Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao | Lex Fridman Podcast #466

1. 0:00 – 0:16

   Introduction

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      The following is a conversation with Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian of modern China. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here's Jeffrey Wasserstrom.

2. 0:16 – 3:45

   Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong

   1. LFLex Fridman0:17

      You've compared Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong in the past. What are the parallels between the two leaders and where do they differ? Xi Jinping, of course, is the current leader of China for the past 12 years, and Mao Zedong was the communist leader of China from 1949 to 1976. So what are the commonalities? What are the differences?

   2. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom0:38

      So the biggest commonality of them is that they're both the subject of personality cults, and that Mao was the center of a very intensely felt one from 1949 to 1976. And when he died, you know, there was tremendous outpouring of grief, even among people who had objectively suffered enormously because of his policies. Xi Jinping is the first leader in China since him who has had a sustained personality cult of the kind where if you walk into a bookstore in China, the first thing you see are books by him, collections of speeches. And when Mao was alive, you, you might have thought that's sort of what happened with Communist Party leaders in China, but after Mao's death, there was such an effort to not have that kind of personality cult that there was a tendency to not publish the speeches of a leader until they were done being in power. I, I was first in China in 1986, and you could go for days without being intensely aware of who was in charge of the party. You would know, but his face wasn't everywhere. The newspaper wasn't dominated with stories about him and quotations from his words and things like that. So with Xi Jinping, you had a, a throwback to that period in Communist Party rule, which seemed as though it might be a part of the past. So that's, that's a key commonality. And a key difference is that Mao really reveled in chaos, in turning things upside down in a sense that, um, you know, he talked about class struggle, which came out of Marxism, but he also really... His favorite work of Chinese popular fiction was The Monkey King about this legendary figure who, this, this Monkey King who could turn the heavens upside down. So he reveled in disorder and thought disorder was a, was a way to improve things. Xi Jinping is very orderly, is very concerned with kind of stability and predictability. So you can see them as very, very different that way. And Mao also liked to stir things up, liked to have people on the streets, um, clamoring. So Xi Jinping, even though he has a personality cult, it's not manifesting itself. He doesn't like the idea of people on the streets in any- anything that can't be controlled. So you can, you know, there are a lot of ways that they're, they're similar, a lot of ways they're different. They're also different, and this fits with this orderliness, that Xi Jinping talks positively about Confucius and Confucian traditions in China. Um, and Confucian traditions are based on kind of stable hierarchies for the most part and sort of clear categories of superior and inferior, whereas Mao liked things to be turned upside down. He thought of Confucianism as a futile way of thought that it hold, held China back. So you can come up with things that they're similar and you can come up with things where they're really opposites, but they both clearly did want to see China under rule by the Communist Party, and that's been a continuity and that connects them to the leaders in between them too as

3. 3:45 – 11:15

   Confucius

   1. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom3:45

      well.

   2. LFLex Fridman3:45

      So there's some degree, as you said, that Xi Jinping espouses the ideas of communism and the ideas of Confucianism. Uh, so let's go all the way back. You wrote that in order to understand the China today, we have to study its past. So, uh, the China of today celebrates ideas of Confucius, a Chinese philosopher who lived 2,500 years ago. Can you tell me about the ideas of Confucius?

   3. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom4:11

      First of all, we, we don't know that much about the historic Confucius. He's, he's around the same time as, you know, figures like Socrates and, uh, like with Socrates, we get a lot of what we know about him or think we know about him from what his followers said and things that were attributed to him and dialogues that were written afterwards. So, you know, you can have a lot of... You can have a lot of fun with these sort of Axial Age thinkers and what they had in common. Another thing that connects these Axial Age thinkers is they were trying to kind of make a case for why they should be able to educate the next generation, the elite, and sort of had a way of promising that they had philosophical ideas that helped keep... Decide how you should run a polity. Confucius lived in a time when there were these warring kingdoms in a territory that later became, became China. But what he said was that there had been this period of great order in the past, that the lines between inferior and superior were clear, and there was a kind of synergy between superior and inferior that kept everything ticking along really nicely. He thought that hierarchal relationships were a good thing, and that the trick was that both sides in a hierarchical relationship owed something to the other. So the father, um, and son relationship was a key one. The father deserved respect from the son, but owed the son care and benevolence. And things would be fine as long as both sides in a relationship held up their end, and he had a whole series of these relationships. The husband to the wife was, again, an unequal one of, um, the husband being superior to the wife, but him owing the wife...... care, and her owing him deference. And he had the same notion that then the emperor to the ministers were, these were all parallels. And there were no egalitarian relationships in Confucianism. Even something that, in the West, we often think of as a kind of quintessential, quintessentially egalitarian relationship between brothers, in, um, in the Chinese tradition of Confucianism, there was only older brother and younger brother. There was no... Brotherhood was not an egalitarian relationship. It was one where the older brother took care of the younger brother and the younger brother showed respect for the older brother.

   4. LFLex Fridman6:40

      So stable hierarchy-

   5. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom6:41

      Yeah.

   6. LFLex Fridman6:42

      ... was at the core of everything in society. It permeated everything including politics.

   7. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom6:46

      Yeah, and he, and there was even a sense that it, it connected the natural world to the supernatural world. So the emperor was to heaven, this kind of non-personified de- deity, like the emperor was to the ministers. So all of this had these relationships. So the emperor was the son of heaven. And, um, you know, for Confucius, he said, "So we should study the texts. We should study how the sages of old, um, behaved." That there, that society was becoming corrupted and was going away from that sort of purity of the sages when the, the relationships were all in order. So Confucianism was a kind of conservative or even backward looking thing. It, it wasn't trying to, it wasn't arguing for progress, it was arguing for reclaiming a pure golden age in the past. So it was also a kind of conser- so in all kinds of ways, you know, it's irreconcilable to many things about Marxism and communism, which is all about struggle and all about actually, um, a progressive view of history moving from one stage to the next.

