Jeffrey Wasserstrom on Modern China, the CCP, and Hong Kong

Historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom traces the long arc of modern Chinese politics for Lex Fridman — Xi Jinping’s selective inheritance from both Confucius and Mao, what the 1989 Tiananmen protesters actually wanted, how the Chinese Communist Party controls information, and why Hong Kong’s ‘one country, two systems’ arrangement was always a template — and a warning — for Taiwan.

Key ideas

1. Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong share a personality cult and a commitment to one-party rule, but almost nothing else. Every leader between them deliberately avoided Mao’s cult of personality; Xi has revived it. Where Mao prized disorder and mass mobilisation, Xi prizes order, stability, and control; where Mao denounced Confucianism as feudal, Xi rehabilitates Confucius alongside Mao as a compatible source of national greatness. See Xi Jinping.
2. The 1989 Tiananmen protests were a movement to make the Party live up to its own reform rhetoric, not to abolish one-party rule. Wasserstrom places 1989 closer to Prague Spring than to the same year’s collapse of Communism in the Soviet Bloc — the protesters’ first grievances were corruption and nepotism, sharpened by China’s meritocratic exam culture, not abstract democratic theory.
3. Chinese censorship works through fear, friction, and flooding — not blanket suppression. Drawing on political scientist Margaret Roberts, Wasserstrom describes overt punishment reserved for high-profile targets, friction that raises the cost of reaching unwanted information without blocking it outright, and flooding that drowns unwanted narratives in preferred ones — a system closer to Huxley’s Brave New World than to Orwell’s 1984, except where it isn’t (Xinjiang, Tibet, COVID lockdowns).
4. Hong Kong’s ‘one country, two systems’ was explicitly framed as a template for Taiwan — and its erosion is now read as a warning. The 1984 Sino-British deal promised Hong Kong a separate legal, economic, and press system until 2047; mainlandisation accelerated after 2008 and sharply after the 2019 protests, culminating in the 2020 National Security Law. Both Hong Kong and Taiwan activists have explicitly drawn the lesson from each other’s experience.
5. History has no direction — apparent failures routinely lay the groundwork for later success. Shanghai’s 1986 protests seeded 1989; Eastern Bloc risings crushed in 1956, 1968, and 1981 preceded 1989’s success; Wasserstrom’s own scholarship on Havel and on Hong Kong’s diaspora argues against reading any single setback as a verdict on a movement’s long-run prospects.

Content

Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong: cult, order, and Confucius

Wasserstrom opens on what connects and separates China’s two most dominant leaders. Both are the subject of sustained personality cults — Mao’s from 1949 to his death in 1976, and Xi’s as the first comparable revival since, evident in the way his collected speeches now fill Chinese bookstore windows. Every leader in between deliberately avoided this: a post-Mao norm held that a leader’s speeches should not be collected and published until they had left power. The similarity ends at cult of personality, though. Mao ‘revelled in disorder’ — his favourite work of popular fiction was the Monkey King legend, and Cultural Revolution-era mobilisation of youth on the streets was, for him, a tool of renewal. Xi is ‘very orderly’, uncomfortable with anything he cannot control, and has never sought to stir crowds the way Mao did.

The two also diverge on Confucianism. Mao dismissed it as a ‘feudal way of thought’ holding China back; Xi treats Confucius as one of his personal heroes, alongside Mao, on the theory that anything suggesting China’s historical greatness can be fused together regardless of the underlying contradictions. Confucianism is fundamentally backward-looking — arguing for a return to a purer past rather than for progress — which sits awkwardly against Marxism’s forward-moving theory of class struggle; Xi does not resolve the tension so much as decline to choose. What remains constant across every leader since 1949, Wasserstrom argues, is not method but commitment: all of them wanted, and want, China to remain under Communist Party rule.

