China’s contradictions may be its greatest strength — and weakness. A look inside the civilization attempting something unprecedented in history.
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Whether it’s the chips in your phone, the rare earth metals in your electric cars, the AI systems reshaping our economy, or 30 percent of the world’s manufactured goods, China’s shadow looms over virtually every aspect of American life.
As Donald Trump tries to negotiate with Xi Jinping amid escalating tariffs and technological warfare, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Yet for all our focus on China’s economic power and military ambitions, we may be missing the most important story: how a civilization is attempting something unprecedented in human history — and whether it can sustain the contradictions that define it.
We may be making the same mistake we made during the Cold War — fixating on military and economic metrics while never truly understanding what drove the Soviet system until it was too late.
What if grasping China requires seeing beyond the familiar frameworks of authoritarian states to understand something genuinely different? Maybe if Trump could listen to the podcast he’d understand the internal contradictions that define Xi’s China, and his negotiations would be less mystifying.
China today is simultaneously communist and capitalist, revolutionary and traditionalist, globally connected and internally controlled. It’s a nation that can land on Mars but prohibits its citizens from discussing their own history, that builds the world’s most sophisticated surveillance state while positioning itself as a defender of international order. Chinese leaders invoke 2,500-year-old Confucian wisdom to justify one-party rule while celebrating Mao — two philosophies that should be irreconcilable but somehow coexist in the service of power.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast we talk with Jeffrey Wasserstrom, historian and author of The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing.
He explains how China tells three crucial stories: the story it tells itself to maintain legitimacy, the story it tells the world to project power, and the underground tales that threaten both narratives.
Wasserstrom also takes us into the “Milk Tea Alliance” connecting young activists across Asia to the Chinese bookstores now operating in exile in Washington, DC. In doing so, he reveals how ideas of resistance travel across borders even as authoritarianism spreads globally.
As Trump faces the challenge of negotiating with Xi, and as China leverages America’s own democratic struggles to expand its influence, Wasserstrom offers a way to understand these competing narratives.
Which may be the key to understanding the century ahead.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
[00:00:00] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. In boardrooms from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen, the question isn’t whether China will reshape the global economy, it’s how quickly and on whose terms. As Beijing reaps benefits from its Belt and Road empire, south, and positions itself as the stable alternative to American chaos, we’re witnessing not just a geopolitical shift, but the emergence of a civilization that’s simultaneously ancient and ultra modern, authoritarian and entrepreneurial, isolated and globally connected. Today, China leverages AI to monitor its citizens. It builds alliances with countries frustrated by American foreign policy while maintaining the world’s most sophisticated censorship apparatus. It’s a nation that can put a rover on Mars, but can’t allow its citizens to freely discuss their own history. Chinese leaders invoke 2,500-year-old Confucian wisdom to justify one-party rule while embracing the revolutionary legacy of Mao. Two philosophies that should be irreconcilable now somehow coexist in service to power and to the future. Yet perhaps the most unsettling aspect of China’s rise is how familiar some of its contradictions have become as America grapples with its own tensions between democratic ideals and authoritarian impulses, between global leadership and nationalist isolation, between technological innovation and the temptation to control information. The distance between our systems may be narrowing in ways we’re only beginning to understand. The question is no longer simply whether China can sustain its paradoxes, but whether any major power can navigate the modern world without embracing similar contradictions. The promise of freedom alongside the machinery of control. The rhetoric of openness coupled with the practice of exclusion. This is the great Chinese paradox of our time. A country attempting to have it all. To be both the world’s factory and its financier. Both a champion of globalization and a fortress of nationalist ideology. Both the inheritor of ancient wisdom and the architect of humanity’s most ambitious surveillance state. It’s a balancing act that extends from the highest levels of statecraft to the most intimate spaces of daily life. Where citizens navigate what can and cannot be said. What can and cannot be remembered. What can and cannot be imagined about their own future. And it’s a balancing act that may reveal as much about the stresses facing all modern democracies as it does about China itself. But perhaps most remarkably, it’s a story being written not just in Beijing, but in the bookstores that Chinese dissidents now run in Washington D.C. In the protest songs that travel from Hong Kong to Bangkok. In the digital networks that connect young activists who share nothing but a belief that another way is possible. These competing narratives, the official story and the underground story, the triumphant rise and quiet resistance may ultimately determine not just China’s future, but the shape of the century ahead and our own place in it. To understand this paradox, this attempt to have it all, we turn to my guest Jeffrey Wasserstrom, whose decades of studying Chinese politics, protest, and culture reveal a country far more complex than either its admirers or its critics typically acknowledge. His latest work, The Milk Tea Alliance, shows how China’s rising influence is creating new forms of resistance across Asia, while his deep knowledge of Chinese history illuminates why today’s leaders make the choices they do. He explores how China tells its story to itself in the world and why that story matters more than we might think. It is my pleasure to welcome Jeffrey Wasserstrom here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast to talk about his new book, The Milk Tea Alliance, Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy in Beijing. Jeffrey, thanks so much for joining us.