   8. LFLex Fridman7:55

      So that's the interesting thing about Xi Jinping and the China of today is there is that tension of Confucianism and communism, where communism, Marxism is supposed to, you know, let go of history. And Confucianism, there's a real veneration of history that's happening in China of today. So they're able to wear both hats and balance it.

   9. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom8:15

      Yeah, you 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 the Confucian tradition or to the kind of rebellious Monkey King tradition, which was what Mao connected to. Um, Xi Jinping, and before him to some extent, you know, Hu Jintao, we saw this a little bit at the Olympics, there was more of this kind of mix it all together view. Anything that suggested greatness in the past could be something that could be fused together. So Xi Jinping says that, you know, M- Mao is one of his heroes or one of the people he looks to as a model, but so is Confucius. And there's really, you know, they, they had so little in common, but, but they both, in his mind and the minds of others, suggest a kind of, uh, power and greatness of the Chinese past.

   10. LFLex Fridman9:15

       Yeah, so this platonic notion of greatness, and that, you could say, connects, that's a thread that connects with Xi Jinping the great history, multi-thousand year history of China.

   11. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom9:30

       Yeah, and it involves smoothing out all kinds of internal contradictions. You had, you know, the first emperor of China, jumping forward a bit, you know, in 221 BC, he, um, is anti scholars. He's, he burns books and he, he doesn't venerate these kind of rituals and things. Um, so he was very much against the things that Confucius stood for. But, and Mao in a sense of having to choose between Confucius and the first emperor, he said, "Well, maybe the first emperor had the right idea. You know, scholars can be, can be a pain." So he said like, "If you have to choose between Confucianism and that..." But Xi Jinping, I think, continually is kind of not choosing, and if he wants to say, "Well, look at the Great Wall. Look at this wonderful..." In fact, that was a symbol of kind of strength and domination related to the first emperor, who, by the way, didn't build anything like the Great Wall you see today. He built walls and they were fine, you know, they were good, but the Great Wall itself didn't come into being until many centuries later. But still this idea of anything that suggests a kind of greatness is something that as a, in many ways, a nationalist above all else, Xi Jinping is a, a supporter of the party and single-party rule. That's something he clearly believes in. And he's, um, a nationalist. He wants to see China be great and acknowledged as great on the world stage.

   12. LFLex Fridman11:00

       Boy, so many contradictions always. With Stalin, he was a communist, but also a nationalist, right? That contradiction is, is, is, um, also permeates through, through Mao and all the way to Xi Jinping. But if we can

4. 11:15 – 19:21

   Education

   1. LFLex Fridman11:15

      linger on Confucius for a little bit. You write that one of the most famous statements of Confucianism is the belief that, quote, "People are pretty much alike at birth, but become differentiated via learning." So this sets the tradition that China places a high value on education and on meritocracy. Uh, can you speak to this, uh, Confucius's idea of education and how much does it permeate to the China of today?

   2. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom11:44

      Sure. So there's an optimism to this. There's an optimism in the sense of a ability that people can be good and when exposed to exemplary figures from the past, they'll want to be like those exemplary figures. So it's a form of education.... through kind of emulation of models and study of, of past figures and past texts that were exemplary. And it, and it was, it did have this, this idea, a relatively positive view of human nature and the sort of changeability of humans through, um, through education. And I think that, that shows through in all kinds of things, even the fact that while there were lots of killings by the Chinese Communist Party and other groups, there was often 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 he could become, anybody could be kind of turned into a citizen of this or a subject of this, a good, a good member of this polity through the kind of, um, education. Often it was a very kind of forceful form of education, but I think that's a carryover from con- from the Confucian times. And, um, over time, this Confucian idea led to the creation of, uh, one of the early great civil service exams, an idea that bureaucracies should be run not by people who were born into the right families, but ones who had shown their ability to master these fairly intensive kind of exams. And the exams were things that could make or break your career, a bit like at some points in the American past, passing a bar exam, a really intensive thing, could, could set you on the road to, to a good career. In China, you had the civil service exam tradition. So I think this kind of emphasis on, on education and on, uh, valuing of scholarly pursuits, but then Chinese leaders throughout history, including up to Mao and Xi Jinping, have also found scholars to be, uh, tremendously difficult to control. So there's an ambivalence to it, or contradiction again there.

   3. LFLex Fridman14:10

      But, uh, 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, uh, learn things, you'll succeed and so the reverse. If you haven't succeeded, that means you didn't work hard and therefore do not deserve the spoils of the, of the success. Uh, does that carry over to the China of today?

   4. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom14:43

      There's such a challenge in all these forms of meritocracy because, you know, you had the civil service exams, but the question was who, if you, if you had a really good tutor, if you could afford a really good tutor, you had a better chance of passing the exams. Um, one thing that happened there was families would, would pool together resources to try to help the, 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, was an important part of that structure, but there also was a kind of, um, there was always a tension of that, um, so what if you don't succeed? Some of the leaders of rebellions against, um, against emperors were failed examination candidates.

   5. LFLex Fridman15:32

      (laughs)

   6. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom15:32

      And...

   7. LFLex Fridman15:33

      Yeah.

   8. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom15:34

      You know, this, this-

   9. LFLex Fridman15:34

      Yeah.

   10. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom15:35

       Y- you, you had this issue and then it became something, well, the system was out of whack and it needed a new, a new leader and, and also there was a, there was something built in that was not so much Confucius himself, but one of his main, um, 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, the will of heaven, if, if he doesn't act like a true emperor, if he's not morally upstanding, then heaven will remove his, uh, heaven will remove its, 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 it's, if the rebellion isn't justified, then heaven will stop the ruler from being killed, but if heaven has removed his, uh, support, then the rebellion will succeed and then a new, um, a new ruler will be justified in taking power. So it's a, it's an interesting sense that the, the universe, in this Confucian view, has a kind of moral dimension to it, but it also, um, it's when things actually happen that you see where the side of morality is.

   11. LFLex Fridman17:03

       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. Uh, hopefully I'm not generalizing too much, but from the things I've seen, there are certain cultures, certain peoples that, you know, it's just part of the value system of the culture that you need to be a really good student. Is that the case

   12. ... with the China of today?

