"The following is a conversation with Jeffrey Waserstrom, a historian of modern China. This is the Lex Freedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear f..."

"there's some degree as you said that Xi Jinping is possesses the ideas of communism and the ideas of Confucianism. Uh so let's go all the way back. He wrote that in order to understand the China of to..."

"could say that in many points in the 20th century, there was a kind of a kind of struggle between different competing political groups over which part of the Chinese past to connect with. Was it to th..."

"an idea that um that people could be could be remolded potentially and and China was one of the few places where they didn't kill the um the last emperor. You know, the last emperor the idea was that ..."

"of the key things to know about the protests in 1989 was that they were an effort to get the Communist Party in China to do a better job of living up to its own stated ideals and to try to support uh ..."

"this was being done more effectively in the economic realm than in the political realm. And that there were a lot of sort of partial gestures that that suggested um the party needed to be pressed to r..."

"all things that um Jan and Dean, the American surf rock band, which was kind of like the Beach Boys, only not as big. And they were um touring China. And it was the first time in Shanghai that there'd..."

"guardism and and the students didn't want to be associated with that. So it wound down pretty quickly and they they they thought you know we're not like the red guards. We don't want to make chaos. We..."

"people were itching to do something. And then um a leader Pu Yao Bang who was associated with the more kind of reformist more liberalizing um group within the Chinese Communist Party. He had been stri..."

"young. Some people are don't seem like they're ever going to die. And they so they begin these sorts of protests. This is in April of '89. And the government tries to sort of get the protest to stop q..."

"counterculture elements that are like there rock concerts on the square. the most popular uh rock musician, Sue Jen comes to the square and is um celebrated when he's there. There's a sense of kind of..."

"as an acceptable kind of movement movement to just have a kind of course correction but then there's also an internal struggle within the communist party leadership and clearly the people who are more..."

"know from past experience that sometimes student protests lead to to members of other social classes joining them because they look up to students as sort of potential intellectual leaders of the coun..."

"reason why it's so considered so toxic by the regime is because it just shows the People's Liberation Army looking like an invading force, not like a stabilizing force. Can we talk about that? who's n..."

"of soldiers who were actually burned alive in their in their tanks during once the massacre began. People got outraged and they attacked the soldiers. But by selective use of of footage, the communist..."

"be this idea that there were lines of tanks in a city. that was um that the the image was of the government as having lost the mandate to rule and they really didn't want to have that image um out the..."

"1989 China went one route of not um not having the communist party dramatic ally change or relinquish control and the Soviet Union and the former Soviet states went another and you could say well look..."

"Hong Kong protests began in the 2010s to try very hard to avoid any use of soldiers to repress them. It was all the police and they tried very hard and managed to success because the the western press..."

"way something like the Tanaman tankman image or the image of a Vietnamese woman being burned by Napal young woman that became another of the iconic images during Vietnam War. Those images really can u..."

"imprisoned and not allowed to you know get enough medical care so you can talk about him having you know died earlier than he should have. But there there's been relatively few of like for political c..."

"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 ab..."

"the stories that you want the people to believe. So all those kind of exist and in operation and I think the the fear is the easiest side to say of what's blocked. So I'm always interested in things t..."

"up until like the very last period of Gorbachev's rule. Bathing's banned in the Soviet Union that are available in Chinese bookstores. You can buy 1984 in a Chinese bookstore. you've been able to sinc..."

"defined to the degree it is dystopian any of the nations are by Brave New World and by 1984. There are mixed elements. I think there are moments when it can seem more more one than the other and there..."

"book and everything, but I think the dictators of the future will find less arduous ways to keep control over the population. Basically saying more like what was in my book than in yours. I have to sa..."

"says that in Ma's China they're kind of combining the two things of this. And I I'm really fascinated by that because they published in China um on the Chinese mainland. It was published in Taiwan and..."

"then during the COVID lockdowns when people were being so intensely monitored and controlled, even places like Shanghai that it seemed much more the brave new world kind of style had their Orwellian m..."

"know China's distinctive but it's it's it's not unique. You have other settings where you have these like no-go zones that you learn. And one example is in Singapore you know there was this so Nationa..."

