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Jeffrey Wasserstrom, "Everything You Wanted to Know about China*: * But Were Afraid to Ask" (Brixton Ink, 2025)
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Jeff Wasserstrom
Hey, still got my hoodie?
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Interviewer
Welcome to the New Books Network. Everything you wanted to know about China but were afraid to ask. It's the 24th of March 2026 today. And that is the title of a new book by Jeff Wasserstrom, who I'm very happy to be speaking with today. Thanks for being here, Jeff.
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Jeff Wasserstrom
Oh, it's a great pleasure. And this is the publication day of the book in the UK and other markets, so I'm delighted.
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Interviewer
So you're a historian, but one of the fascinating things you do in this book occasionally is bring dead people back to life. One of them is Chiang Kai Shek. So in one moment you say if Chiang Kai Shek were to come back to life, that Nationalist Party leader might think of Xi Jinping sounded like one of his successors, not a successor to his arch rival Mao. Can you tell us more about what you mean by that?
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Jeff Wasserstrom
Sure. And it's a kind of counterintuitive thing to many people to think about parallels between Chiang Kai Shek and Xi Jinping. But I want to mention that I'm not the only one who's historian of China who sort of thought in those terms. I co wrote a piece about this with James Carter a while ago. And also Rana Mitter, who was good enough to write a foreword for this book, mused on some related things around the time of the Olympics, struck by how some of the ways that China was presenting itself then sounded like or echoed some of the aspirations that Chiang Kai Shek had about a China that was. That was somehow in touch with its traditional Confucian values and made the most of those, and yet was also a major player in world affairs. Chiang Kai Shek never got to govern a China that came as far or had the kind of stature in the world that the People's Republic of China has now. Though he did it During World War II, he did reach a point where he was sharing a stage with world leaders as part of the Allies in World War II. But what I was thinking about with that, I'm in love with unexpected analogies that I stress are imperfect analogies, but through their unexpectedness get us to think differently about things. So the tendency is to focus on the fact that the People's Republic of China is run by a Communist Party and to focus on that Communist part of things. But if we think about the fact that it's a Leninist party and that parts of Leninism were criticism of imperialism and the idea of a vanguard party ruling then, the Nationalist Party that Chiang Kai Shek led throughout much of his life was also a Leninist party. And in the 1950s, if you had to say what was the key, what was one of the key differences between the Republic of China that then existed only on Taiwan after Chiang Kai Shek's armies were defeated by Mao Zedong's armies, you would say that. Well, in Taiwan, the Leninist Party in control celebrated Confucius, whereas on the mainland, the People's Republic of China, the Leninist Party in control there criticized Confucius. But if you flash forward to the era of Xi Jinping, who's now the successor to Mao Zedong as the prominent leader of the Communist Party. Well, Xi Jinping talks a lot about Confucius as a figure you could celebrate. You could also say that in the 1950s, Mao talked a lot about class struggle, whereas Chiang Kai Shek, the Nationalist Party, didn't emphasize class struggle. Well, now that contrast also isn't there. There are also kind of lighter contrasts that one could point to, like the fact that Chiang Kai Shek had a wife who was playing a role somewhat like the first lady role that American president's wives would play. And she was a glamorous figure. And she. This was Madame Chiang Kai Shek, Song BEI Ling. She came to America and gave a speech in English and people were very impressed by that. She was kind of a celebrity figure. Well, Xi Jinping is the first leader of the Chinese Communist Party that has a wife who really fits all could be described in all those same ways. He's married to Peng Liyuan, who in diplomatic settings sometimes plays a role very much like first lady when an American president travels. And she's a glamorous figure. She was a popular singer before segueing into that role. And she also gave an impressive speech in the United States at one point. Madam Chiang Kai Shek gave her speech to Congress and Peng Liyuan did hers to the un but still you can think about those kind of unexpected parallels.
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Interviewer
This theme of gender seems surprising but important. I mean, both Chiang Kai Shek and Xi Jinping have patriarchal visions, you might say, in terms of the New Life movement in the 1930s, when Chai Shek and Xi Jinping. There's been this kind of crackdown on kind of gender non conformity in many of its guises. We don't normally associate, I guess, social order on the level of gender roles with kind of political systems, but it seems like there might be a connection here. What do you think?
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Jeff Wasserstrom
Oh, I think that's a great, it's a great point to bring up. And I'm sort of thinking about if you were in the 1950s, if you sort of looked forward and you saw the kind of emphasis on traditional gender roles in Taiwan and on the mainland. Of course, you know, gender disparities didn't disappear, but at least the, the, the ruling party was talking a lot about the need to promote gender equality. You would find it surprising if you flashed forward to the early 21st century to find out that it was Taiwan, not the mainland, that was the first one to have a female leader. And that actually the Communist Party has largely abandoned that kind of talk of gender equality. And you're right, is also enforcing kind of traditional gender roles and is less accepting of gender nonconformity in all kinds of ways. And Taiwan is one of the few places in Asia that recognizes same sex marriages. So there are many ways in which this was all very unexpected. When I began studying China in the early 1980s, when I really began focusing on it, and I first went to Asia in 1986, and I went to China rather than Taiwan. But at the time it was striking how similar in some ways the Republic of China on Taiwan and the People's Republic of China on the mainland were, and that both were one party states with limited space for dissent. But it seemed, if you were looking at it, that if democracy came, or sort of liberalization, let's say, rather than sort of full democratization came to either of those countries, it might come first to the mainland because there were reforms underway that we're heading or at least opening up some kinds of new spaces. And yet, surprisingly, history is full of surprises, which is why it's such a wonderful subject to keep studying, that it was Taiwan, not the mainland, that moved more forcefully to democratization and that would become a place with competitive elections and things like that. So there are many kinds of shifts. There were surprises of that earlier period in the present related to gender roles and about political systems.