[00:04:17] Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Oh, thanks for having me on, and what a wonderful way to set the stage for this conversation.
[00:04:22] Jeff Schechtman: Well, thank you. You know, one of the things that went on during the Cold War is we discovered near the end of it that we really had no idea what was going on inside Russia. When we think about China today and its complexity and its contradiction and these paradoxes, do we have an understanding and how important is that understanding to dealing with China and the world today?
[00:04:46] Jeffrey Wasserstrom: So we know a lot, and we have access to things about China if we pay attention to them, and one of the ways that we find out a lot about what’s going on in China, and I think this is worth stressing today in the U.S., is by students from China coming to the United States in large numbers. And if there is a diminishment of that, it will diminish, among other things, our knowledge of things going on in China. It’s been very eye-opening for me to teach a lot of students from China, to both encounter ones who are in step in their way of viewing the world with the official lines coming out of Beijing, but I also often encounter ones who are really critically thinking in interesting ways, have found ways before coming to the U.S. to get beyond the Great Firewall and jump over it, as the term is in Chinese, to learn about how China is being discussed in other parts of the world. And that is an access to information that I think is very important. We know a lot, but we also have a lot of misunderstandings, and I think there’s one of the things that fuels my interest is trying to combat those misunderstandings. And I think the deepest misunderstandings are ones that are simultaneously promoted by the Chinese Communist Party and its official rhetoric, and oddly also accepted and endorsed by some voices outside of China. And the most important of those, I think, is a vision of China as a unified, unitary culture and state, where somehow everybody is on the same page, rather than realizing just how much linguistic, cultural, and other kinds of diversity there is within China, and that there are kinds of multiple varieties of Chineseness. And I think that I just can’t stress that enough. And I think that’s one of the things that motivated me to write this book, but to write others as well.
[00:07:00] Jeff Schechtman: And one of the things about trying to understand China are these multiple paradoxes that are so much a part of both the culture and the politics and the economics of China.
[00:07:12] Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Yeah, yeah. And I think that there are the contradictions, which were well put, the contradictions of being both a Communist Party-run state and a consumerist society. You just weren’t supposed to have those combinations. And to have both be a Communist Party that celebrates some things about Mao and wants to celebrate things about Confucius, who Mao thought of as a feudal thinker who was holding China back. And I think one key to this for the Chinese Communist Party is it’s trying to do whatever it can to stay in power. And it has a vision of a commitment to the idea that by staying in power, they’re keeping China strong. So in many ways, the Communist Party is at heart now a nationalist party. It couldn’t rename itself the Nationalist Party, though, because the Nationalist Party was the name of Chiang Kai-shek’s party that was his arch enemy that it defeated in 1949. But aside from that, it is in some ways a nationalist party
[00:08:16] Jeff Schechtman: more than it is a Communist Party now. And in many ways, it was hoped that the economic success of China would replace ideology, that economic success would be the driving force. But it seems that every time there’s been an economic hiccup, that nationalism really comes
[00:08:34] Jeffrey Wasserstrom: to the fore. Yeah, there was a lot of kind of wishful thinking that thought that when countries somehow economically developed, that freer markets, freer trade somehow would lead to kind of liberal democracy. And that simply hasn’t always happened. I mean, China’s not the only place that we can look to where there’s been economic development, but not moves in those directions. We can think of Saudi Arabia. We can think of Singapore, which was a place that Chinese officials in the 1980s and 1990s paid a lot of attention to. They were really interested in the way Singapore was becoming a kind of economically futuristic place. But there still was a control on, certainly on criticizing the status quo. There was a kind of one-party rule with economic development. So we were fascinated in the US, I think, with what had happened in places like South Korea and Taiwan, where economic development had led to an end of one-party authoritarian rule. But that didn’t mean that it was always going to work that way.
