Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Thu, 24 Apr 2025
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a historian of modern China. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep466-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/jeffrey-wasserstrom-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Jeffrey Wasserstrom's Books: China in the 21st Century: https://amzn.to/3GnayXT Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink: https://amzn.to/4jmxWmT Oxford History of Modern China: https://amzn.to/3RAJ9nI The Milk Tea Alliance: https://amzn.to/42DLapH SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Oracle: Cloud infrastructure. Go to https://oracle.com/lex Tax Network USA: Full-service tax firm. Go to https://tnusa.com/lex Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex AG1: All-in-one daily nutrition drink. Go to https://drinkag1.com/lex OUTLINE: (00:00) - Introduction (00:06) - Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections (10:29) - Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong (13:57) - Confucius (21:27) - Education (29:33) - Tiananmen Square (40:49) - Tank Man (50:49) - Censorship (1:26:45) - Xi Jinping (1:44:53) - Donald Trump (1:48:47) - Trade war (2:01:35) - Taiwan (2:11:48) - Protests in Hong Kong (2:44:07) - Mao Zedong (3:05:48) - Future of China PODCAST LINKS: - Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast - Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr - Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 - RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ - Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 - Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips SOCIAL LINKS: - X: https://x.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://instagram.com/lexfridman - TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://facebook.com/lexfridman - Patreon: https://patreon.com/lexfridman - Telegram: https://t.me/lexfridman - Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/lexfridman
Chapter 1: Who are the speakers in this episode?
The following is a conversation with Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian of modern China. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Oracle for cloud computing, Tax Network USA for taxes, Shopify for selling stuff online, Element for electrolytes, and AG1 for a daily multivitamin. Choose wisely, my friends.
Let me make the public service announcement that I've done a few times about these ad reads. I do them on RSS. I do them on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, based on the feedback I've gotten in the survey, lexfriedman.com slash survey. Many enjoy it. A quick, random, non-sequitur insights into whatever is going on in this particular mind. I don't do the ad reads in the normal way.
Half the time I don't really even talk about the sponsor. I'm just talking about stuff that I'm thinking about. Except maybe for a bit of a shout out to the sponsor for being awesome. And a quick description of what they do. Sometimes the sponsor itself, the topic, inspires me to think about certain kinds of topics.
Anyway, that's the point, to continuously be innovating how to do this podcast thing. What is this? Who am I? And who are you? And why is it the connection between the two of us? is so real. Me as a podcast fan, I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I legitimately feel like I am friends with the person I'm listening to. I think there's a real way in which that is fundamentally true.
I think people mock that. I think people say that that's not a real connection. I think it's a real connection. I don't know. My life is fundamentally better for these friendships, real or not real. Who's to say I can't have some great imaginary friends? Anyway, hopefully these ad reads are interesting. If you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. Sign up, get whatever they're selling.
I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfriedman.com contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. Let's go. This episode is brought to you by Oracle, a company providing a fully integrated stack of cloud applications and cloud platform services. These guys do infrastructure well.
Single platform for the infrastructure, for the database, application development, and obviously injecting AI into everything, including the pitches. These guys do compute infrastructure well and have been doing it for many, many years. Obviously, this episode about China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, trade, is very relevant to this topic.
Boy, I sit back and think about the future of compute and how it is inextricably connected to the geopolitics, to the bullshit, to the madness of the online world where they're talking shit to each other. the individual humans of the individual nations, and the leaders of those humans, and the leaders of those nations.
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Chapter 2: What are the similarities and differences between Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong?
But then Chinese leaders throughout history, including up to Mao and Xi Jinping, have also found scholars to be tremendously difficult to control. So there's an ambivalence to it or contradiction again there.
But to which degree this idea of meritocracy that's inherent to the notion that we all start at the same line. there's a meritocratic view of human nature there, where if you work hard and you learn things, you will succeed. And so the reverse, if you haven't succeeded, that means you didn't work hard enough or do not deserve the spoils of the success. Does that carry over to the China of today?
There's such a challenge in all these forms of meritocracy because you had the civil serving exams, but the question was if you had a really good tutor, if you could afford a really good tutor, you had a better chance of passing the exams. One thing that happened there was families would...
would pool together resources to try to help the brightest in their group to be able to become part of the officialdom. And this kind of pooling together resources to help as a family was an important part of that structure. But there also was a kind of... There was always a tension of that. So what if you don't succeed?
Some of the leaders of rebellions against emperors were failed examination candidates. And you had this issue. And then it became something, well... the system was out of whack and it needed a new leader.
And also there was something built in that was not so much Confucius himself, but one of his main interpreters, early interpreters, Mencius, had this idea which can be seen as a crude justification for rebellion or for a kind of democracy to say that even though the emperor rules at the will of heaven,
if he doesn't act like a true emperor, if he's not morally upstanding, then heaven will remove its mandate to him. And then there's no obligation to show deference for a ruler who's not behaving like a true ruler. And there it sort of justifies rebellion. And the idea is that If the rebellion isn't justified, then heaven will stop the ruler from being killed.
