YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeffrey Wasserstrom

lines on the record: 203
first: 2025-04-24
most recent: 2025-04-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Walking and talking, and there's no translator in the image. And so you're like, how are they talking? What language are they using? How is this? Or is it just a kind of, I mean, there are, of course, there are exchanges with top leaders and, you know, Trump will say they're friends or these kinds of things, or there's a language of Xi Jinping can talk about somebody or some country being a friend, but we don't have a sense of these kinds of what makes them tick as a person. So maybe you should ask him about Ernest Hemingway and see if he really gets excited about him. Because in the kind of generic things, he talks about all these, you can see him sort of ticking things off about, oh, yes, I'm glad to be in England, a country of Shakespeare and this. And he goes off these set things. But Hemingway, there's some sense that he had some special feeling, which fits in with some of the macho.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because he was meeting with us. He must not be heading anywhere up. And then after Tiananmen, he becomes. The top leader in China. But he had a kind of you could pick things out from being in a he liked to kind of show off his kind of cosmopolitanism. Xi Jinping talks, gives these speeches about all the foreign authors he likes and has read, but it's all very kind of scripted, at least in his own head too. It's very carefully done to present a certain image of himself. And we really don't get many senses of what he's like in unguarded moments or has them. And sometimes we get the illusion of them. Like there was an image of him and Obama in their shirt sleeves. And the photo would show them.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Famously was interviewed by Barbara Walters and asked about Tiananmen, and he tried to make out that it wasn't a big deal. You know, the variety of things. But he had relatively spontaneous conversations. I was going to say, he's the only Chinese leader I've met. But I met him before he was a major, major leader. He was the party secretary or mayor of Shanghai. It matters because the party secretary is the more important role. But anyway, he just met with a group of foreign scholars who were going over to Shanghai in 88 for a conference on Shanghai history. And just to show you the limits of anybody who thinks they can predict what's going on in Chinese politics. Predictability is just very hard in general in the world. But I think the consensus among us, and these were some of the most knowledgeable foreign scholars on China, was this was somebody who really had probably topped out.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you do, I would be very pleased because I could watch that interview and get some insights about she, which have been very hard to get. I mean, it's been their really difficult. They've been very few. Very few discussions, he doesn't give press conferences, there's a variety of things, and this is different from some of his predecessors. Jiang Z”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then with this crackdown that's come on Hong Kong and there are exiles from Hong Kong who have bounties on their heads. And so now I feel that it's not necessarily that anything would happen to me if I went to Hong Kong, but I feel I would be very closely watched. And so I wouldn't want to meet with some of my friends there who aren't this high profile. So I don't want to go to a place where Would feel that I was toxic in some way.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who had brought you to a university in trouble by saying something that would get them in trouble? I think it was often that you were more vulnerable if you were within China or you were connected China in different ways. For me, it's been confusing these last few years. I wrote one piece about this, about I'm not going to any part of the PRC for the time being. But I always thought that Hong Kong was a place that I'd be free to go, even if things got difficult. I didn't get a visa for the mainland. You didn't need a visa for Hong Kong. But Hong Kong The mainland, I had kept a kind of distance from the dissidents that I was writing about. With Hong Kong, I felt that these rules kind of didn't apply. And I was more connected to them, more friends with some of them.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who were clearly it was a kind of tit for tat partly because of Tech Maven's relative being held in Canada. So it was kind of there. It was also not picking a fight with Americans. But there were certain kinds of things that you could map out what was the riskiest thing to do. And so I went in the 2010s having ridden forcefully about Tiananmen. And I didn't feel dangerous. I mean, I felt there was an awareness in some cases of what if I was giving a public talk, there was awareness of what it was. There was sometimes you didn't want to get your host.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amplify their voices or translate their work would promote them, that then it wasn't about necessarily danger if you got in China, but you were more likely to be denied a visa if you were the kind of person who was doing that. So I wrote critical op-eds about the Chinese Communist Party. I published them in some high-profile places. I've written a lot about Tiana Mun. wrote about human rights issues, all that. And I kept getting visas to go to China. I testified to a congressional executive joint committee on China about the Tiananmen protests on the 25th anniversary of it. And some people said, oh, that's the kind of thing that would lead to you not getting a visa. I got a visa right after that. Now I think it might be different. Now some of these expectations have been changed. There have been people who've been very surprisingly gotten in trouble, these two Canadians.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“China, who are amplifying the voices of people within China or exiles from China who the government would like to silence. So the Dalai Lama, you had scholars who worked on Tibet and had connections to the Dalai Lama where early people to have trouble going to the PRC. Then scholars who worked on Xinjiang and were connected to Uyghurs. But there also were people who were sort of personally connected to dissidents or exiles who would”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are all kinds of different things about safety or not. I think until recently, at least the people who were most vulnerable were people of Chinese descent, people originally from China who had gone abroad and coming back, or even people who were Chinese Americans who went there. There was higher sort of expectation that they should be on board. So you had early cases. My friend Melissa Chan was an early person kicked out when she was working for Al Jazeera and reporting on Xinjiang. So that's one kind of person who was vulnerable because of this expectation that they should be somehow more loyal. Another kind of person who was vulnerable, or this case, more likely to be blocked from China. The Communist Party is particularly concerned about people from outside of China.