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Interviewer
When you're saying that people might have thought that change would come to the mainland before Taiwan in the 80s, are you referring to the kind of. The amount of talk in those days about the end of communism or globally, or are you talking about something else?
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Jeff Wasserstrom
Well, I'm thinking about that. You know, that Taiwan, if you, if you go back to the period of like the end of the 1970s, you had Taiwan still under martial law. Taiwan is a place that was not coming to terms with a major, kind of a major dark part of its own history. The 1947, 1947 massacre, the 228 massacre. And the person who succeeded Chiang Kai Shek was his son who had been involved with the secret police. So, you know, the prospects for, at least at that point for Taiwan liberalizing and democratizing. There were people, of course, who had been struggling against that system, trying to bring out change. But it was a long struggle that didn't show any signs of any dramatic change in the future. When it came to the People's Republic of China, you had Deng Xiaoping talking a lot about the need for a degree of both economic reform and some kinds of political reform. Though it's pretty clear from early on that he was going to prioritize economic reform over political reform. And you did have changes in other parts of the Communist Party run world, though there were mixed signals on that. You had the Solidarity movement in Poland, but it was crushed with a return to martial, with martial law being imposed there in 1981. So the mid-1980s, I don't think anybody. Well, there were people who were hoping, I guess, to see an end to Communist Party rule in all sorts of places. But it's. There weren't. There weren't that many people who were expecting it, but there were reasons to expect that or to think that there were some moves toward a kind of loosening a kind of more. More liberalized form of Communist Party rule in different places. And Gorbachev was beginning to make moves in that direction.
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Interviewer
I just want to stay with you as a graduate student in the late 80s in China, because a lot of people trying to understand political change would look at speeches of leaders, political parties, various kinds of administration. But the example you give in the book actually is about a rock concert. What do rock concerts tell us? Or what did it tell you that might not be so obvious from looking at speeches and kind of conferences and plenaries, et cetera.
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Jeff Wasserstrom
Yeah, I love to talk about that concert, which is probably the concert I've thought about the most that I didn't actually go to, or one of the ones. I was in Shanghai in 1986, and when I got there, I think this is worth noting, when I got there, I was working on a dissertation about student movements of the first half of the 20th century. And some of the professors told me that it was that I shouldn't expect to see any student protests in 1986, 87, because the students only cared about the latest fashions and they weren't particularly politically interested. There was really no chance that I'd get to see things like the things I was studying in the archives. But they were wrong. As people who predict that a generation of students will be quiescent or often proved wrong. The students who I got to know, it's not that I could tell that they were soon going to be on the streets protesting, but the students that I. The first students that I met in China, one thing that struck me about them was they were very excited about the fact that compared to their parents generation, they had more of a chance to experience some of the things that young people in very different parts of the world were experiencing. I mean, when I became friends with them, I became friends even though we hadn't grown up with the same television shows, we hadn't grown up listening to the same music, but they were starting to be able to listen to some of the same music. They were interested in a time going forward when they would be more part of a kind of global youth culture than was typical in places under Communist Party rule. And they were very excited when there was going to be. There had been the first rock concert, first rock concerts in 1985, the first rock concerts in China by the British group Wham. But then there was an American group that was like the Beach Boys, only not as famous Jan and Dean, who were coming to Shanghai to give a concert. And around the time the lead up to that concert, which was in late November or December of 1986, there had started to be some speeches given by Fang Li Zhi, a physicist who was calling on the Chinese Communist Party to move faster in the direction of political opening up as well as economic opening up. And In December of 1986, there were some protests. And the protests are often thought of as being fueled by those speeches by Fang Li Zhi. And those were part of the mix. And there were young people in various parts of China who wanted political liberalization to happen faster. And there was a sense that there were people within the leadership group, such as Hu Yaobang, who at that point was Deng Xiaoping's chosen successor, who were sympathetic to the idea of moving more toward political openness rather than focusing much more on economic openness. But the Jan and Dean concert comes in, and to me it just seems wonderfully symbolic of the cultural side of that time was that students in Shanghai just at the time when there were starting to be protests and people were starting to talk about the desire for greater reform at the concert, they got up to dance because that's what they thought you did at rock concerts. And security guards made them sit down in their seats. And this became symbolic of what they thought was kind of was wrong about the way the Chinese Communist Party was opening up, that they were. They wanted to have, you know, the idea that it was an open place. But if you have a rock concert but people can't dance, that seemed a very shallow form of genuine opening up.
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Interviewer
So I want to bring up another concert because I would love to hear you parse its symbolic significance. In November of last year, the Japanese pop star Ayumi Hamasaki performed also in Shanghai. But only this time there were no students to stand up and be made to sit down again because it was an empty stadium, because authorities canceled her sold out concert due to kind of rising Sino Japanese tensions. So that's, you know, 40 years later, a second concert, a different context. What might analyzing this kind of other concert tell us that just looking at diplomatic news headlines doesn't about this kind of state of China in the world?