[00:09:50] Jeff Schechtman: Why didn’t it work that way in China? Why was China so different in that respect?
[00:09:55] Jeffrey Wasserstrom: I think one thing that happened in China after 1989, I think it’s crucial to go back to that moment in 1989 when Communist Party rule was ending in Eastern and Central Europe, when there was a notion of the end and where there were giant protests in China. The giant protests in China in 1989 were not about overthrowing or ending Communist Party rule the way they were in Eastern and Central Europe. They were more about trying to get the Communist Party to live up to its own professed ideals and to go further in reforming itself. But after 1989, after what happened in Eastern and Central Europe, the Chinese Communist Party, also seeing what had happened inside their country, were determined to not have to face that kind of protest again, if they could help it, and also to not go the same kind of route toward extinction. There was talk of a Leninist extinction that had happened in Eastern and Central Europe. One thing I think they learned from what had happened in the Soviet bloc was that people had been, to put it really crudely, they knew that people in other parts of the world had better stuff and were having more fun. If you were in East Germany and you heard things about West Germany, like East Berlin to West Berlin, you heard about stores that had incredible ranges of products that you couldn’t. People were eating better food. People were watching more movies. They were doing all of those things. The Chinese Communist Party came up with this idea, well, what if we gave people better stuff and more choices in their daily life, leisure activities, but kept a tight rein on political discussion and a tight rein on political choices? Give people more choices in some areas, but not in others. That was the kind of unspoken new social contract. We’ll give you more choices in some regards, but we won’t budge on the political side of things.
[00:12:00] Jeff Schechtman: And to what extent was someplace like Hong Kong supposed to be a kind of laboratory for this?
[00:12:05] Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Yeah, I think that was crucial. I think in what I just said about being in East Berlin, knowing what life was like in West Berlin, in 1989 or 1990, there were people who were on the mainland who knew that in Taiwan, there were more choices in many regards, including and starting to be in political terms. So that, I think, was one of the things that how could we, the Communist Party thought, how could we make life within the mainland feel as good in certain ways as Taiwan to undermine that as a kind of example that people would want their country to be more like. Hong Kong was a crucial spot for all this because Hong Kong was slated to become part of the People’s Republic of China in 1997. And there was supposed to be this framework called One Country, Two Systems, where Hong Kong would become part of the PRC. And it would have to hew to Beijing’s line on things like diplomacy, it wouldn’t have its own military, but it would be able to keep its own system. And then there was a question of what did that mean? Everybody agreed it would keep a different economic system. And the mainland wanted it to because it would benefit from Hong Kong’s advanced economy. But people in Hong Kong thought it would mean also keeping a freer press, keeping more right to protest, keeping more independent courts. Hong Kong had never been a democracy. It had very, very partial limited democracy at the end of its period as a British colony. But it had not been democratic, but it had been capitalistic and consumerist. And after 1997, quite extraordinarily, because we’d never seen an example of a Communist Party run country that had a place within it that was so very different as Hong Kong was. For a time, Beijing seemed to have a fairly light touch on Hong Kong. And Hong Kong did continue to have a much freer press, to have independent courts, to have an educational system where people could learn about things in school that were taboo topics on the mainland. And all that was going forward. But then Beijing got eager to exert more and more control over Hong Kong and pull it to be more like mainland cities. People in Hong Kong pushed back. And then there were these giant protests, steadily bigger protests in 2012, 2014, and then giant in 2019, which were actually the subject of my previous book for Columbia Global Reports, Vigil Hong Kong on the Brink, a short book that came out in 2020. The Milk Tea Alliance book is sort of a sequel to that, which talks partly about what happened in Hong Kong after those protests were crushed, but also about how some elements of the Hong Kong protest style
[00:15:16] Jeff Schechtman: spread to other places within Asia. And is part of the fear of Taiwan, the fear that it is a place where the Chinese culture with all its paradoxes and all of these issues can exist side by side