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's important to realize there are elements of that story that are very true. And the answer they had is that under my watch, that's not going to happen. And the reason why my party deserves to rule is because it can reassert China's place in the world. And both the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party. Predicated themselves on this kind of nationalistic story of being in a position to prevent that from happening again.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, two not strong enough about, you know, really keeping control. And, you know, for Putin, it would be that it led to the Soviet Union, to the loss of an empire. But for Xi Jinping, there is a bit of being haunted by what happened to the Soviet Union. And I'm not going to be the leader who sees the diminishment of this. Landmass that was in a sense rebuilt over time for Mao and then Deng Xiaoping. You know, you have the story, a very powerful story about the Chinese past that the Chinese Communist Party makes a lot out of Shang Kai-shek, the Nationalist Party, was Mao's great rival, also made a lot out of, and it has a partial basis, in fact, was that from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. China, which had been the strong force in the world, got bullied.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I imagine if he and Putin ever have a kind of heart-to-heart conversation, one thing they'd find to agree on is this sort of distaste for Gorbachev, this feeling that Gorbachev was, that was the wrong way to do things.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seem to care about orderliness. He does seem to care about certain things he wants to present himself as a kind of scholarly figure in touch with China's deep past. We know he's a strong nationalist and a kind of cultural nationalist as well as Political nationalist, but beyond that, we don't have that much of a sense of what makes him tick. We get little hints. There was a secret speech where he talked about that leaked out that he talked about how the Soviet Union had collapsed because people didn't, the leadership didn't pay enough attention to ideology. And he also said that none of the more manly enough to keep control. So he”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Used to have more of a sense of these kind of ideological factions, but also partly about different views of how much tinkering there should be with the economy and things like that. And they were also basic partly based on personalities and personal ties. But we did have a sense you could sort of map out these kinds of rival power bases and things. And we just have much less of a sense of that under Xi Jinping. It's very hard to know other than the sort of small group around him, how it works. We don't have a major defector who says, yeah, this is how this is how Xi Jinping. We have Xi Jinping's self-presentation and a lot of things that are then said about him. There were some false expectations about him that some people thought, oh, he's going to be a reformer because his father was a liberalizing figure. And that doesn't work that way.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“James Palmer, who worked in Beijing as a journalist and now is an editor of foreign policy, wrote an important piece a few years ago about just we should really be straight about what a black box the Chinese elite elite politics are and really not try to pretend we know more than we do.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Chinese Communist Party felt, I guess, more it's still insecure, but it felt cockier in some ways. And you had like, okay, maybe we can start asserting more control over things. So I think that's been stronger under Xi Jinping's time and power. And she was already the designated successor by 2008. He was in charge of security for the Olympics. And the Olympics was supposed to be a moment possibly of more opening up because when Seoul hosted the Olympics, South Korea became a less tightly controlled right wing dictatorship and moved toward democracy. And some people were hoping the Olympics might move China that way. And it went quite the opposite.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of mood or group within the party. Some of these trends, I think, began before he took power in late 2012. I think really my own feeling going to China fairly often from the mid-1990s till about 2018 was that until 2008, the year of the Olympics, each trip it would feel like, oh, there's just more space, there's more breathing room for, you know, it's not becoming a liberal democracy, but I would notice things that felt like I'm surprised that that happens, that there just felt people felt less worried about what they were saying and what they were doing. That kind of trend line up till about 2008. But from the Olympics and then the financial crisis after that”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Uncomfortable with difference, I guess. And he's not alone in Strongman this way, of sort of wanting to impose a kind of singular vision of what Chinese identity means, what loyalty to the status quo means. And so there's been a kind of tightening of controls over all the borders. And even things, one thing she reported on was Mongolia, inner Mongolia. It's been seen as an unproblematic kind of frontier area. And who cares if there was some revival of Mongolian language? But under she, there's been a less patience with those kinds of differences. There's been more of a resurgence of patriarchy, all kinds of things have happened under him. How much is it just him, or how much is it also?”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What she talks about, the changes in China as she was covering it from the mid 2010s on was, and I think this really is Xi Jinping's one of his imprimatures on the country, is there's a narrowing of spaces available for variations of ways of being Chinese within the country. And this goes against the grain of a pattern in the sort of post-Tiana period of allowing more space for sort of civil society, but also allowing sort of Way Muslims felt that they didn't have to choose between being, you know, their Muslim identity and their Chinese identity, that there's more and more of a kind of, we see this in Xi Jinping becoming impatient with Hong Kong, where there was a way of which, okay, this is a city that's part of the PRC, but it really operates very differently. It seems to be”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a really great question. I was actually just writing a review of two books. One is called The Xi Jinping Effect, which was just a bunch of scholars, an academic volume sort of looking at take this topic and that topic, how much is Xi Jinping as a person really affected it. And they come up with all kinds of answers. But there's a book I really like, Emily Fang of NPR has a new book out called Let Only Red Flowers Bloom.