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Jeff Wasserstrom
I love your idea. I love you bringing up this question because it makes me think about the possibility of a commentary someday on China through five concerts or 10 concerts, if I could think them up. I mean, there are some in between. I'll just kind of name check a couple. And in one case, I think it can help get us to this kind of subject because music has been related to nationalism of different forms as well. I mean, Most importantly in 1989, the 1986-87 protests ended. Ended quite quickly. But in some senses they set the stage for the very big and long lasting protests in 1989. And in 1989, the Tiananmen protests. One thing that happened was when students occupied Tiananmen Square. There was a very festive atmosphere and there was music and there was dancing. And Sui Jian, the most important Chinese rock singer of the time, came to perform as a way of showing solidarity with the students. There was also a song by a Taiwan, a Taiwanese folk singer who had defected to the mainland. He had been a progressive in Taiwan. He defected to the mainland and he wrote a song, Children of the Dragon, which was one of the things that the students at Tiananmen Square rallied around again. And so this was part of the milieu in the Tiananmen protests. And you know, I think it was an important part of the scene there. Though it's worth noting that Ho Dejian song had a kind of national, was a nationalist song. And it could be interpreted as one that was kind of promoting. Children of the Dragon could be seen as promoting kind of Han Chinese ethnic identity. And later, over time, Ho Dejian, he was actually sent back to Taiwan after Tiananmen. Linda Javin has a wonderful biography of him. And she refers to him as one of the first dissidents that was returned to sender political exile, sent back to where he was from. But anyway, Houjian eventually would end up back on the mainland again. And despite having been a kind of radical figure in two places in his youth, was writing songs at one point that were promoting the kind of nationalism of the Chinese Communist Party. So there are ways in which people's affiliations change over time. And actually the role of music can change over time in different ways. The Chinese Communist Party at some points has tried, has tried in various ways to kind of take. Make the most of youth popular culture to promote its causes rather than, rather than challenge its rule. And it's done some things that are even kind of, kind of laughable, like put out rap songs that, that extol the virtues of slogans of the Chinese Communist Party. But the concert you were talking about, the background, the situation there, there are ways in which popular culture and consumer culture at this time of increasing connections between different countries can all get bundled together in complicated ways. And one of the things that has happened post Tiananmen is that sometimes when young people have gotten involved in politics, it's been about things like boycotts of goods from parts of the world that are seen as in some ways insulting the Chinese Communist Party or insulting the Chinese people. The idea that the Chinese Communist Party has tried to promote is that an insult to the Communist Party is an insult to China and the Chinese. And that's very. That's a political. A way of placing a political lens on identity categories that are actually up for grabs in many different ways. And one of the things I try to do in my book and that I think is done by some of the best recent books out there by others, like Emily Fang's Let only 100 flowers bloom. Let Only Red Flowers Bloom. Sorry. And is to say that the Chinese Communist Party has tried to promote the idea that there's only one way to be Chinese that's authentic and acceptable and to sort of blur the line between the Chinese, Chinese culture, the Chinese country, and the Chinese Communist Party. And sometimes this works to a degree. And there are widespread popular moves against a foreign country, including boycotting the music and products from there when the Chinese Communist Party has a diplomatic spat with them or somebody from that place has said something that goes against the grain of the Chinese Communist Party. But there are also times when, when people reject that understanding. But popular culture, consumer products, all of these become become symbols. And part of the debates that involve also diplomatic and more formal issues. K Pop Demon Hunters, Haja Boy's Breakfast Meal and Hunt Tricks Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi?
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It's not a battle. So glad the Saja boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.
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Jeff Wasserstrom
It is an honor to share.
- [25:09]
Commercial Voice
No, it's our honor.
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Jeff Wasserstrom
It is our larger honor. No, really, stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side. Ba da ba ba ba and participate
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- [25:24]
Jeff Wasserstrom
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- [26:53]
Interviewer
Thanks a lot. So I want to remain just for a little longer with this, you know, this, the suggestiveness of this example of the rock concert with Jan and Dean. But approach it from a different angle. I mean we've, we've now arrived at this, this idea that you may or may not write about China in, in five concerts. A different angle is this. So I, I think one of the things that's very suggestive about that example is that we learn something different about what democracy means or what people want in terms of democratic reform. If we situate ourselves kind of locally and on the ground rather than just from the outside and looking at books and reports. I'm curious if you had an invisible cloak and a teleportation machine and you had a day or two to situate yourself anywhere across China, across different spaces to learn about where the country is going. How would you spend that day or two?