[00:15:30] Jeffrey Wasserstrom: with an actual democracy? Yeah, I think there’s that. And it also challenges the idea of a unitary Chinese culture that the Chinese Communist Party tries to emphasize in its own kind of patriotic story. And Hong Kong was a challenge to that view of a kind of unitary Chineseness as well. Jeremy Barme, who’s this very insightful specialist in Chinese studies who was in Australia and is now based in New Zealand and runs something called China Heritage, he likes to talk about the other China, a kind of China that is more cosmopolitan, more open, less rooted in a particular view of emphasizing hierarchy from the past, and is just as Chinese as the Chineseness of the Chinese Communist Party. And the representatives of that other China can show up within physical mainland China in kind of salons and places where people meet and talk in ways that completely diverge from the official line. But this other China also really existed in places like Hong Kong, exists in places like Taiwan, and in diasporic spots like these bookstores that are popping up to serve members of the Chinese diaspora to have conversations that at certain points they could have in China, but they can’t perhaps anymore. There’s a branch, the one that has in Taiwan and in Thailand, and one just opened in the Netherlands called the Nowhere Bookstore, that’s a kind of places for Chinese discussion that can’t take place within physical China. There’s one in Washington DC that’s called JF Books, a reborn form of Jifeng Books, which was my favorite Shanghai bookstore until it had to close. And very fittingly, I’m launching the Milk Tea Alliance book, the first event on publication date, June 10th, will be at JF Books. And that is a kind of place for discussions that are completely in step with Chinese culture, but not the view of Chinese culture that the Chinese Communist Party, especially under Xi Jinping, wants the world to accept as the only kind of
[00:18:07] Jeff Schechtman: Chineseness. Is there a paradox in this Chinese culture, even what Xi Jinping celebrates, which is on the one hand, this kind of Maoist revolutionary fervor, along with the tradition
[00:18:21] Jeffrey Wasserstrom: of that hierarchical order that you talk about? Yeah, it’s a very curious thing because Xi Jinping in some ways is a kind of return to some things of the Mao era, like a leader who’s potentially going to be leader for his lifetime, a leader who has a personality cult around him where his words are being taught, trying to be raised to a kind of level of sacred writ. These are things that kind of disappeared or were tamped down after Mao until Xi Jinping revived them. But on the other hand, what Xi Jinping is completely not like Mao about is Mao liked to stir things up, thought chaos was productive, in a way was embracing the kind of idea of just destruction in a way that at the moment is more reminiscent of what Trump and Elon Musk have been doing in the US than what Xi Jinping has been doing in China with trying to embrace kind of orderliness. Xi Jinping has no patience for the idea that Mao did of getting people out on the streets to just rile things up or about the kind of attacks on carefully built up institutions. So there are contradictions and you can see why he would continue a trend that happened with some of the other post-Mao leaders of trying to raise up Confucianism again, Confucianism which has a kind of celebration of orderliness and
[00:20:10] Jeff Schechtman: stable hierarchies. How much more complicated is that though in the world as it exists today that is more connected and China not wanting to be isolated but also to play a larger part
[00:20:25] Jeffrey Wasserstrom: in global events? Yeah, I think so the Chinese Communist Party still cares a lot about ideology. It cares about a particular kind of evolving version of Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, to Deng Xiaoping, to Xi Jinping thought. But at another level, the Chinese Communist Party is kind of quintessentially a diagnostic state is how some political scientists think. What I mean is they’re very pragmatic about trying to figure out strategies that can help it achieve its most central goal which is staying in power. It sort of looks for opportunities. So there are moments when Xi Jinping, and I think this is a moment, where it seems that the most strategic thing is to present China as committed to the international order and kind of protecting it against assaults to it from the United States. Whereas at other points, strategically, it seemed more valuable to the Chinese Communist Party to talk about how the international order is the creation of capitalist countries and empires of old that were keeping colonized peoples down and to kind of connect China to the other parts of the world that were kind of kept out of that. So it’s yet another contradiction. But at the moment, Xi Jinping can kind of have it both ways. When, in other words, he goes to Southeast Asia, he reaches out to some of the places in the region and in the world that are suffering from tariffs like China is from the US, those tariffs can be presented as a kind of neocolonial thing. Here we go again with a powerful Western power trying to keep us down, speaking as China as part of the us that is the colonized or partially colonized world of old that was kept out of the international system. While at the same time, Xi Jinping is presenting himself as a kind of grown up in the room who is working to shore up an international order that’s under threat. Doesn’t that only work
[00:23:00] Jeff Schechtman: though in a situation where America is as unpredictable and unstable as it is today?