"about the kinds of ideas that then take them to the next level and talk about the applicability uh to the situation in China. Some of those bookstores have have closed or have had to become kind of re..."

"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 is maybe it's going to open i..."

"periodically will get students from the mainland and I have a lot of students from the mainland in my classes. I teach Chinese history and I feel like okay now I'm contradicting the version of the pas..."

"deliberately doing that or if there's not a spark of possibility that comes before you as just a regular citizen of China. You might never really ask maybe a whole there's a whole different perspectiv..."

"narrative in your country and looking outside. is just harder to do in China based on technological based on all the reasons you've mentioned. And if I can I just want to give a shout out. Thank you. ..."

"Flooding one is the brave new world. Yeah, it is. And I think it's a whole kind of the world of short attention spans and social media and how this all works. And um Chinese Communist Party leaders we..."

"come to mind to to mention one is um Christina Larson very bright journalist uh friend of mine who's now working on other things but was working in China and she wrote wrote about this in MIT Technolo..."

"besides best and worst internet I always like is William Gibson who wrote one of the other important dystopian novels of the present neurommancer he wrote a rare non for him non-fiction piece about Si..."

"he talked about how a group of the poets when they would get writers would they get together they would whether or not any of them drank they would make sure there was a bottle of alcohol on their tab..."

"better food and more choices were available there. And it and it was true. And I think this is a human as human as the desire for more freedom. So one of the things that the Chinese Communist Party, t..."

"the rest of the world is in chaos and we're more stable. But but the thing that I I hadn't that I now I'm going to think about differently is the argument was we'll give you more choices and you'll ha..."

"spaces available for variations of ways of being Chinese within the country and this goes against the grain of a pattern in the sort of post Tiana men period of allowing more space for sort of civil s..."

"kind of tightening of controls over all the borders and even things one thing she reported on was Mongolia in Mong Inner Mongolia. it it's been seen as an unproatic kind of frontier area and who cares..."

"like oh there's just more space there's more breathing room for uh you know it's not becoming a liberal democracy but I would notice things that felt like I'm surprised that that that happens that the..."

"Olympics was supposed to be a moment possibly of more opening up because when Seoul hosted the Olympics, South Korea became a less tightly controlled right-wing um dictatorship and move toward democra..."

"years ago about just we should really be straight about what a black box the Chinese elite elite politics are and really not try to pretend we know more than we do. We did used to have more of a sense..."

"that some people thought oh he's going to be a reformer because his father was a liberalizing figure and you know that doesn't work that way. He does seem to care about orderliness. he does seem to ca..."

"find to agree on is this sort of distaste for Gorbachev. This feeling that Gorbachev was that was the wrong way to do things. Not manly enough. Yeah. And two not strong enough about you know really ke..."

"force in the world got bullied and nibbled away at by foreign powers and it's important to realize there are elements of that story that are very true and the answer they had is that under my watch th..."

"originally from China who had gone abroad and coming back or even people who were um you know Chinese Americans who went there there was a higher sort of expectation that they should be on board. So y..."

"who worked on Shinjang and were connected to weaguers. But there also were people who were sort of personally connected to dissident or exiles who would amplify their voices would translate their work..."

"Now some of these expectations have been changed. There have been people who've been very surprisingly gotten in trouble. These two Canadians who were clearly it was a kind of tit fortat partly becaus..."

"things that that clearly are are kind of tightly policed. And one is um discussions of the private life of Chinese leaders and their their families and issues of kind of really following money trails ..."

"either way, I do know that the Communist Party and likely Ci Jinping himself watched uh my conversation with Prime Minister Modi. They responded to it and uh I do hope and I will definitely go to Chin..."

"of it is the Chinese Communist Party wants under Xiinping. Xiinping wants to gain more allies around the world to be seen with more respect around the world and at the moment is in a position where he..."

"could discuss it. Uh but there's also a deeply cultural standoff almost happening here which would be interesting. So in April as people know Trump escalated a trade war with China using tariffs raisi..."

"yield. My question is with this standoff, who do you think will blink first? Where does this go? So, I think one persistent there there's a lot to unpack there for of a historian, too. I mean, I think..."