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Jeff Wasserstrom
Ah, so one, one thing, that one, one thing I would do right now would go to would be to go to Chengdu, a city in, in the west of China, in Sichuan that I have, that I didn't manage to get to when I was going to China regularly. And the reason why I think it would be interesting to be there right now is that there's a very old saying in China, when the emperor is far away, there are all kinds of things that can happen when you're far from where the emperor is. And this is one of the rare cases where I think there's a kind of enduring validity to this idea across. Across the very different kinds of Chinas that have existed at different times from the imperial period onward. And the reason why I'm thinking about that is that the idea of the emperor being far away is that things can happen in pockets of China, even at moments when there's a relatively strong central authority who's trying to impose a unified view. And so in the period since I was on the mainland last, which was in 2018, the big story in many ways has been this tendency for Xi Jinping to try to ramp up a process that was already underway of trying to minimize the spaces for diverse ways of expressing Chineseness. There are all kinds of things. There's been less toleration of different languages being used in schools across the prc. Mongolian, there's been a move to minimize its use in schools in Inner Mongolia. The most obviously in Hong Kong in the 2000 and 20s, there's been a push to impose forms of patriotic education there. There's been a lot of the minimization of the ways in which Hong Kong was different from mainland cities. And so when I'm looking at China from afar, as I've had to be recently, there's a worry I have that I might. I might go too far in the direction of thinking that this kind of push for conformity is succeeding. Because I know that in the past, even in the periods when there was the biggest push for conformity, there would be things that popped up on the margins that expressed a different kind of way of thinking about things. And my sense is that Chengdu is one place where these things are happening. And occasionally people have shared stories or photographs from there that show me, for example, things that surprise me when I've been thinking about the era of Xi Jinping. One was a photograph of a bookstore in Chengdu that was taken a few years ago that had a section that sold dystopian literature. And the slogan Big Brother is watching you was written above that section. And I'm obsessed with Orwell right now. And one of the things that I may be so interested in, the Orwell in China story is that 1984, which tended to be banned in all Communist Party run countries, has been for sale openly in China since the late 1980s. And in the early in the 21st century, there was even a 1984 bookstore opened in Shanghai, a bookstore called 1984 that had the slogan Big Brother is Watching you written on the, on the walls. And that was just a very extraordinary thing to see in a Communist party run country. But over time, during the period when I was going back to Shanghai quite regularly in the 2010s, I saw that the bookstore remained, but the big brother is watching you slogan was taken down and the nods to Orwell became much subtler. And there was a sense that a space that had been there was closing up. And there were independent bookstores in Shanghai that closed and all sorts of things were happening that to me played into this idea of increasing conformity. And yet the photograph I saw from Chengdu was from the early 2000 and twenties and that slogan was still there in a bookstore. And I've heard other stories about Chengdu remaining a place where there's simply more space because of the distance from Beijing. And it's more of a distance physically and in other ways than Shanghai is distant from Beijing. So if I could spend a couple days in Chengdu, I think just talking to people, listening to conversations, checking out things like bookstores, and placing those things beside what I knew about Beijing and Shanghai would be fascinating and I would also have a chance. Since I was recently in Hong Kong and was taking note of ways that it had become much more like mainland cities. In some ways very, very disturbing, but also in some ways remain different, such as having an open Internet. I think it would be very. It would be fascinating to place in my mind Chengdu and Hong Kong side by side and think about whether the ways in which both of them were different because of being far from where the emperor was.
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Interviewer
What you're saying brings up the issue of censorship. And it's difficult but not impossible for us to track the ways in which the regime is censoring discourse. It's not as easy to understand how people on the ground are responding to those restrictions, which is exactly what you're talking about. So going back to the title of the book, everything you wanted to know about China, but we're afraid to ask, I mean, what are the key things we should remember about or ask about how people on the ground in China, how they respond to restrictions on speech.
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Jeff Wasserstrom
Yeah, that's a great question. And in the book I draw heavily on work by Margaret Roberts that I just think is really has a powerful framing of things. And she says that to think about censorship, it's worth thinking of three Fs. There's fear, the sort of what are people afraid to say or to do? But there's also friction, which is just, are there ways in which the authorities simply make it harder for you to get access to certain things without. Without actually banning them. But, for example, you can. You can check out certain sites, but you have to use a VPN, which slows your computer down. So when you're looking for an answer quickly, you'll end up getting the official version of it rather than the part that they want you to deny. And she says that we tend to focus on fear, the banned book, the arrested daring artist, and things like that, but that actually friction is very important as well. And then finally, the third F she brings up is flooding, which is just the way in which the discourse can be saturated with messages that the authorities want you to have. And in thinking about that for a long time, I've had in my mind work that Michael Schoenholz, a very insightful Swedish Sinologist, has had where he thought about Heath. He encouraged us, when thinking about Chinese Communist Party propaganda, to also just think about advertising, to think about slogans as permeating the air sometimes the way that catchphrases for brands do. And I think if you think about official propaganda and advertising in the same category, then the flooding idea definitely, definitely makes sense. And friction might be brands making sure that when you enter a store, their products are the first ones you see rather, and you can find other brands, but you have to dig for them. So I think that's worth. We're thinking about. I think it's also. It's important to. To think about how people continue in a. That as long as a country, as long as there's porousness with China, there will be limits to how, how much the authorities will be able to impose their vision of things on the people. And there are just there. We should also think about things that are. That. That the sensors are slow to catch up on. There's a tremendous amount of creativity used by people in China to get messages across when they're being censored. And a favorite example of this that's been used was that when the MeToo movement was beginning in other places and was reaching into China, and feminists in China were trying to talk about that on the Web, and the phrase me too was banned, people began using the image of a bunny and a rice bowl and talking about rice bunnies, because the word for rice in Chinese can be pronounced mi, and the word for bunny too. So you could refer visually to me too without writing out the words for me too in English or the words meaning the characters for it in Chinese. So the creativity to get around censorship, even when there is direct censorship, other things to keep in mind are that sometimes things get through that don't seem as though they're challenging censorship, but contravene something that the authorities are trying to convey. And my favorite example there is something that, that Victor Shi, who teaches at UC San Diego, near where I am in Irvine, which is also where Margaret Roberts teaches. Victor just mentioned when there was the zero COVID policy in China that the government was trying to convey, the idea that around the world people were having to have these intense lockdowns to deal with the disease. And this was relatively late in the COVID crisis and people in China were getting frustrated. There had been periods when they thought that the Communist Party had handled this well. There were others. This was the time when they were worried that it was handling it all wrong by sticking with zero Covid so long. What Victor just mentioned in passing was that there were students in the United States from China who, if they wanted to communicate with their, they wanted to write something about COVID on WeChat and the COVID policies of the two countries that might get censored, but there was nothing stopping them from simply sharing photographs with no particular intent of what they were doing. You know, this is something that people do online is just say how you spent your day. So if they shared a photograph of going to Costco and shopping and other people being in Costco, shopping without masks on, and somebody in China saw that at a time when the government was saying, of course, we need to be very stringent about this, the pandemic is still in a phase where everybody has to make sacrifices for this, they would see that that wasn't going on. And actually when there were the White paper protests in China in 2022, one example that was talked about of why it was that some of the people protesting against 00 Covid thought that the government's communications about it were must be false, was that they had seen images of the World cup being played in the Gulf States then, and they had seen crowds showing up at the event, gathered, huddled together. And this undermined that kind of story. So I think when we, when we think about censorship, we need to think about what kinds of ideas can be circulated, what kind of ideas the government works to stop being circulated in images. But we should also just think, think about what circulates in subtle ways and coded ways, and also what circulates that undermines an official story without being something that would necessarily trigger censorship. BELLS and there, there are two, since I'm giving shout outs to other books which is one of the things I think is important to do and seems fitting to do in the New Books Network. I'll just mention one very new one that's an excellent short book specifically about this subject of censorship and how to think about it in more complex ways than we often do. About China is one by Michelle Hoax, which just came out this month, and another one, since I'm talking to you and you're in Oxford. The work of a scholar that I just think the world of who does consistently impressive work on topics like this is Margaret Hillenbrand. And she's published multiple books that talk about the way to kind of think about the way people find spaces to express ideas, even in a controlled state as well.