[00:23:06] Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Yeah, I think there are different opportunities and different moments that the Chinese Communist Party has. And this is one of those moments that it has a particular opportunity because of what’s happened in the United States. It’s had other moments that it could take advantage of. For example, when the financial crisis of 2009 was when it was doing relatively well at that moment compared to other places, it could at that point say, look at us, look at our model, it seems to be something that’s working. So the Chinese Communist Party, it faces enormous problems, and you can quote me on this, at some point it will fall. No order lasts forever. We just don’t know what decade or even what century it will fall, but it faces enormous problems. It faces problems, its economic growth rates are slowing. For the last couple of decades, it’s made a lot about high growth as one of the things the Communist Party can offer. So in some ways, the Communist Party keeps having to come up with different stories to tell about why it deserves to rule. And it’s been very convenient for Xi Jinping that as one of those stories, that one about generating steady, large economic growth, was losing its traction, another kind of story about being a force for stability in the world, and these kind of nationalist stories could rise.
[00:24:42] Jeff Schechtman: Can’t they always come back to this narrative that is so seemingly so inculcated of kind of the century of humiliation, that it is always a response to that?
[00:24:54] Jeffrey Wasserstrom: It is something that is continually invoked. It’s a patriotic myth that keeps coming back, and periodically things happen that allow it to seem like something that isn’t just of the distant past, but rather still has resonance. There are times where you could just say, look, let’s get over this. And there are people certainly within China and protesters and critics, people of Chinese descent, critics of the Communist Party who say, look, that is an outdated notion that even if we say that was a terrible thing, that doesn’t have much to do with the world we’ve been living in, with the Communist Party in power and China’s a powerful state. But then periodically something happens that plays into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party who wants to keep that alive. And the tariffs could be spun that way too. And there could be a way in which that breathes new life into this idea of an outside world intent on keeping China down. In 1999, there was something very useful for the Chinese Communist Party that happened, which was when NATO was bombing Serbia to try to put an end to ethnic cleansing there. And the Chinese Communist Party was allied with Serbia. The Chinese embassy in Belgrade was hit by NATO bombs and three citizens of China died. And that allowed the Chinese Communist Party to breathe new life into that century of humiliation to say, here, we haven’t really moved that far from it when a NATO military action can still harm us. So there are ways in which it’s an outdated historical myth, but it is something that has some real reality to it from the past. And then periodically something happens that allows the Communist Party to present it as not being just about the past somehow.
[00:27:04] Jeff Schechtman: And how do young people understand that mythology?
[00:27:08] Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Many different ways. And this is why I come back to the fact that I encounter people, I encounter students from China who have all whole ranges of opinions. But certainly there was, to get to the Milk Tea Alliance, the Milk Tea Alliance was a set of people, largely people of Chinese descent, but not only, who were tired of the kind of drumbeat of official nationalistic rhetoric from the Chinese Communist Party that was picked up by some violently nationalist young people within China and led to these online feuds where people in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Thailand might be talking online about Hong Kong as a really special place, liking it so much better than liking other parts of China, or referring to Taiwan as a country. Because Taiwan, for all intents and purposes, does operate as a country. It’s its own state. But according to official nationalistic view, if you talk about it that way, you’re somehow buying into outdated, colonialist views of the world if you don’t acknowledge Beijing’s claim that Taiwan is meant to be, and has always been somehow part of China. So the Milk Tea Alliance was young people in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand, just saying, look, this is not an idea of the world, a vision of the world that we have to accept. We shouldn’t be criticized anytime we refer to Taiwan as a country, or we express support for Hong Kong protests. So let’s not just be cowed by the sort of might of Beijing and the sort of popular nationalism coming from within there. Let’s push back against it. And they came up with this playful idea of a Milk Tea Alliance, because one of the things that people in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand have in common is their iconic tea drink includes some kind of milk in it. They’re different drinks, Thai tea, boba tea in Taiwan, milky Hong Kong tea. And they said, on the mainland, they’re different. They drink their tea without milk. So they just came up with this kind of playful way of saying, we should be able to band together about being worried about the shadow of Beijing and Beijing potentially interfering with the way of life, a way of life that we treasure. And our way of life is different. It’s got a different kind of cosmopolitanism. And so they came up with this playful idea of the Milk Tea Alliance, which was initially a kind of online form of expressing solidarity. But it would also be people in one place expressing support for protests in another place that were either against authoritarianism, or against Beijing’s increasing influence, or about a combination of those two things.