But if heaven has removed his support, then the rebellion will succeed, and then a new ruler will be justified in taking power. So it's an interesting sense that the universe in this Confucian view has a kind of moral... dimension to it, but it also, it's when things actually happen that you see where the side of morality is.
Okay. So it's meritocracy with an asterisk. It does seem to be the case, maybe you can speak to that, that in the Chinese education system, there seems to be a high value for excellence. Hopefully I'm not generalizing too much, but from the things I've seen, there are certain cultures, certain peoples that
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Chapter 3: What are the core ideas of Confucius and how do they influence modern China?
long enough to be filmed and to draw attention and the film to circulate. Again, another image of the power of images. And he's disappeared. And there hasn't been a show trial or even a secret trial. And again, we don't know if he's still alive, but these are cases where I think the Chinese Communist Party really doesn't want a competing story out there.
They don't want somebody to be able to answer what he was thinking.
How much censorship is there in modern-day China by the Chinese government?
So, you know, there's a lot of censorship. My favorite book about, one of my favorite books about Chinese censorship, Margaret Roberts, where she talks about there are three different ways that the government can control the stories. And she says there's fear, which is this kind of direct censorship thing, like banning things.
But there's also friction, which she says, she has three Fs, fear, friction, and flooding. And she says they're all important. And I think this is true, not just of China, but in other settings too. So what friction means is you just make it harder for people to get answers or get information that you don't want them to get.
Even though you know that some people will get it, you just make it that the easiest way, the first answer you'll get through a search. So a lot of tech savvy or globally minded people tapped-in Chinese people will use VPN to jump over the firewall. But it's work. The internet moves slower. You have to keep updating your VPN.
So you just create friction so that, okay, some people will find this out. And then flooding. You just fill the airwaves and the media with versions of the stories that you want the people to believe. So all those kind of exist in operation. And I think The fear is the easiest side to say of what's blocked.
So I'm always interested in things that you would expect to be censored that aren't censored. You can read all sorts of things in China about totalitarianism. You can read Hannah Arendt's book on totalitarianism, which would be the kind of thing you're not supposed to be able to read that in a... somewhat totalitarian state or a dictatorial state, if anything.
But it's not specifically about China. And so censorship is most restrictive when it's things that are actually about China. Things about leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, there's intense kind of censorship of that and certain events in that way. But a sort of like
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Chapter 4: What happened during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989?
And you've got all these kind of things. He also would have been shocked by all these books about how to start your own cafe and bar and sort of celebrating entrepreneurship, how to get into Harvard. It's like all of these things just wouldn't compute from his time. Although I said it would actually maybe make him nostalgia for the time of his youth in the 1910s.
He was a participant in the May 4th movement, which was a time of reading all over the world, looking for the best ideas circulating. So he might say, well, the teenage me would have really, really loved this. So some of the coolest bookstores... Things that I was just as amazed could exist in the early 2000s. So you can still buy copies in 1984, and you can still get some of these other things.
But that was a time when more and more of those things were being translated fresh. I'm not sure you get permission to translate some of those things now. There's more of a sense of caution. And when some of those bookstores would also then hold events that would talk about
kinds of ideas that then take them to the next level and talk about the applicability to the situation in China, some of those bookstores have closed or have had to become kind of really shadows of what they were. And one of the best ones, not the one I wrote about in Nanjing, but a similar one, a Shanghai one, which was literally an underground bookstore. It was in a metro station.
And it had really freewheeling discussions of liberal ideas in the early 2000s and early 2010s. But then it just got less and less space to operate under Xi Jinping when things started narrowing. And it then had to close in Shanghai. And it's just been reopened in D.C. as JF Books. And it's becoming this really interesting cultural hub. And I'm really delighted.
It's where I'm going to hold the launch for my next book when it comes out in June, this book on the Milk Tea Alliance, about struggles for change across East and Southeast Asia, including China. places that are worried about the kind of rising influence of Beijing. And it seems just perfect to be holding it in the kind of place that can't exist in Shanghai.
So places like that, they stopped being able to exist on the mainland. Then they could still exist in Hong Kong. But now in Hong Kong, One of the coolest bookstores has had to close up. It just didn't feel like it could continue operating and tightening control there. And it's reopened in upstate New York. So you have this phenomenon of bookstores.
There's also a few bookstores called the Nowhere Bookstores that opened in Chiang Mai and Taipei. And The Hague, and I heard one maybe is going to open in or is open in Japan, too. My sometime collaborator, Amy Hawkins, who covers China for The Guardian, wrote a great piece late last year about this overseas bookstore phenomenon, sort of carrying on the conversations that people face.
thought they might be able to have in China and then couldn't and imagine someday being able to hold in China, but maybe can't.
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