Confucius, meritocracy, and the roots of Tiananmen anger

Confucianism prescribes stable hierarchical relationships — father to son, husband to wife, ruler to minister, even older brother to younger brother — in which neither side is equal, but each owes the other something: deference from the subordinate, care and benevolence from the superior. The tradition is explicitly conservative, holding that a golden age of clear, functioning hierarchy has been lost and must be recovered, not that history moves forward toward something better. One of Confucius’s chief early interpreters, Mencius, supplied an escape hatch: the Mandate of Heaven doctrine held that an emperor rules only so long as he governs justly, and that a morally failing ruler forfeits heaven’s backing — a built-in justification for rebellion, retrospectively confirmed by whether the rebellion succeeds.

This tradition also produced one of the world’s earliest civil-service examination systems, the ancestor of today’s Gaokao — the intensely competitive university-entrance exam that can determine a young Chinese person’s entire career trajectory. The exam tradition promised meritocracy but never delivered it cleanly: families with the resources to hire better tutors gained a real advantage, and some historical rebellions were led by failed examination candidates. Wasserstrom argues this matters directly for understanding 1989: although Western coverage framed the Tiananmen protests as a pro-democracy movement, the posters that first galvanised student anger were about corruption and nepotism — people getting ahead ‘via the back door’ despite the exam system’s meritocratic promise. Anger at unfairness, not democratic theory in the abstract, was the specific spark.

Tiananmen Square and Tank Man

The 1989 protests are, in Wasserstrom’s account, widely misread — both because they are often conflated with the same year’s collapse of Communism across the Soviet Bloc, and because the Western press framed them primarily as a pro-democracy movement. He argues 1989 more closely resembled Prague Spring (1968): an effort to push the Communist Party to fully deliver on its own stated liberalising, reforming direction, not to overthrow one-party rule. Several currents converged: frustration that economic reform had outpaced political reform, corruption and nepotism anger, the symbolically loaded death of reformist leader Hu Yaobang (whose funeral gave students a legitimate reason to gather), and the resonance of round-number anniversaries — the 70th of the 1919 May Fourth Movement, the 200th of the French Revolution. Wasserstrom, who had witnessed a smaller 1986 warm-up protest in Shanghai, notes that protests can seem to come from nowhere but rarely do: 1986 laid groundwork for 1989 by giving a generation of activists shared ‘skills, scripts, and repertoires’.

The protests grew because provincial students kept arriving in Beijing, making it hard for anyone already there to leave; they escalated to crisis when workers began forming an independent labour union, since Chinese leaders have long feared what happens when other social classes rally behind students they see as a potential intellectual vanguard. Troops moved in overnight on 3–4 June, and the massacre that followed is remembered globally through a single image: an unidentified man standing in front of a column of tanks on a Beijing boulevard the next day. Wasserstrom argues the image, not the shooting itself, became the deeper crisis for CCP legitimacy, because it showed the People’s Liberation Army behaving like an occupying force rather than the country’s protector. [?] Tank Man’s fate is unknown — Wasserstrom says he assumes the man was killed or simply disappeared, but stresses this is inference: there was never even a secret trial, unlike other dissidents. He reads the Party’s later handling of Hong Kong’s 2014 and 2019 protests — police rather than soldiers, tear gas and rubber bullets rather than live ammunition, and today’s tight control over Xinjiang detention-camp imagery — as a direct, learned response to the power of that single photograph.

Censorship: fear, friction, and flooding

Asked how censorship actually works in China today, Wasserstrom draws on political scientist Margaret Roberts’s three-part framework. Fear is the most visible mechanism — overt threats and punishment — but Roberts finds it applied selectively, mainly to high-profile figures like journalists and activists, rather than as a constant threat hanging over ordinary citizens. Friction works by raising the cost of reaching unwanted information without blocking it outright: a VPN can get around the Great Firewall, but slowly, and it needs constant updating, so friction alone deters many casual attempts. Flooding is the least visible and, in Wasserstrom’s view, the most powerful for a social-media age: rather than suppressing an unwanted narrative, the state fills the information space with preferred versions until the alternative is simply outcompeted.