[00:30:14] Jeff Schechtman: And talk a little bit about how social media and how these ideas move about, particularly among the younger generation.
[00:30:22] Jeffrey Wasserstrom: So I think what really one of the things that intrigues me is that we now live in a period where you have access to things, images, symbols that are happening all over the world. So it’s kind of natural that young people in any part of the world are aware of what young people in other parts of the world are doing. And they can draw inspiration from each other, express solidarity for each other. Young people in Hong Kong, and Thailand, and Burma, the ones that I profile, particularly Thailand and Hong Kong in the book, are interested in things happening everywhere. They express being inspired by Greta Thunberg, for example. They’re particularly inspired sometimes by young people who say an older generation has kicked the can down the road for things that we’re really going to have to live with and are going to shape our life. But what intrigues me is that these things can go global. But why is it that in cases like the Milk Tea Alliance, and we saw this earlier in Arab Spring as well, people seem really disproportionately influenced by things happening nearby. Even though they can be connected to things globally, things happening nearby, even in places that don’t share the same language or are thought of even as necessarily part of the same region, because Thailand’s thought of as Southeast Asia rather than East Asia, but there’s an influence there. And I think this is something, there’s a special sort of stickiness to what’s happening nearby might be something you can particularly relate to. The Shadow of Beijing also had a way to connect people. And also being nearby, there’s more of a chance that you can actually go and meet people in person who are part of these different struggles, who you might have learned about first online, connected to first online, but if it’s a two-hour flight away, you’re more likely to go there. So I was fascinated by these stories of particularly some Hong Kong activists and Thailand, Bangkok activists, who through online connectedness, but also through some meetings and friendships that developed, became very mutually influenced and mutually supportive, and even would do things that analysts have called protest swapping, saying like, I’ll do a protest in my part of the world that you’re not allowed to do in your part of the world, but you would like to do. And then you can do the same things. There was a kind of reciprocity. I love the story of a young Bangkok student who was really inspired by the Hong Kong protests. And when the Hong Kong protests were completely crushed and a national security law was imposed, and it was dangerous to sing the song Glory to Hong Kong, if you sang it in Hong Kong, you would be immediately arrested. He went outside the Chinese embassy in Bangkok on Chinese National Day that’s celebrated by the Communist Party as this national moment, and he sang Glory to Hong Kong as a way of saying, Hong Kong may be suppressed, but its struggle is not forgotten. Here, I’m doing something that you share this on social media, and people in Hong Kong can see that people in Thailand haven’t forgotten them. And they also know there was around that same time, Joshua Wong, the Hong Kong activist, went outside the Thai consulate in Hong Kong and protested against police brutality in Thailand. So you’re sort of making use of whatever space you can have to do the things perhaps that people in another setting can’t. And there was also a flow. Some of the songs were picked up. That’s one example, but they were picked up in different places. And symbols were picked up. And I’m particularly interested in the book in this kind of unexpected way that a Hollywood film and an American popular novel, The Hunger Games, novels and films, which were something coming out of the West, but they were picked up in East and Southeast Asia, and given a completely new kind of life that they haven’t had in the place of origin. The Hunger Games is well known to many young people in, say, their 20s around the world, but only in East and Southeast Asia have the slogan, one slogan from it, if we burn, you burn with us, and one gesture from it of resistance by young people against an authoritarian state in this imaginary world, holding up three fingers as a symbol of resistance. Those have only really taken off in East and Southeast Asia, in Hong Kong, Thailand, and Burma, the three-finger salute and The Hunger Games slogan. And so I’m fascinated about that. Something can begin in one part of the world, take off in another part of the world, and gain special traction because different parts of that part of the world, people who are watching each other, learning from each other, supporting each other, are particularly drawn to them. And so that’s something that I find just a fascinating thing to track.