- [42:57]
Interviewer
Thanks, Jeff. I think it's really important to nuance this discussion of censorship in China, and I want to build on this by posing a very specific question and seeing what you think. I mean, one question I've been thinking about in the news recently is what public opinion is in China right now in relation to the war in Iran. There are many reasons why there are restrictions on open discussion of the stakes for China in the Iran war in terms of China's international posturing and positioning, et cetera. So if we take that as an example, are there ways for us to find out, kind of read the temperature of Chinese public opinion on the ongoing war?
- [43:44]
Jeff Wasserstrom
It's a really challenging thing to get a sense of that public opinion. I think we should assume that there's going to be widely varying views of it. And there are also ways in which, again, thinking about how information and news stories can either support or undermine the official lines of the Chinese Communist Party, whenever there is a crisis in another part of the world that is endangering and destroying people's lives and is not being caused by the Chinese Communist Party. This can help the Chinese Communist Party simply because one of the key arguments it makes to justify its continued, to legitimate its continued rule is to say the world is in a dangerous stage. So it's important to have your country be a strong one because weak countries or countries perceived of as weak tend to fare very badly. So there are ways in which, regardless of the line taken on events in other parts of the world, when they, when they are terror, when there's terrible news, it can buttress a line of the Chinese Communist Party. We should assume that there will be very views of this issue just among different, different people in China, different groups within China. And that's just something we always have to continually remind ourselves because when we're cut off from close ways of being able to really take the temperature directly. And there are fewer international journalists in China right now than there usually are. And those that are there have a harder time getting around reporting. Though there's some great reporting being done. There's some very good journalists based there. Amy Hawkins, who writes for the Guardian, is one who I rate particularly highly and somebody I've collaborated with. But there are many others as well. But not as many as there used to be and not as many people. Certainly Americans feel cut off because there simply aren't that many. There aren't nearly as many American students studying in China as there used to be or people writing freelance articles from China as there used to be. So we just feel cut off from that. With Iran, I don't have the war in Iran. I don't have a really good even suggestion to make of how to get a sense of it. But there have been some really good. A similar issue came up with how the war in Ukraine was being understood within China. And there there is some. Some reporting and some analysis. Maria Repnikova is somebody who tracks these kinds of things very well and has a special interest in the topic of the war in Ukraine because her specialties are both Chinese media and Russian media, and she reads both languages and follows both languages. So I think if we read things like the work she's done about the variation in responses to the war in Ukraine, we might begin to get a sense of how to think analogically about what kinds of varied fault lines there might be in the thinking about Iran, since you've moved since this moved, and it's appropriate to move in that kind of dark direction. I can't help working in one very light comment that I love to find ways to quote, which is about both censorship and going back to rock concerts. And it's one of my favorite lines about Chinese censorship by, of all people, Mick Jagger. When the Rolling Stones were playing a concert in Shanghai, they were told that one of the songs on their regular set list couldn't be played because it was too sexually suggestive. And this was a time when the Rolling Stones concert in Shanghai was incredibly expensive to go to. And Mick Jagger said, imagining what the kind of audience was that would actually be at a rock concert by the Rolling Stones, which at that point was already a very, let's say, elderly rock group. And Mick Jagger said, I'm so pleased to hear that the Chinese Communist Party is concerned with protecting the morals of expat businessmen and their Chinese girlfriends, which just punctured the idea of the Communist Party trying to control something like, like, like a sexually suggestive song being performed by an aging rock band. At the same time, when there was so much. There was, this was in the early 2000s, there was so much popular culture of all sorts circulating on the Chinese Internet. This was actually a time of more restrained kind of control and before the kind of tightening began under Xi Jinping. So I just thought that sort of punctured the ways in which Chinese official censorship, along with everything else, can simply be out of touch with what's going on.
- [49:32]
Interviewer
Okay, Jeff, you've now got this image stuck in my head of Mick Jagger going into the government office to demonstrate the exact way he was going to gyrate on stage and them approving or disapproving of specific moves. So, so thanks for that. I'm not sure I can follow on Mick Jada, but if I can bring this to a territory that's a bit more close to home for you and for me. You raised the issue of academic freedom as well in the book. So in a scenario where Xi Jinping got you on a call and asked, Jeff, you know, this stuff that you guys go on about academic freedom, you know, China is clearly doing very well in many metrics. What's your strongest argument for why academic freedom might be important for Chinese universities? What would you say?
- [50:33]
Jeff Wasserstrom
Wow, that's a very tough question at this kind of moment. And I guess I wonder. It's the kind of question that makes me realize why. Perhaps think tanks don't ask me to talk as much as they might, but history departments are more likely to. Because the way, the way I, I would want to spin this is actually to. To not answer about the present, but to spin backwards a little bit to the past, which I think does also relate back to the present. And it goes something like this. There was a time when the limited nature of academic freedom in mainland Chinese universities, and by this what I mean, a specific type of academic freedom, the freedom to criticize the policies of the Chinese Communist Party and to debate in very, very open ended ways, kind of almost every historical topic and to debate things that. And so forth and so kind of the kind of academic freedom that that professor of the humanities perhaps will sort of focus on most. There was a time when because of the limits placed on those kinds of debate and that kind of economic freedom in, in the People's Republic of China, as opposed to in, say, the United States and the UK meant that no universities in the People's Republic of China tended to be ranked in the very top tier in global rankings, things like the Times Higher Education Supplement ranking systems. And when Hong Kong became part of the People's Republic of China in 1997 with the handover, one of the things that was valuable to Beijing, the Communist Party, about having Hong Kong become part of the country was that finally, because there was more academic, in part because there was more academic freedom in Hong Kong, Hong Kong universities were ranked quite highly in some of these metrics. When you flash forward to the present, we have a time not only when there are all kinds of threats and breakdowns of some of the kinds of academic freedom that was, that was so valued in American and UK universities, not only have there been those problems, but you've also had a shift in the whole ways in which the ranking systems are figured. Whereas there's been more emphasis on labs, state of the art labs, more emphasis on sheer quantity of productivity in the sciences. And you have a case in which in universities like Beijing, Beida, Peking University, Tsinghua University in Beijing are now rated incredibly highly in global rankings, despite still having the kind of constraints on debates about Chinese history and Chinese politics. In fact, it being harder to discuss some of those things openly than it was at an earlier period. And yet those universities have risen dramatically. And even before the crackdown in Hong Kong, they'd begun to surpass the Hong Kong universities in those rankings. So one of the things that makes it hard to make these arguments to Xi Jinping harder than it would have been to one of his predecessors is I could have said to one of his predecessors in the 1990s, look, even if you have qualms about academic freedom on open discussion of some kinds of topics, you're never going to have a top rated university. And you want to have top rated universities, you're never going to be able to rise up the rankings unless you allow more freedom of debate. And I simply can't make that argument in the same way to Xi Jinping now. I mean, there are arguments, I think that I could have an easier time making sticking to my role of the present as opposed to, to playing the historian card. I think there is a good argument to say that there are some disasters that are exacerbated by limits to press freedom if we focus on freedom of the press rather than academic freedom. But academic freedom can be part of this picture too, because you have cases which you can point to, including, related to China, where one thing that checked the SARS epidemic from growing to bigger proportions than it did was the fact that even if there were limits on reporting some kinds of bad news within the mainland. There was a vigorous free press in Hong Kong and in Taiwan, and there was more freedom for scientists to do kinds of work in those cases. So there was a more effective early warning system to alert people to the potential of that. So you can think about cases in which freedom of the press can be a check upon all sorts of kinds of disasters. And of course, that's a message that's important to have to have publicized when you're thinking about the United States and when you're thinking about Britain, as well as when you're thinking about China. But I think you have very clear cases in China to think about in which the lack of the free flow of information led to really horrific things. Nobody in China thinks at the moment that the Great Leap Forward was a good thing, a massive famine, and one contributing factor to that massive famine was a limit on the flow of truthful information due to both limits on freedom of the press, but also to and this I think, would be something else to bring to Xi Jinping's attention, a structure in which people at local levels feared that giving bad news to the person in charge in Beijing would be bad for their political careers. Again, that's something that's not unique to China, but it is something that makes disasters worse and sometimes creates disasters where there wouldn't have been ones.
- [57:45]
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- [58:26]
Jeff Wasserstrom
I'm ready.
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- [58:38]
Jeff Wasserstrom
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- [59:05]
Interviewer
you allow me to imagine the scenario where I was also invited to join this three way call for a few minutes, here's one different point I might make and I wonder what you think. I might also say, look, the Chinese leadership clearly wants to project its story about China to the world. I mean, sometimes people, yeah, kind of the kind of motivation, but actually by limiting academic freedom and other kinds of freedoms, figures within China actually have limited global reach in terms of persuading others of their version of the story. So in fact, by opening things up, you are making commentators within China more persuasive and those outside less so. I mean, even some, you know, even like, you know, someone like you, Jeff, might find your position quite different. If there was a very kind of very open field of discussion in China, one counterargument or one, you know, implicit or explicit comment I might anticipate she or someone else making is, well, you know, sure, that might be the case, but there are also risks with that. And ultimately we prefer to just let the people outside say whatever they want. It doesn't really affect how we govern domestically that much, enough for us to change our policies. That makes me feel at least a bit pessimistic about those of us outside of the PRC who, who study China. I don't know if it makes you feel similarly or differently.