   13. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom17:32

       There's been a lot of emphasis on, um, on education and sort of working really hard and excelling at, at some subjects and having, um, you know, there isn't the civil service exam, but there is, um, the Gaokao, an exam that really can determine where you get what kind of, um, institution you get into. And I think, you know, getting back to this idea of, of meritocracy, which, which is strong in a lot of, um...You know, a tradition that also, a kind of, um, what it opens you up to is when there is a sense of unfairness in who's getting ahead and how the spoils are being divided, this leads to a kind of outrage. And some of the biggest protests in, in China have been about this sense of nepotism, which really seems to subvert this whole, um, idea of, kind of meritocracy. And the, the 1989 protests at Tiananmen, even though kind of in the, the Western press particular was discussed as a movement for democracy, but a lot of the first posters that went up that got students really angry were criticisms of corruption within the Communist Party and nepotism, and this sense that people, despite all the talk, I mean, despite the fact that most people seemed to be having to study really hard to pass these exams, to get, uh, good positions in universities, that some of them were being handed out via the kind of backdoor. And that led to a kind of outrage. Not, I mean that's true in, in, in many places, but I think it gives a special, a special anger against nepotism because of that, um, the way in which so much emphasis is put on kind of this standard exam way of, of getting ahead.

5. 19:21 – 30:36

   Tiananmen Square

   1. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom19:21

   2. LFLex Fridman19:21

      I hope it's okay if we jump around through history a bit and find the threads that connect everything. Since you mentioned Tiananmen Square, you have studied a lot of student protests throughout Chinese history, throughout history in general. What happened in Tiananmen Square?

   3. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom19:38

      So in 1989, this massive movement took place. The story of it's largely suppressed within China and largely misunderstood, um, in other places, in part because it happened around the same time that communism was unraveling and ending in the, the former Soviet Bloc, so I think it's often conflated with what was going on there. Um, and so I think one 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, the trend within the party toward a kind of liberalizing, um, liberalizing and opening up form, uh, that had, that had taken shape after Mao's death and in a sense, the student generation of '89, and I was there in '86 when there were some sort of warmup protests. There was a kind of frustration with what they felt was, um, a half-assed version of what they were talking about, that the, the government was saying, the party was saying, "We believe in reforming and opening up. We need to liberalize. We need to give people more, um, more control of, of their fate." And the students felt that 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 really, really move in that direction. And it, it's, it'll seem like a very trivial thing, but I found it fascinating in '86 when I was there in Shanghai in late '86. And students protested, and this was the first time that students had been really on the streets in significant numbers since the Cultural Revolution, or at least since '76. And the students were inspired by calls for democracy and discussions of democracy by this, um, eh, this physicist Fang Lizhi, who was a kind of, um, often thought a Chinese Sakharov. Um, he was a, a liberalizing intellectual. But one of the things that students in Shanghai, which is where some of the most intense protests that year took place, were frustrated about was a rock concert, of 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. It was the first time in Shanghai that there'd been a rock concert, and the students were really excited about this because this fit in with what they thought the Communist Party was moving toward, was letting them be more a part of the world. And for them, that meant being more in step with pop culture around the world. And at the concert, some students got up to dance 'cause that's what they knew you were supposed to do at a rock concert, and the security guards made them sit down. And for the students in Shanghai, this really symbolized what was, you know, a feint toward openness that really didn't have follow-through. "We're gonna give you rock concerts but not let you dance." And so the, the protests went on for a little while in '86 and, um, posters went up. The officials at, at, um, universities said, "No, this is out of hand. We had chaos on the streets during the Cultural Revolution. We can't go back to that." And nobody wanted to go back to that. So there were posters I saw that said, "This is new Red 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 wanna make chaos. We also are not fervent loyalists of anybody in power." The Red Guards had been, you know, passionate about Mao. The, the, the analogy partly sort of scared them, and also it meant that the government was really serious about, uh, dealing with them. So then in 1989, this protes- the protests restart, and there are a variety of reasons why they can restart. They, the space for them... Uh, students are thinking about doing something in 1989. It's a very resonant year. 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. People are thinking about that. But more importantly, it's the 70th anniversary of the biggest student movement in Chinese history, the May Fourth Movement of 1919, and the May Fourth Movement had helped lay the groundwork for the Chinese Communist Party. Some member, leading founders of it had been...... student activist then. It was an anti-imperialist movement, but it was also, um, a movement against bad government. Um, and so the students sought, you know, the anniversary of that movement was always marked, commemorated in China and people took the ser- the history seriously. People were reminded of what students did in the past and so the, there was sort of, there were a lot of reasons why people were itching to do something. And then, um, a leader Hu Yaobang, who was associated with the more kind of reformist, more liberalizing, um, group within the Chinese Communist Party, he had been stripped of a very high office, demoted after taking, partly taking a fairly light stance toward the '86, '87 protests. And so he was still a member of the government, but he was not as high up in power. He had been very high up. He had been sort of Deng Xiaoping's potential successor. And he dies unexpectedly and there has to be a funeral for him because he dies still as an official. And the students take advantage of the opening of there having to be, um, having to be commemorations of his death and they put up posters that basically say the wrong people are dying. Uh, Hu Yaobang was younger than some of the more conservative members, they said, "So some people are dying too young. Some people are, don't seem like they're ever gonna 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 protests to stop quickly and they use the sort of same technique of, they issue an editorial in People's Daily that says this is creating chaos, which is a code term for take us back to the Cultural Revolution. And this time the students say, "No, you know, we're just trying to show our patriotism. We believe that there's too much corruption and nepotism. There's not enough support for the more liberalizing, um, wing within the party." And so they keep up the protests. And there's a lot of frustration at this point. There are also economic frustrations at this point. Um, the economy is, is improving because of the reforms, but it seems that people with good government connections are getting rich, um, too easily and so it's, there's sort of a sense of unfairness. The students are also really frustrated by the kind of macro man- managing of their private lives on campuses, so the protests at Tiananmen Square and in plazas all around the country and other cities as well become this mix of things. It's an anti-corruption movement, it's a call for more democracy movement, it's a call for more freedom of speech movement, but it's also a kind of, um, has some counterculture elements that are like there are rock concerts on the square, the most popular, uh, rock musician, Cui Jian, comes to the square and is, um, celebrated when he is there. There's a sense of kind of a variety of things rolled into one. Um, and I, I, I brought up how it sort of gets conflated with the movements to overthrow communism in the Eastern Bloc. It was actually in many ways, I think, more like something that happened in Eastern Bloc 20 years earlier. It was more like Prague Spring and other 1968 protests in the Communist Bloc which was about moving toward socialism with a human face, more like trying to get the parties to in power to reform rather than necessarily doing away with them, so there was a kind of disjuncture. Happened at the same time as moves to, to end communism, but of course, I would say there was a possibility when all the protestors were on the square, it seemed that for a time that this might be seen 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 political conservatives, even if they believe in economic reform, are clearly getting the up- upper hand and they're, this is not gonna be tolerated. And the students stay on the square when sig- signals are given to try to get them out. Students from around the country are pouring into, to Beijing to join this movement. They don't want to end the movement when they've just arrived, so it's actually one thing that keeps it going is new, new, um, participants are coming from the provinces and even if some moderates want to leave the square, people want to stay. And then workers start joining in the movement as well and form a independent labor union and that really, the, the Chinese Communist Party, to a certain extent they might put up with student protestors, but they know from past experience that sometimes student protests lead to, to members of other social classes joining them 'cause they look up to students as sort of potential intellectual leaders of the country and admiration for scholars is part of this that turns, people turn out when students protest. Something very different from the American case where there's a kind of often suspicion of Ame- of student activists being necessarily on the same side as, as everybody else. But in China, there had been from the history of the 20th century a sense of students as potentially a vanguard. So once there are, um, labor activists joining the movement, then troops are called in and there's a massacre near Tiananmen Square, um, on middle of the night of June 3rd and early, uh, June 4th. And the, the army just moves in and begins behaving very much like an army of occupation, which is something the People's Liberation Army is, is supposed to be the one that saves China from foreign aggression and they're acting like an invading force.