[00:35:37] Jeff Schechtman: Beyond the frame of protest, however, and the various forms of protest that you’re talking about, is there a particular narrative that is emerging among young people in terms of what they think today and what they hope to accomplish? You know, there aren’t formal
[00:35:56] Jeffrey Wasserstrom: institutions around the Milk Tea Alliance, and there isn’t a clearly developed kind of ideology that you can talk about in one way. But there are shared impulses, there are shared things in some of these places, the concern with any kind of external efforts to prop up local autocrats, this idea of a distaste for the combination of domestic autocrats and some kind of foreign power supporting them. And that actually provides a kind of connective tissue from the Milk Tea Alliance activists who are concerned about Beijing propping up or, you know, colluding with local powerholders to an earlier generation where there was a sense of when there were protests in South Korea and the Philippines, when there were American-backed autocrats there in the 1980s. There are things that rhyme or sort of echo between those periods. But the other thing that some of the young people I’ve been talking to do have in common, they have some shared, they tend to have some ideas that connect them beyond the kind of basic anti-autocracy and even to some extent with Beijing. There’s a greater role in a lot of these movements for young women than there were in earlier periods. There’s a fair amount of support at least in some pockets of this Milk Tea Alliance for LGBTQ kind of struggles. Same-sex merit, legalizing same-sex marriage is something that some of them care about. And this kind of youthful desires just in itself that we did see in the global 1960s too, but it’s finding a particular expression. In Thailand, one slogan was, let it end with this generation. This kind of notion of we keep sliding back into these other paths, the status quo never quite changes. And we need to do new things, whether that’s being more playful or being more militant to try to shake things up. But it’s not an organized, coherent thing. This is more a story of some of the strategies that people use in these kinds of against long odds kinds of struggles. They also get drawn because of that sense of needing to keep hope alive in periods of very difficult periods for democratic struggles all over. They also are drawn to certain kinds of figures from history, perhaps, who are people like Vaclav Havel and Mandela, who struggled for long periods of time when it would have seemed that their struggles could never possibly succeed. And then ultimately, they do have a kind of moment. So I think there are shared, maybe a shared grammar of hope or looking for hope that they find.
[00:39:18] Jeff Schechtman: And how does the CCP perceive these protest groups around the world, perceive this diaspora of milk tea alliance? And how much freedom are they willing to give them to prevent a larger explosion?
[00:39:32] Jeffrey Wasserstrom: There’s a lot of efforts to delegitimize these kinds of struggles. Certainly, the Communist Party has a well-developed way of doing this to claim that these are the things that are being stirred up by outsiders. Not that the CCP is an outside influence propping up the Thai establishment, but rather that when the Hong Kong protests were erupting in 2019, the effort was to say the CIA was behind them, that these were a color revolution, that these were not patriotic, these were not about Hong Kongers loving Hong Kong and wanting to protect it. It was rather about them being duped and used. With Tiananmen, there was the same idea. It was a small handful of malcontents who were being disproportionately influenced by the West. So there’s a way to try to delegitimize these things. The other thing that’s happening, and this is a global story as well as a regional story, is I’ve been talking about activists learning from each other or borrowing from each other’s symbols, but autocrats are definitely borrowing from each other’s playbooks and developing playbooks together. There are ways in which the Chinese Communist Party is watching what autocrats in other parts of the world are doing and autocrats in other parts of the world are watching what the Communist Party is doing. Same way, autocrats in the US are looking at Hungary, where they’re using autocratic forms of control as well. With Hong Kong and Thailand, because I talk about how activists in those places were supporting and learning from each other, the regimes in each of those places are using some of the same strategies against activists, including, for example, arresting people on multiple… And then while they’re still arrested, bringing new charges against them that sometimes are going through things that these people had done in the past, and subjecting them to multiple prosecutions. Rather than prosecuting them on a single charge that then has a very long sentence that might generate more international outrage, they are just letting moves against these activists come in different news cycles, and for different sentences, none of which sound that bad on their own, a couple of years for this, six months for that, but basically removing them from the playing field for long periods of time, or coming up with technicalities to ban opposition political parties. They’re using these kinds of things in Hong Kong and Thailand that allow… When there’s a story about it in the global press, it will be a critical story, but there’s still a way that it pales compared to some of the things that are being done in much more nakedly repressive settings. I think that’s a clever strategy. There were also… Another thing that certainly was done in Hong Kong during the repression there, not wanting to have the horrific press coverage that Tiananmen got, there was a strong effort to have it not be soldiers that were used against the protesters, but only police, and have the police not shoot to kill, but shoot to shoot beanbag shot, rubber bullets, things that would cause great pain and inflict a degree of terror, but would not leave bodies on the street in the kind of way that a massacre that would