What is censored is narrower than outsiders often assume. Material framed abstractly, or displaced onto other countries, circulates surprisingly freely — Hannah Arendt’s writing on totalitarianism is available in China, and 1984 has been sold in Chinese bookstores since 1985. What is tightly restricted is material specifically about Chinese leaders, live political events, or named dissidents and exiles. Wasserstrom extends this into a running comparison between Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World: contemporary China, he argues, oscillates between the two rather than settling on either — closer to Brave New World’s soft, consumer-driven control for most people and most of the time, but with unmistakable 1984-style coercion in Xinjiang, Tibet, and during COVID-era lockdowns. The post-Tiananmen social compact he describes traded expanded consumer and lifestyle choice for the continued absence of political choice — an arrangement now complicated, he suggests, by a newer and more global anxiety over surveillance by technology platforms as much as by states.

Xi Jinping’s power and the ‘black box’

Wasserstrom endorses journalist James Palmer’s warning that outside observers habitually overstate what is actually knowable about elite Chinese Communist Party politics under Xi — the older sense of mappable ideological or personal factions within the leadership has largely disappeared, and there has been no major defector to explain how decisions are really made. What can be inferred is narrower: strong cultural and political nationalism, a preference for order and predictability, discomfort with internal difference (Hong Kong’s distinctiveness, a modest revival of Mongolian-language education in Inner Mongolia, feminist movements), and — from a leaked internal speech — the view that the Soviet Union’s collapse partly reflected a leadership that was not forceful enough to hold the country together.

On the 2025 US–China trade war and the Trump relationship, Wasserstrom treats ‘toughness’ rhetoric from Washington as functionally useful to Xi’s own legitimating story: a dangerous world justifies strong, centralised CCP rule, and the ‘hundred years of humiliation’ narrative — the CCP’s and, earlier, the Nationalist Party’s shared framing of the 1840s–1940s period of foreign encroachment — gives that toughness a ready audience. He cautions against reading US–China relations as a purely bilateral dispute, however: historically, the trajectory has repeatedly been reshaped by developments neither capital controlled — the Sino-Soviet split, not any US decision, made Nixon’s 1972 visit possible; the September 2001 attacks reset a US–China dynamic that many expected to dominate the following decade after the 1999 Belgrade embassy bombing and the 2001 spy-plane incident. [?] Whether Xi’s calculus on Taiwan leans toward confidence-driven assertion or weakness-driven distraction is explicitly Wasserstrom’s own speculative judgement, offered as an open question rather than a settled reading.

Hong Kong and Taiwan: one country, two systems

Hong Kong Island became a British colony after the first Opium War (1840s); Kowloon followed the second (1860); the much larger New Territories came under British control in 1898, but as a 99-year lease, not a colony — a lease due to expire in 1997. Because the rest of Hong Kong depended on the New Territories for energy, water, and food, the 1997 handover could not simply split the territory, and the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration instead transferred sovereignty over the whole territory to the People’s Republic of China (Wasserstrom is careful to say ‘transferred’, not ‘returned’ — Hong Kong had never been PRC territory). The compromise, ‘one country, two systems’, promised Hong Kong its own legal, economic, and press system for 50 years, to 2047, while folding it diplomatically into the PRC. Beijing explicitly presented the arrangement, at the time, as a possible future model for Taiwan.

Early Beijing restraint had its own self-interested logic: China wanted WTO accession and the 2008 Olympics, and depended on Hong Kong’s economy and — for a period — its universities, which were the only ones in the PRC considered genuinely world-class. Mainlandisation accelerated after 2008 and sharply after 2019, when protests against a proposed extradition law — which would have let Beijing try Hong Kong residents on the mainland’s very different, far higher-conviction-rate court system — reached an unusual scale: one to two million participants out of a population of 7.5 million. Wasserstrom frames the stakes as generational: someone 17 years old in 2019 was contemplating living most of their adult life inside an arrangement due to lapse by 2047, which explains why younger protesters proved less willing to wait than an older generation asking why the movement could not simply be patient. The 2020 National Security Law followed, effectively ending the distinct legal culture the 1984 deal had promised.