- [60:54]
Jeff Wasserstrom
Those are really good points. I guess building on what you were saying, there is an interest in. The Chinese Communist Party is interested in soft power as we think about it. And you could say that loosening up on some kinds of, say, artistic freedoms is one of the ways to more effectively generate soft power. And that you've had, you've had some very talented writers and artists ends up feeling that the way that they need to be outside of. They need to be outside of China to do the kind of work that they want to do. And you could say that they're. That if you care about soft power, there are reasons to keep desires for control in check. And a great example for this, I think, is that it's an, it's an argument for, for the crackdown in Hong Kong being counterproductive of at least some goals of the Chinese Communist Party. Is one of the things, one of the most effective forms, one of if we think of soft power in part as things being created inside a country that people in other parts of the world want to emulate. One of the great soft power strengths of the People's Republic of China in the early in the 21st century was the Hong Kong. Was Hong Kong cinema. That was something that there were Hong Kong films. The Departed would be an example of this, that Hollywood was remaking. There were all kinds of ways in which Hong Kong style of cinema was having a reach beyond Hong Kong and was being associated with. With Hong Kong. And along with the other things that were really damaged horribly by the National Security Law was the Hong Kong film industry. You also have some very talented writers who have found it. Found the need to operate outside of China. And so you could say that if what you want to do is be admired for those things. And it's a complicated argument at the moment, though, because there actually are. This is a moment right now when there are some people outside of China or even with no child of China who are telling stories about China that fit very nicely with the Chinese Communist Party views of things, or at least are celebrating some parts of what the Chinese Communist Party has been doing. We live in an odd moment where there's both Sinophobia, but also what Perry Anderson usually usefully referred to in the London Review of Books a couple of decades ago in another context as Sinomania, a kind of enthusiasm for things going on in China that is sometimes as out of step with the complete reality as Sinophobia can be out of step with the overall reality. So I guess it's a challenging time, but it's often a challenging time, I think, to get across ideas about China that are complex and nuanced and that avoid the kinds of Scylla of Sinophobia and Charybdis of Cynomania. It's a tricky time. I mean, I do, if I. If I try to get optimistic about it, I do think there's one again, a shout out for another recent book, one that came out too late for me to plug it in. The further readings section of everything you wanted to know about China is Yi Ling Liu has a new book, Wall Dancers, that's about the very. A very complex way to think about the Chinese Internet and the ways that people are both constrained by it and find creative ways to get around the constraints and really conveys a sense powerfully, which I think we always need to try to do. And are the books that I feel there can't be Enough of conveys an idea of China as a place populated by incredibly varied individuals whose relationship with the party and the state changes over time, some of who end up being very creative people who feel that they can't stay within China the way it is, but others end up staying there and finding new pockets to operate in.
- [65:44]
Interviewer
Thanks a lot, Jeff, for these book recommendations, especially throughout this interview. There's something that I need to ask you about as well. I really don't want to miss, which stays with the. I guess stays with the universities or knowledge production theme, but it's more about universities outside in China than those inside. Nuance is important, as you say, but it's also important to be timely and kind of aware of shifting realities which are changing very fast around the world and in China. Your book is delightfully short and it's not kind of weighed down by a huge amount of kind of apparatus and hedging. Is there some way in which the way that university research works that doesn't quite fit with how fast the world and China are changing? And are there kind of ways, I mean, including your book, that cut across some of the noise, to try to get at simple but nuanced ideas about China?
- [66:56]
Jeff Wasserstrom
That's great. I do think there have been. There have always been. Well, the like everything. There's a history to this that. So there was a period when it was quite normal for. For academics to imagine that they were writing. Their career would be spent writing some things that were for other specialists and other things that were respond that were for very broad audiences and were responding to things of the moment. And then there was a period of, I think, intense kind of professionalization and an idea of valuing almost a perverse sense that the fewer people who could really understand what you were communicating, the deeper your thought must be. And I think we're at the moment in part because of the incredible problems that are taking place and challenges to the academic system where at least there's the hunger among more people I know within the academy to figure out ways to make the things that they know or care about to communicate them quickly and to broader and broader audiences. And there are some, I mean, just to give you a sense of the history of this, if you think about what a philosopher would think was normal for them to do. If you go back to the time of people like John Dewey, who actually went to China and wrote about it for magazines, there was an idea that a philosopher might be somebody who regularly wrote for in very accessible ways. And then there was kind of a later Period where maybe the expectation was somebody on the route to becoming an academic philosopher would be to try to sort of focus on things that we were writing that were not accessible to broader people. And Dewey was a case in the United States, but Bertrand Russell was somebody who was very public in the uk. And I think the same was true with kind of historians. There were historians that. That I admired when I first started studying history, who wrote a mixture of things in specialized journals and for very, very broad audiences, even big books. The Making of English working class by E.P. thompson, one of the books that really enthralled me was one that was beautifully written, even though massive, and something that the idea was that a lot of people would read it and that it would have relevance. Even if it was about the 19th century, it would have relevance to the present. But I think we are in a period now where there was a period when, in the 1980s, when I was in graduate school, where there were plenty of graduate students, I think, who could have imagined that going forward they might solely be writing for other specialists. And even when I began doing things like consulting on a documentary film and on tiananmen in the 1990s and writing for contributing to newspapers and magazines, that was seen as something that was a bit like, I mean, eccentric, you know, you could do that, of course, but it wasn't. It wasn't something that everybody who was becoming a professional historian necessarily wanted to do. And now I think there are more and more people who are at the career stage that I was then who would. Who would think that would be something that they aspired to do and that somehow they felt had a kind of urgency to it that we don't. We aren't really in a time when you can have the luxury of thinking that your expertise can just be hidden away. Now, in a sense, I think I've always felt that there's a way in which all the academics I know who went into teaching, of course, spent a lot of energy communicating to broad audiences and doing it in a timely way because they were giving lectures. And so if you're giving lectures, if you want to keep the students engaged, you have to find a way to connect with what their concerns are. And you need to find a way to speak in a clear manner and not load everything up with footnotes. So in a sense, I think, you know, I never felt it was a complete break when I wrote pieces for general audiences. I thought it was the same sort of thing as giving a lecture to an entering undergraduate class or giving a talk at a public library. So I thought, you know, that it somehow natural to alternate between communicating with other specialists and communicating with broader publics. But I think there are, there's a wider acceptance of that or even promotion of that as a normal part of academic careers. Of course, this is at a time when the potential for academic careers of any kind is under ever greater threats due to budgetary and other things, when graduate programs are shrinking and all kinds of, there are all kinds of countervailing pressures in both directions. But I think there's no longer a stigma against saying that what you want to do is write something that anybody could read. And there are some things that have been happening specifically related to China to promote that kind of shift in the United States. The National Committee on US China Relations started something, I guess, a couple decades ago now that really is, I think, what I feel is the most important thing that organization has done, which is a public intellectuals program where early ish career academics, as well as people occasionally from other worlds like journalism and policy realms, who have a focus on China and want to develop skills to communicate about it more effectively to broad audiences, or simply to talk to people in the policy world about the things that they've developed expertise in, spend time going through a set of workshops and other things that encourage and facilitate then developing those kinds of skills. And I've been very pleased on occasion to be asked. I was never part of that program as what they call pipeline fellows, public Intellectual program fellows, but I have sometimes been brought in to do sort of short coaching sessions for people who are in that program. And I've mentored some of them. And I think a lot of the people who are doing the best writing on, on China and commenting on China in the United States came out of that, that program and developed skills that were not necessarily the kinds of things they learned in graduate school, if they're people with a PhD.