[00:43:31] Jeff Schechtman: mobilize global opinion in a different way. As there has been an extension of authoritarianism around the globe, and we see that daily, has that given the Chinese leadership more of a license to
[00:43:44] Jeffrey Wasserstrom: do what they’ve been doing? Certainly. I think it’s a gift to the Chinese Communist Party in its efforts to present itself as to undermine the criticisms of it on human rights grounds. It’s always benefited in some extent by certain kinds of comparisons. There was a way in which I’ve often thought that North Korea is a difficult ally for the Chinese Communist Party to have, because it’s just difficult in many ways, but it’s also convenient for it to have, because it makes the Chinese Communist Party’s form of repression look less rigid, because it is less rigid in many ways than North Korea. But I think the Chinese Communist Party has benefited by the high level of global distraction, the high level of horrific things to point to in many different parts of the world. You see that with things like the grotesque abuses of human rights in Xinjiang against the Uyghurs. In Tibet, these things can occasionally make it into the headlines, but they don’t have the kind of traction there that they would have in a time when there were not things like the rise of authoritarianism in places like the actions in Gaza by Israel. All of these things provide a way of diminishing the space or the bandwidth for international outrage about things that are going on in the People’s Republic of China.
[00:45:36] Jeff Schechtman: And given all of that, what then is the biggest threat that the Chinese leadership faces?
[00:45:41] Jeffrey Wasserstrom: So the biggest threat the Chinese leadership faces is simply to be able to keep this kind of complicated balancing act uses of strategic opportunities going over the very long term, because there are problems that just don’t go away. There’s a demographic issue of an aging population. There’s the slowing down of economic growth rates. And there are ways that there are some stories the Chinese Communist Party has prided itself on telling that over time just really aren’t believed anymore, like this idea that the Chinese Communist Party are moral exemplars. There’s a lot of knowledge of corruption within the party. There are all kinds of sources of discontent. There’s no way at the moment for people to organize against that, to put those grievances together. But the grievances don’t go away, and they’re combustible things. And I think we do have to keep in mind that there were signs of all kinds of problems with the Soviet system, but there was also a sense that it might just continue for a long period of time until you get this moment when you just start realizing how it just can’t. So I think the Chinese Communist Party is still haunted by that. I think they’re haunted by what happened to the Soviet Empire under Gorbachev. But I guess they’re haunted by they will point to things like they’ll be haunted by the idea of color revolutions, things like that. But I think they might also be haunted by the fact that it wasn’t so immediately apparent that everything was going to come apart at the seams. So they’ve got, as I say, this balancing act of many things that keeps allowing them to outlive the predictions of imminent demise. And at the moment, I think they’re in a fairly strong kind of position, but they find it impossible to be completely secure about that because they do know about the way other seemingly stable structures have imploded. And periodically, there also are these unexpected bursts of protests within the structure. It was on a small scale, but late in the zero COVID time in 2022, suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, there were these white paper protests of young people holding up blank sheets of paper and saying, we’re not going to put anything on it because anything we put on the paper you’ll say is illegitimate. But it was a way of kind of taunting the government and showing, even if it was at a small scale, that the kind of discontent is still there. And there are protests by workers, there are protests on environmental issues on small scales that do remind the regime that there is still a criticism of it, even when it’s underground.
[00:48:57] Jeff Schechtman: Jeffrey Wasserstrom, his book is The Milk Tea Alliance, Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy in Beijing. Jeffrey, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the Who,
[00:49:07] Jeffrey Wasserstrom: What, Why podcast. Thanks. This has been a great conversation. Thanks for your very astute
[00:49:12] Jeff Schechtman: questions. Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate
