Speaker

Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Historian of modern China; Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, with courtesy affiliations in Law and Literary Journalism. His research began with student protest movements and has grown to cover Chinese social history and comparative history more broadly.

Wasserstrom first travelled to China in 1986 and witnessed early student protests in Shanghai that year — three years before the far larger 1989 Tiananmen Square movement, which anchors much of his later writing. His books include China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Maura Elizabeth Cunningham), Eight Juxtapositions: China Through Imperfect Analogies from Mark Twain to Manchukuo, and Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, on the 2019 Hong Kong protests; at the time of this episode he had a further book on the ‘Milk Tea Alliance’ — cross-border solidarity among pro-democracy movements across East and Southeast Asia — forthcoming. He also writes and edits for outlets including the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Core positions

  • Reads Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong as sharing a personality cult and an unwavering commitment to one-party rule, but as otherwise near-opposites: Mao prized disorder and mass mobilisation, Xi prizes order and control.
  • Argues the 1989 Tiananmen protests are widely misread in the West as a straightforward pro-democracy movement; he frames them as closer to Prague Spring — an effort to make the Party live up to its own reformist rhetoric, with corruption and nepotism, not democratic theory, the protesters’ first grievance.
  • Treats Hong Kong’s ‘one country, two systems’ arrangement as having been explicitly designed, from 1984, as a possible future template for Taiwan — and its erosion since 2019 as a live warning Taiwanese observers have drawn on directly.
  • Resists teleological readings of protest movements: apparently failed uprisings (Shanghai 1986, the Eastern Bloc risings of 1956, 1968, and 1981) routinely supply the skills and scripts later, successful movements draw on.

In the wiki