- [74:38]
Interviewer
What you just mentioned about the connection between lecturing and writing for a broad audience, I mean, it really struck me as I was reading the book because the question answer format of the book, it did remind me of going to office hours and kind of asking your questions and, and kind of getting each query sequentially resolved. Before we wrap up, I want to, I guess, bring us back to your position as someone who studied China, I mean, back to those early days in the 80s when you first went. And bringing it up to today, a pessimistic diagnosis I have is that although it's easier to access many kinds of information today, there's something quite irreducible and irreplaceable about going to a place and seeing it for yourself. And as you mentioned, it's harder whether you're a journalist or a student to do that today. And in the case of China, I think that's quite a big problem. So, so the last thought I want to pose to you is that it is irreplaceable to have that experiential encounter with a society and a place. And I want to see if you agree with me and if so, what can people do about that.
- [76:06]
Jeff Wasserstrom
So it is, I mean, certainly it made all the difference in the world to me to have spent the time in China that I spent in the mid-1980s early on and get that first sense of it. I, I think, though, that if we, if we understand the topic of of China studies as including what Jeremy Barmay refers to as the other China, which is a version of Chinese culture that's different from the and sometimes sometimes just moves on a different course, then and sometimes directly challenges the kind of official China version of the Chinese Communist Party. If we think of the study of China as including that, then there are ways to experience the other China without going to the physical People's Republic of China. There are pockets of the Chinese diaspora. There's interactions with people who've recently left China. There's interactions with people who are temporarily outside of China who are making their lives with inside the PRC but are studying abroad. There are other all kinds of ways that you can connect with and have conversations and discussions. They're also and trying to end the book with a certain degree of optimism. I talked about an example, my favorite example of a place outside of the physical PRC where the Other China is kept alive and is vibrant and enjoyable to experience, is the network of diaspora bookstores that are happening, that are opening up in different parts of the world, that encourage the kinds of debates that sometimes, in some cases, where you could have in China at a different period, physical China, but now you can't. And there's a place called JF Books in Washington, D.C. that's a reborn version of Jifung Books, which was my favorite Shanghai bookstore for a while and then had to close. And it has salons and discussions where you have a mix of people with different kinds of interest in China, being from there or just having an interest in there, or being members of the Chinese diaspora who've maybe never been there, who have conversations. There's also a few books called the Nowhere Bookstores, and the first one was in Taiwan, but then there was one opened in Chiang Mai. There's one in New Zealand now, and there's one in the Hague that I had the pleasure of speaking at earlier last year rather. And it's a very creative thing. There are a lot of books about China there, both in English and in Chinese. But there are also books that might be useful to think about alternative Chinas that could exist in another time, like sections that deal with dissident movements in the former Soviet bloc and things like that. And it's a very creative thing. You get a passport when you go there, a mock passport that allows you to become a citizen of the Republic of Nowhere. And nowhere is something that can also be pronounced now here. And you can get stamps when you go to different parts of that parts of the nowhere republic. And I find that just a fascinating way to think about how this can be an experiment in trying to allow people to experience something that's very related to China, even though it's outside the People's Republic of China. And I think there are other times and places when people have. There have been other periods when people have had to try to grasp something about a place without being able to go to the main physical place associated with it. So I think that's something that maybe would be as. As hard as. As much as I think it's important that people who can go to the People's Republic of China go there, I think it's important to think about the ways that you can experience and connect to that other China without going there.
- [80:44]
Interviewer
That's a really good point to end on, Jeff, because I think even in a short book, you communicate key ideas about what China is, but also what it has been and also what it might be. So I hope that readers and listeners can keep all those on their minds, even if they are sometimes in tension with each other. Thanks a lot for speaking today. It was an absolute pleasure and thank you so much.
- [81:10]
Jeff Wasserstrom
I can't think of a better way to have marked the publication date of the book coming out in most parts of the world. And I'm hoping there will be a separate North American edition, as this is not available yet in North America, but I'm hoping there'll be a separate North American edition published before too long.
- [81:30]
Interviewer
Perfect. Let's watch the space and look forward to that.
- [81:39]
Jeff Wasserstrom
Sa.