   4. LFLex Fridman30:12

      So this is where famously the tanks roll in.

   5. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom30:14

      ... the tanks roll in and I think also you have that famous image of the man standing in front of the tank-

   6. LFLex Fridman30:20

      Yeah.

   7. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom30:20

      ... that's a banned image within China and I really think the 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

6. 30:36 – 40:36

   Tank Man

   1. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom30:36

      force.

   2. LFLex Fridman30:36

      Can we talk about the, who's now called the Tank Man, the man that stood in front of the row of tanks. This was on June 5th in Tiananmen Square. What do we know about him? What do you think about him? The symbolism.

   3. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom30:51

      It's a, it's an amazing symbol. Um, you know, he's on this boulevard near the square with this long line of tanks and it's unquestionably this act of incredible bravery. And there's some interesting things about it, some that are forgotten. One is that in the end he climbs up on the tank-

   4. LFLex Fridman31:08

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom31:09

      ... and, uh, the tank swerves, you know, doesn't run him over. And the Chinese Communist Party initially showed video of this and said, "Look, the western press is talking about how vicious we were, but look at the restraint."

   6. LFLex Fridman31:21

      Mm-hmm.

   7. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom31:21

      "Look at this. He wasn't mowed down." And they tried this whole story with Tiananmen initially of saying, "Look, the students were out of control. This, everybody should remember what happened during the Cultural Revolution." And the army showed restraint and there were a small number 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 Party could say, "Look, actually look at this. The, the heroes, the martyrs were these soldiers." And they try for the first months after it to, to try to get this narrative to stick. They talk about Tiananmen a lot. They talk about these things. They show images of the Tank Man. The problem with it is that lots and lots of people around Beijing had seen what happened and knew that in fact there had first been the firing on unarmed civilians with automatic weapons and then, and there had been many, many people, some students but a lot of ordinary Beijing, Beijing residents and workers who were just mown down. So lots of people knew somebody who had been killed. So that story just didn't work and then I think the, the, the claim had to be made to try to, try to suppress discussion of the event and particularly to dis- to repress that visual imagery that was that image of the man in front of a line of tanks. Whatever the tanks did do him or not, the main takeaway from it would 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 there in the world.

   8. LFLex Fridman33:14

      Yeah, we're watching the video now. He's got what, like grocery bags in his hands? It's such a symbolic, "I've had enough." Like that kind of statement.

   9. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom33:28

      Yeah and it's probably not a student. You know, it's often described as a student but he probably was, um, a worker and it is, it is a powerful, powerful image of bravery and, you know, I brought up the 1968 parallel for Eastern and Central Europe. There was actually a very powerful photograph of a man baring his chest in front of a tank-

   10. LFLex Fridman33:49

       Mm-hmm.

   11. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom33:49

       ... in Bratislava during, um, what I think of as Prague Spring. That was a famous image of bravery against tanks and in 1968, in Czechoslovakia, then still Czechoslovakia, the tanks that rolled in were Soviet tanks sent down there and so not that people would know, but that was an image, you know, what was so powerful in that was saying, "We're not gonna put up with this invasion." Again, I think you have the People's Liberation of Army, army looking like an invading force and that's what, um, that's what the Chinese Communist Party in a sense can't, can't deal with now even though sometimes they could tell a story about 1989 and they do tell a version of this and some people believe this I think, is that in 1989 China went one route of not, um, not having the Communist Party dramatically change or relinquish control and the Soviet Union and the former Soviet states went another. And you could say, well look, in, after 1989 the Chinese economy boomed, life got better for people in China. Lif- life got really terrible for a lot of people in the former Soviet blocks. Maybe we actually, maybe this was the right way to go and you can make that kind of argument but if you show the tanks and the man in front of the tanks you, you, you just have a different kind of image of heroism.

   12. LFLex Fridman35:17

       It's one of my favorite photographs or snapshots ever taken, videos ever taken. So I apologize if we linger on it. Sometimes you don't understand the symbolic power of an image until afterwards and perhaps that's what the Chinese government didn't quite understand. They lost information war, they need more. So I, I have to ask, what do you think was going through that man's head? Was it a heroic statement? Was it a purely primal, guttural, like I've had enough?

   13. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom35:50

       It's so interesting to just speculate and we just don't know because, you know, he was never able to be interviewed afterwards but I think your emphasis on patriotism is really important 'cause one of the students' main demands was then, I think, it might have been the thing that would've gotten them to leave the square, would've been to say, "We want this to be acknowledged as a patriotic, that our goals are patriotic. We're not here to, to take China back into the Cultural Revolution. We're here, we're here to...... express our love for the country if it goes in, in the right way. So will you admit that? And you, you mentioned about the power of the image and I do think the Chinese Communist Party learned something or to have taken to heart the power of the image after that because we saw this in, um, when there were protests in Hong Kong, the government on the mainland really wanted to tell a story there of, you know, crowds out of control and i- initially there were in 2014 and again in- i- initially in 2019 there were very orderly crowds and it, it, i- i- i- it had trouble with that story. So they tried very hard to ban images of peaceful protests until there were some incidents, as there almost always are, of, uh, violence by crowds and then they would show those images over and over again. They also worked very hard when 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 'cause the, the western press was often saying, "Will this be another Tiananmen? Will there be a massacre or will there be soldiers on the streets?" The movements in Hong Kong were suppressed without the use of, um, of shooting to kill on the streets. There were shooting to, to wound, um, there was beanbag shot, there were rubber bullets, there was enormous amounts of tear gas, there was even tear gas left, let fly inside subway stations in 2019 and all these things are really brutalizing but they don't make the kind of images that sear in the mind the way something like the Tiananmen Tank Man image or the image of a Vietnamese woman being burned by napalm, young woman, that became another of the iconic images during the Vietnam War. Those images really can, um, have an extraordinary power and I think the Chinese Communist Party is now aware of that. There are no really gripping... there are very few photographs allowed of the Xinjiang, um, extra-legal detention camps. There are very little, very little photo... the, there is an awareness of how much, uh, power a photograph of a certain type can have.

   14. LFLex Fridman38:42

       So nobody knows what happened to the Tank Man?

   15. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom38:46

       No.

   16. LFLex Fridman38:46

       What do you think happened to the Tank Man?

   17. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom38:48

       I assume he was killed.

   18. LFLex Fridman38:49

       Killed?

   19. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom38:50

       I assume. He was just disappeared. It's interesting because very often figures are made an example of in one way or another. I mean, Liu Xiaobo was in- uh, was 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 crimes recently sentencing to death and things like that, it's much more just remove them, imprison them. But the Tank Man, there was never a trial, there was never... even a trial that was a, was one that you knew what the result would be, which there was for Liu Xiaobo and others. Not even a hidden trial but simply, simply disappeared and there's been somebody who's like another figure like this who's disappeared. Um, a couple of years ago in Beijing there was a lone man who put up a banner on a bridge, uh, Sitong Bridge in Beijing and it was extraordinary. It was, it had denunciations of the direction Xi Jinping was taking the country, it was denunciation of, of COVID policies but also of dictatorial rule and the banner, somehow he managed to have it up and get it 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, you know, 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

7. 40:36 – 1:16:33

   Censorship

   1. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom40:36

      thinking.

   2. LFLex Fridman40:37

      How much censorship is there in modern day China by the Chinese government?

   3. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom40:42

      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 of, like, banning things. But there's also friction, where 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, the first answer you'll get through a search.

   4. LFLex Fridman41:28

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom41:29

      So a lot of, you know, tech-savvy or globally-minded, um, uh, tapped-in Chinese will use, uh, people will use a VPN to jump over the firewall but it's work. It, 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 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 that, th- things, things that you would expect to be censored that aren't censored. Um, you can read all sorts of things in China about......totalitarian, you could read Hannah Arendt's, uh, book on totalitarianism. Which would be the kind of thing you just, you know, you're not supposed to be able to read that in a somewhat totalitarian, uh, state or a dictatorial state, if anything. But it's not specifically about China and so censorship is most, 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. Um, and certain events in that way. But a sort of like something through allegory, something through, um, imagining a place that looks a lot like a Communist Party ruled state so that people are going to read it. There were things that were banned throughout, up until like the very last period of Gorbachev's rule, banned, things banned in the Soviet Union that are available in Chinese bookstores. You can buy Nineteen Eighty-Four in a Chinese bookstore. You've been able to since 1985.

   6. LFLex Fridman43:21

      (laughs)

   7. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom43:21

      Um, you can buy, again, it's not about China and actually for some people within, um, China in the mid-1980s, where they focused on the part of Nineteen Eighty-Four that's like the Two Minutes of Hate, these rituals of denunciation of people, for some people in China, it seemed like it was about their past, not about their present. And then by the '90s, 1984 is a very bleak culture of scarcity, a place where people just aren't having fun. And people said like, "You could read Nine-" Some people would read Nineteen Eighty-Four and say, "Look, this is, this is the world we're living in, it's a Big Brother state." But others said, "Well, that has some similarities to us but, you know, he wasn't talking about a country like ours. Look, we've got supermarkets, we've got McDonald's. I mean, this is not, you know, we've got fast trains, we got, things are, we're living so much better in some ways than our grandparents did and this isn't like that bleak world he was imagining."

   8. LFLex Fridman44:17

      Yeah, you've actually spoken about and described China as more akin to the dystopian world of Brave New World than 1984, which is really interesting to think about. I think about that a lot, I've recently re-read of over the past couple of years, re-read Brave New World a couple of times, and also 1984. It does seem that the 21st century might be more defined to a degree it is dystopian, any of the nations are, by Brave New World than by 1984.

   9. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom44:48

      There are mixed elements, I think there are moments when it can seem more, more one than the other, and there can be parts of the same country that seem more one than the other. I think, um, and if we just think about control through distraction and playing to your sense of pleasure and i- One thing that people forget sometimes or don't know is that, uh, Aldous Huxley who wrote Brave New World taught Eric Blair, who became George Orwell, when he was a student at Eton.