"embassy and that happened and then in 2001 there was a spy I plane incident that happened and and so there was a lot of discussion that the next decade was going to see USChina tensions being the majo..."

"Communist Party and then you have to look at are there things that are happening that aid the Chinese Communist Party story. So the rise of um of what can seem like or is anti-Chinese sentiment within..."

"kinds. Do you see a hopeful possibility for resolution for deescalation here? It's it's a it's a hard time to to figure out what what you can to to sort of hopeful hopeful angles. I mean, I guess what..."

"representative at the UN insisted that Hong Kong was not a colony and Macau was not a colony because then they would have to be decolonized and go to independent. But so anyway, there was an understan..."

"how smoothly it will go." Over time, people in Hong Kong people in Hong Kong started saying "Well, wait, Beijing keeps sort of nibbling away at chipping away at these things that make us separate." An..."

"say that Dang Xiaoping oversaw the deal that got Hong Kong and Macau to become part of the People's Republic of China. He could could point to that even though he died right before 1990 in during 1997..."

"protests, some of the biggest in human history in Hong Kong. And so like put all of that together and so many possible trajectories of human history can happen here. Yeah. I mean I'm particularly inte..."

"Thailand, the place that I've been working on lately. One of the slogans in 2020 when there was a push for Ber democracy was let it end with this generation which again expressed this kind of sense of..."

"So you often get we we get captivated by a moment that seems to come out of nowhere but it often doesn't. It's been the ground has been laid by it can be by an earlier generation that passes on the st..."

"the odds seem impossible, it's still worthwhile. You know, it's it it doesn't mean that it will it will work. It doesn't mean that will work. But I think history has enough examples of things that you..."

"looking at looking at situations, I mentioned sort of Eastern Europe and Central Europe but Taiwan was a was a right-wing dictatorship under sort of a version of martial law for decades. And at each s..."

"transformative effect on the world. So maybe this is another case where so the Chinese Communist Party people leaders in the Chinese Communist Party they do know about history and they care about hist..."

"roll don't do military violence but just fullon pressure ordering Taiwan to do things. And there it it's it's like in order the only way to respond is with violence. You're completely trapped. If you'..."

"uh coming to power of the Communist Party, let's go back. We began comparing Xi Jinping and Mao. Let's go back to Mao. How did Mao come to power? The road to Mao coming to power. We need to first say ..."

"strongman. And then there was a period where the country was really divided. Republic of China didn't have a strong government. But there were then two groups. One rallied around uh Sonia Sen had foun..."

"vanguard party leading a country forward. So there was a small communist party, a bigger nationalist party. They were involved in these protests against warlords and against imperialists. And while Su..."

"different he's he's a kind of culturally more conservative figure. Um but what's important in part about this is there are some members of the Chinese Communist Party who accept the basic ideas of Mar..."

"way in which the and this is something I think the Communist Party leaders remember. There's a feeling that the nationalist party doesn't really believe its own rhetoric that in fact all it cares abou..."

"party rule, limits on participation believes that there's a bad time when China was being bullied by imperialists. What distinguishes Shanghai? Shankai has a personality cult. Mao has a personality cu..."

"part of his public image. And same was the case with uh Shank Kai-shek. Yes. And both of them, right, they had high-profile wives who were uh sort of celebrity figures and and made um a good impressio..."

"west in a kind of quick industrialization in a move like this and it was just a it just didn't it just didn't work and all kinds of things were wrong and that would be a whole there'd be a we'd need a..."

"policy of collectivization and be so unwilling to see the atrocity and the suffering he's causing and enough to change course. So with the great leap forward which caused this incredible famine um the..."

"that particular proxy war that they triumphed. What do you think about that speech about these performance? I don't know how many uh how many how much you've listened to Mao speeches. Well he had a he..."

"resonances. Now um Mao could alternate certain points he thought there should be an alliance with or he said that China should be able to work with Japan because um I mean he said it at one point he s..."

"of represented that place that was somehow within it was it was an amazing thing. I think looking backward sorry rather than forward I think it's really extraordinary how much leeway was given to Hong..."

"flourishing of incredible people. What a beautiful world we live in. The Chinese people, all the people I've met is just so great to interact with a totally different culture. You can feel the roots r..."