Hong Kong and Taiwan have modelled each other explicitly, in both directions. A 2014 Hong Kong protest banner read ‘Hong Kong today, Taiwan tomorrow’ — flipping Beijing’s own ‘watch Hong Kong as a model’ framing into a warning. Tibet supplies an earlier, harsher precedent for the same underlying pattern: a promised degree of separate governance in the 1950s narrowed until the arrangement collapsed by 1959, sending the Dalai Lama into exile. Wasserstrom does not think Xi Jinping has a fixed timetable for Taiwan, but suggests military action would be more likely to come from a position of domestic weakness or distraction than from confident strength — making the international perception of Xi as an orderly, stabilising figure, paradoxically, a mild brake on the likelihood of a rash move.

Mao Zedong’s rise and Xi’s selective inheritance

China’s imperial system ended in 1911; a fractured republic followed, in which a small Communist Party (Mao among its early members) and a larger Nationalist Party, founded around Sun Yat-sen, briefly allied against regional warlords before Sun’s death and Chiang Kai-shek’s subsequent 1927 purge of Communists. Where orthodox Marxism located revolutionary potential in the urban proletariat, Mao’s decisive theoretical departure was to make the peasantry China’s revolutionary vanguard — an adaptation that let the Communists rebuild strength in the countryside through Japan’s 1930s invasion and the ensuing civil war, which the Communists won in 1949 partly on a widespread perception that the Nationalists, in retreat to Taiwan, did not believe their own anti-corruption rhetoric.

On the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) — the collectivisation and rapid-industrialisation campaign that killed an estimated 30 to 45 million people — Wasserstrom points to fear-driven information distortion as a proximate mechanism: officials afraid that admitting failure to meet impossible targets would be read as personal political disloyalty instead passed unrealistic reports up the chain, starving the leadership of the information that might have forced a correction. The Party’s own 1980s verdict on Mao — ‘70% correct, 30% wrong’, a formula borrowed from Mao’s own assessment of Stalin — has given way under Xi to a ‘first 30 years, second 30 years’ framing that treats the whole period as cumulative achievement rather than periodised rupture. Xi’s inheritance from Mao is, in the end, selective: he claims the nation-strengthening legacy — invoking Mao’s 1953 ‘we will never yield’ speech on the Korean War standoff — while explicitly rejecting the Mao who prized chaos, mass mobilisation, and unpredictability, closing the loop on the episode’s opening Xi/Mao contrast.

History without a direction

Asked to weigh whether Hong Kong’s 2019 protests and the broader push for democratic space in the region were failures, Wasserstrom resists a simple verdict. His central historiographical claim is that apparently failed movements routinely supply the skills, scripts, and repertoires later, successful movements draw on: Shanghai’s small 1986 protests laid groundwork for 1989; Eastern Bloc risings crushed in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Poland (1981) preceded the successful upheavals of 1989. Social movements, in his reading, do not build in a predictable line, and an early setback does not reliably predict later failure — a point he illustrates with Václav Havel, whose political project would have looked like a dead end had he died in 1988. Wasserstrom’s closing hope for China is plural rather than singular: not convergence toward liberal democracy specifically, but a restoration of space for what fellow China specialist Geremie Barmé calls the ‘other China’ — a version of Chinese identity drawing on Daoism and cosmopolitanism alongside Confucianism and nationalism — which he sees surviving today in Hong Kong’s diaspora communities and in Taiwan’s example, even where the home movements fell short of their own stated goals.

See also

• Jeffrey Wasserstrom — speaker
• Lex Fridman — host
• Mao Zedong — extended with this episode’s account of his rise to power and the Great Leap Forward’s information-distortion mechanism
• Xi Jinping — new person page synthesising this episode’s account of his politics
• One Country, Two Systems — new concept page motivated by this episode’s Hong Kong and Taiwan material
• Totalitarianism — the comparative model this episode’s Great Leap Forward material extends
• Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State — a contrasting account of Xi-era succession instability
• Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other — parallel account of the CCP’s studied avoidance of Soviet-style liberalisation
• Keyu Jin on China's Economy, Industrial Policy, and State Capitalism — an economic-mechanism account of the same US–China trade tensions discussed here historically