   10. LFLex Fridman45:19

       Mm-hmm.

   11. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom45:20

       And they were sort of rivals and, in fact, in 1949, um, Orwell sent his former teacher a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four and said, you know, "Look, I've written this," basically it's kind of almost a little Oedipal, like, "I've written this book that displaces yours." He didn't say that, he just said, "I wanted you to have this." But he had criticized Brave New World in reviews as like n- not having, having imagined a world of capitalism run wild like before realizing the kind of totalitarian threats of the middle of the 20th century. But Huxley wrote Orwell a letter in October of 1949, same month the Communist Party took control in China, not that he mentions China. And he just said, "You know, it's a great 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."

   12. LFLex Fridman46:17

       I have to say, I think Huxley might be really onto something there. Truly a visionary. Although to give points to Orwell, I do think as far as just a philosophical work of fiction, 1984 is a better book. Because, uh, Brave New World does not quite construct the philosophical message thoroughly, because 1984 contains many very clearly, very poetically defined elements of a totalitarian regime.

   13. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom46:49

       Oh, and the dissection of language is just so-

   14. LFLex Fridman46:52

       Language.

   15. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom46:52

       ...amazing. No, I think you've got a point there and I went back and re-read Brave New World and it's, it's fascinating but it, it's very, it's very messy.

   16. LFLex Fridman47:00

       Yeah.

   17. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom47:01

       I think there's a clarity to, to Orwell's 1984. There's a clarity to Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale similarly, the, the, the construction of the elements and she was a big fan of both, um, 1984 and Brave New World. So it, there, there's a way they le- they go forward. But, you know, there was a kind of, it's not exactly a sequel, but Orw- uh, Huxley did write something called Brave New World Revisited.

   18. LFLex Fridman47:27

       Yes, he did, that's right.

   19. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom47:27

       In the '50s and he kind of said actually it seems, and he mentions China there. He says that in Mao's China they're kind of combining the two things of this and I'm, I'm really fascinated by that because they published in China, um, on the Chinese mainland, it was published in Taiwan and Hong Kong too. It's called A Dystopian Trilogy and it's a box set where you have Zemioh Tenzwie, who ins- that inspired both Orwell and Huxley to some extent. Uh, that's one book and then there's Animal Farm and 1984 is the second book and then the third volume is Huxley's Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited. And it was published in Complex Characters and you can bu- you could buy it in Hong Kong but I compared it to the book you can buy on the mainland...... and it's all the same except the parts in Brave New World Revisited that refer to China are scalpeled out and this, I think, shows the subtlety of the censorship system. You can buy these books and you can read about them but the parts that s- that en- that really show you how to connect the dots, that gets, that's taken out. And I do think the Brave New World side of things, I, I think with China I was feeling it was definitely moving more toward Brave New World except Tibet and Shinjang being more the crude boot on the face 1984 style of control. But then during the COVID lockdowns when people were being so intensely monitored and controlled, even places like Shanghai that had seemed much more the Brave New World kind of style, had their Orwellian moment. So you have it, now I think it's, you know, there are more 1984, more Brave New World parts of the country and there are also more Brave New World, more 1984 moments.

   20. LFLex Fridman49:23

       I see why it could give a sense after you've thoroughly internalized the fear that you have complete freedom of speech, just don't mention the government. So you could talk about totalitarianism, you could talk about the darkest aspects of human nature, just don't... you can even talk about the government in a sort of metaphorical like poetic, um, way that's not directly linkable but the moment you mention the government it's like a dumb keyword search. (laughs)

   21. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom49:55

       It's, yeah, it's, and, and I think it's like one of these really good examples of how, you 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, (laughs) so National University of Singapore has a world class history department but no Singapore historian in it. Nobody who focuses on the history of Singapore 'cause, you know, it's incredibly wide ranging what you can, what you can do, analyze, but when you're actually talking about the family that's been most powerful in Singapore then it gets to be touchy. In, um, Thailand which I've been working on recently, you have this leis majeste, um, laws that make it very, very dangerous to say certain kinds of things about the king and so you, in all of these settings you have to figure out ways to, to work around it. There's a, um, um, there's a way in which you can say at the international, the Foreign Correspondence Clubs in different parts of Asia, you can have an event that's about the country won over that you can say basically anything you want but if you, when it gets to the things in the place where you are, um, you're, you're, it's touchy. I should give credit for that insight, uh, Shivani Mahtani who's written, um, co-wrote a very good book on Hong Kong, Among the Braves, um, she was talking about that, that in Singapore at the Foreign Correspondence Club you could have an event on Hong Kong that could say all kinds of things that you couldn't say at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondence Club. But at the same time when I saw her in Singapore, she said there was a Singapore refugee, a political refugee in Hong Kong who was giving a talk at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondence Club saying kinds of things that he couldn't say in Singapore. And in Thailand I gave a talk at the Foreign Correspondence Club and then I went to hear a talk there because I was just curious about like what the culture in this Foreign Correspondence Club and there was somebody talking about human rights abuses in different parts of Southeast Asia, saying things very directly and then said, "And there are things going on in Thailand that we're not gonna talk about," and there was this kind of... yeah, self-censorship can be a very powerful thing.

   22. LFLex Fridman52:19

       One of the things I learned about all this which is interesting, I want to learn more, is about the human psychology, the ability of the individual mind to compartmentalize things. It does seem like you could not live in a state of fear as long as you don't mention a particular topic. My intuition would be about the human mind, if there's anything you're afraid of talking about, that fear will permeate through everything else. You would not be able to do great science, great exploration, great technolo- and that, that idea I think underpins the whole idea of freedom of speech why you don't wa- uh, in the United States, you don't wanna censor any even dangerous speech because that will permeate everything else. You won't be able to have great scientists, you won't be able to have great journalists, you won't be able to have... I don't know, and, and I'm obviously biased towards America and I think you do need to have that full on freedom of speech, but this is an interesting case study, um, and that's actually something that you speak about that Mao, if he were alive today and visited China would be quite surprised. Uh, can y- and you give the, uh, Nanjing bookstores an example, can you just speak to this? If Mao visited China, let's, let's go with that thought experiment, what would he recognize, what would he be surprised by?

   23. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom53:38

       So I, I wrote about, I wrote about imagining a revivified Mao, you know, going, wandering this really cool Nanjing bookstore in the early 2000s and just being amazed at what you could read there and, you know, what, what books were for sale and I've, I thought about how he'd, he'd be like, "What's, what's going on?" You know? "Is the Communist Party not in control?" I mean, I've, he talked about how art and politics needed to, in some ways, go together and you've got all these kind of things. He'd also be, he also would've been shocked by all these, there were all th- all these books about like how to start your own cafe and bar and sort of celebrating entrepreneurship, how to get into Harvard, it's like, you know, 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-"

   24. LFLex Fridman54:40

       (laughs)

   25. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom54:40

       "... really loved this." So some of the coolest bookstores, the things that I just was amazed could exist in the early 2000s. So you can still read, you can still buy copies of 1984 and you can still get, um, 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 the kinds of ideas that then take them to the next level and talk about the applicability, uh, to the situation in China, s- some of those bookstores have, 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, 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, um, under Xi Jinping when things started narrowing, and it then had to close in Shanghai, and it's just been reopened in, um, DC as JF Books, and it's becoming this really interesting cultural hub, and I'm, I'm really delighted. It's where I'm going to hold the launch for my next book, um, when it comes out in June, this book on The Milk Tea Alliance, um, about struggles for change across East and Southeast Asia, including in places that are worried about the kind of rising influence of Beijing, and it seems just perfect to be, um, to be holding it in the kind of place that can't exist in Shanghai. So places like that, they, 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-

   26. LFLex Fridman56:48

       Wow.

   27. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom56:49

       ... 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 is going to open in, or is open in Japan too. Uh, my sometime collaborator, Amy Hawkins, uh, 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 thought they might be able to have in China and then couldn't and imagined someday being able to hold in China but maybe can't.

   28. LFLex Fridman57:26

       So first of all, boy, do I love America. Uh, and, and second of all, it makes me really sad because there's a very large number of incredible people in China, incredible minds, and maybe I'm romantic about this, but books, uh, is a catalyst for brilliant minds to flourish, and without that...

   29. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom57:48

       So I guess maybe this is a good time to mention something that I, I do think about and sometimes people would, will think because of censorship and that there's an idea of sort of brainwashing within China population control, and I periodically will get students from the mainland, and I have a lot of students from the mainland in my classes when I teach Chinese history, and I feel like, "Okay, now I'm contradicting the version of the past that they've, that's been drum beat into them." But I'll still get students who are incredible free thinkers, who have come through that system and it just, it just doesn't hold or there are limits to it, and this is kind of... I mean some of them are people who just got curious by something, and it is a porous system, even, you know, it's, it's, it's more porous than in North Korea.

   30. LFLex Fridman58:39

       Mm-hmm.
8. 1:16:33 – 1:34:41

   Xi Jinping

   1. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom1:16:33

      opposite.

   2. LFLex Fridman1:16:33

      You mentioned that you, we don't know the degree to which this change has to do with Xi Jinping or the party apparatus. And that question, going back to Confucius of hierarchy and how does the power within this very strict one-party state, uh, work? What, what can we say? What do we know about the structure of this Communist Party apparatus? Uh, how much internal power struggle is there? How much power does Xi Jinping actually have? Is there any insight we have into the system?

   3. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom1:17:07

      So James Palmer, who worked in Beijing as a journalist and now is an editor at Foreign Policy, wrote an important piece few 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 of these kind of ideological factions, but also partly about different views of how much tinkering there should be with the economy and things like that. And they were also basic, partly based on personalities and personal ties. But we did have a sense, you could sort of map out these kinds of rival power bases and things. And we just have much less of a sense of that under Xi Jinping. It's very hard to know other than the sort of small group around him, how it works. We don't have a major defector who says, "Yeah, this is how, this is how Xi Jinping..." We, we have Xi Jinping's self-presentation and a lot of things that are then, um, said about him. There were some false expectations about him that some people thought, "Oh, he's gonna be a reformer because his father was a liberalizing figure." And you know, that doesn't work that way. And he does seem to care about orderliness. He does seem to care about certain things. He wants to present himself as a kind of scholarly figure in touch with China's deep past. Um, we know he's a strong nationalist and a kind of cultural nationalist as well as, um, political nationalist. But beyond that, we don't have that much of a sense of what makes him...... what makes him tick. We get little hints. Um, you know, there was this secret speech where he talked about, that leaked out, that he talked about how the Soviet Union had collapsed because people didn't, the leadership didn't pay enough attention to ideology, and he also said that none of them were manly enough to keep control. So he, if I imagine if he and, he and Putin ever have a kind of heart to heart conversation, it's one thing they'd find to agree on is this sort of distaste for Gorbachev, this feeling that Gorbachev was, that was the wrong way to do things.

   4. LFLex Fridman1:19:21

      Not manly enough?

   5. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom1:19:22

      Yeah, and too not strong enough about, you know, really keeping control. And, you know, for Putin it would be that it led to the Soviet Union, to the loss of an empire, but for Xi Jinping, it's, there is a bit of being haunted by what happened to the Soviet Union, and we're not go- I'm not going to be the leader who sees the diminishment of this land mass that was, in a sense, rebuilt over time for Mao and then Deng Xiaoping. You know, you have the, the story, a very powerful story about the Chinese past that the Chinese Communist Party makes a lot out of, but that Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist Party was Mao's great rival, also made a lot out of. And it has a partial basis in fact, was that from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, China, which had been this strong 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, that's not going to happen. And the reason why my party deserves to rule is because it can reassert China's place in the world." And both the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party predicated themselves on this kind of nationalistic story of being in a position to prevent that from happening again.

   6. LFLex Fridman1:20:49

      This is, uh, a bit of a tricky question, but is it safe for journalists, for folks who write excellent books about the topic, to, uh, travel to China?

   7. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom1:21:02

      I think there are all kinds of different things about safety or not. I think until recently, at least, the people who were most vulnerable were, um, people of Chinese descent, uh, people 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 you had early cases, my friend Melissa Chan was an early person kicked out when she was working for Al Jazeera and reporting on Xinjiang. So that's one kind of person who was vulnerable because of this expectation that they should be somehow more loyal. Another kind of person who was vulnerable or, this case, more likely to be blocked from China, they, there's a, the Communist Party is particularly concerned about people from outside of China who are amplifying the voices of people within China or exiles from China who the government would like to, to silence. So the Dalai Lama, you had scholars who worked on Tibet and had connections to the Dalai Lama were early people to have trouble going to the PRC, then scholars who worked on Xinjiang and were connected to Uighurs. But there also were people who were sort of personally connected to dissidents or exiles who would amplify their voices or translate their work, would, would promote them, that then it wasn't about necessarily danger if you got in China, but you were more likely to be denied a visa if you were the kind of person who was doing that. So I wrote critical op-eds about the Chinese Communist Party. I published them in some high profile places. I've written a lot about Tiananmen, wrote about human rights issues, all that. And I kept getting visas to go to China. I testified to a congressional executive joint committee on China about the Tiananmen protests on the 25th anniversary of it, and some people said, "Oh, that's the kind of thing that would lead to you not getting a visa." I got a visa right after that. Uh, now I think it might be different. 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 for tat, partly because of tech maven's relative being held in Canada, so it was kind of there, it was also not picking a fight with Americans. But there were certain kinds of things that you could map out what was the riskiest thing to do. And so I went in the 2010s having written, you know, forcefully about Tiananmen, and I didn't feel dangerous. I mean, I felt there was an awareness in some cases of what, if I was giving a public talk, there was awareness of what it was. There was sometimes, um, you didn't want to get your host, who had brought you to a university, in trouble by saying something that would get them in trouble. I think it was often that the, you were more vulnerable if you were within China or you were connected to China in different ways. For me, it's been confusing these last few years. I wrote one piece about this, about, um, about, "I'm not going to any part of the PRC for the time being." But I always thought that Hong Kong was a place that I'd be free to go, even if the things got difficult. I didn't get a visa for the mainland. You didn't need a visa for Hong Kong. But with Hong Kong... With the mainland, I had kept a kind of distance from the dissidents that I was writing about. With Hong Kong, I felt that these rules kind of didn't apply, and I was more connected to them, um, more friends with some of them.... and then with this crackdown that's come on Hong Kong and there're exiles from Hong Kong who have bounties on their heads. And so now I feel that, you know, it's not necessarily that anything would happen to me if I went to Hong Kong, but I feel I would be very closely watched, and so I wouldn't want to meet with some of my, my friends there who aren't this high profile. So I don't want to go to a place where I would feel that I was toxic in some way.

   8. LFLex Fridman1:25:17

      Right. One, you're walking on eggshells, and two, you can get others in trouble. That kind of dynamic is complicated. So it's fascinating that Hong Kong is now part of that calculus. So I've gotten the chance to speak to a bunch of world leaders. Do you think it's possible that I would be able to do an interview with Xi Jinping?

   9. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom1:25:37

      If you do, I would, I would be very pleased because I could watch that interview and get some insights about, um, Xi which have been very hard to get. I mean, it's been, they're really difficult. There've been very few, um, very few discussions. He doesn't meet with... He doesn't give press conferences. There's a variety of things. And this is, this is different from some of his predecessors. Um, Jiang Zemin famously was interviewed by Barbara Walters and asked about Tiananmen and he tried to make out that it wasn't a big deal, you know, there were a variety of things, but he had relatively spontaneous conversation. I was going to say, I... He's the only Chinese leader I've met, but I met him before he was a major, major leader. He was the, um, party secretary or mayor of Shanghai. It matters because the party secretary is the more important role. But anyway, he just met with a group of, um, foreign scholars who were going over to Shanghai in '88 for a conference on Shanghai history, and just to show you the limits of anybody who thinks they can predict what's going on in Chinese politics or, I mean, predictability is just very hard in general in the world. But I think the consensus among us, and these were some of the most knowledgeable foreign scholars on China, was this was somebody who really had probably topped out because he was meeting with us, you know, he must not be heading anywhere up.

   10. LFLex Fridman1:27:04

       (laughs) .

   11. JWJeffrey Wasserstrom1:27:04

       And then after Tiananmen he becomes, uh, the top leader in China. But he, he had a kind of, you could pick things out from being in a room, he'd like to kind of show off his kind of cosmopolitanism. Xi Jinping talks, gives these speeches about all the foreign authors he likes and has read but it's all very, kind of, scripted, at least in his, his own head too. It's very carefully done to present a certain image of himself and we really don't get many senses of what he's like in unguarded moments or has them and, um, sometimes we get the illusion of them. Like there was an image of him and, um, Obama in their shirt sleeves at a, the Sunnylands meetings and, and the photo would show them walking and talking and but there's no translator in the image and so you're like, "How are they talking? What are the, what's, what language are they using? How is this... Or is it just a kind of... "I mean there are, of course there are exchanges with top leaders and, you know, Trump will say they're friends or these kinds of things where there's a language of Xi Jinping can talk about somebody or some country being friend, but we don't have a sense of these kinds of, the, the, what makes him tick as a person. So, so maybe you should ask him about Ernest Hemingway and see if he really gets excited about him because it, the, in the kind of generic things he talks about all these you can feel him sort of ticking things off about, "Oh yes, I'm glad to be in England, the country of Shakespeare." And this and he goes off these set things. But Hemingway, there's some sense that, you know, he had some special feeling which fits in with some of the macho side to him that would be... Interestingly, he doesn't mention Orwell as one of his favorite British, uh, authors as much. He says he likes Victor Hugo a lot.

Episode duration: 3:04:00