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now there's a new kind of suspicion about the degree of any kind of private choices. I mean, there was an idea that the post-Tiana Men generation was promised to have a little bit more space away from the prying eyes of the state. And now globally we worry about the prying eyes of whether it's the state or whether it's tech companies. It's a different moment. What does it mean to say you have more choices?”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, one of the things that's happening now is the Chinese Communist Party, the economy isn't booming the way it was before, the sort of sense of clearly we're living better materially than the generation before. It's not as easy an argument to make when you have slower growth rates and things like that. But the Communist Party makes different kinds of arguments now about the rest of the world is in chaos and we're stable. But the thing that I hadn't that I now am going to think about differently is the argument was we'll give you more choices and you'll have more sort of more of a private life, more of this. But now in the period we are globally,”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In their daily life. We'll give them better stuff, we'll give them more choices at the store, we'll give them more choices about what to read to, because we'll give them more choices in consumer goods and intellectuals, the consumer goods they want are to watch the movies and read the books that other people like them around the world are reading. So we'll give them more choices. We won't open the floodgates completely, but we'll give them more choices, but not give them more choices at the ballot box or in politics. And this was the new kind of new social compact. Allow us to keep ruling and we'll make sure that you're living better than the last generation in terms of choices and in terms of material goods.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They knew that one reason why people, and this is like the simple way of one way I think you have to understand why communism fell in Eastern Europe was partly about ideals and thirst for freedom and that, but also people knew that people, East Germans knew that West Germans were having more fun and getting better stuff. And when some East Berliners got over the wall, one of the first places they went to was this department store to see if the images of better food and more choices were available there. And it was true. And I think this is a human, as human as the desire for more freedom. So one of the things that the Chinese Communist Party, they never articulated this way, but how can we try to get to a stage where we don't have things like Tiananmen again? Well, what if we tried to make a deal with people? We'll give them more choices.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think the question of whether we give up too much and who can abuse what we do give up is something that is being asked in the United States now about big tech companies as well. It's asked about governments, but it's also asked about big tech and what you have as a trade-off. But I hadn't thought about it till this conversation, which I can tell is why people find it stimulating to have these extended conversations Because you have set lines, but then you kind of, the conversation goes and you think in a different way. So what I used to always say, About China after 1989 was the Chinese Communist Party wanted to stay in power. They realized that the Soviet Union Soviet bloc was falling apart.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Accused of being radicalized and being potential terrorists. And the cues could be something like Somebody giving up smoking or not drinking alcohol because that was seen as something that sometimes went along with becoming more devoted to Islam and more devoted to something, a particular version of it. So he talked about how a group of the poets, when they would get a writers, would they get together, they would, whether or not any of them drank, they would make sure there was a bottle of alcohol on their table. Because it was simply a way of trying to stay ahead of this system of looking for these kind of clues. So you really have this dark side of Xinjiang is this example and Tibet also with incredible tight control. And there's more of that kind of push on personal life in other parts of China as well.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's not welcomed in Singapore, let's just say. But he talked about how when he wanted to try to, he went to Japan a lot in the 1980s at a time when Japan was a place where you sort of got a sense of what the future might hold. So the dark side of this, the surveillance state at its worst, which we see in Xinjiang in places. And there, again, it may seem like I'm just obsessed with science fiction. And there it really is minority report. It's this kind of like you do certain kinds of behaviors and we're seeing this other places too. We're seeing versions of it in the US as well where it's like, oh, we can tell from a pattern that you're the kind of person who might do X. And so in Xinjiang, they were when they were starting to round people up, there's this great book by Uyghur poet. He talks about how people were just trying to disappear off the streets and they were being a”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before you go into an underground parking lot now in the US and you find out whether there are any empty spaces on a floor, that was something that was years before in Singapore. And you used money less often there because you had a kind of transponder that would automatically pay for your parking and things. And it was something that can be very seductive. So the other line besides best and worse internet I always like is William Gibson, who wrote one of the other important dystopian novels of the present neuromancer. He wrote a rare nant for him non-fiction piece about Singapore where he referred to it as Disneyland with the death penalty. And, you know, there are times when...”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your pleasures and things. It was really advanced. A lot of things that then come out of the place are tried out there and in massive numbers. And I remember after I around the time that I had read that, I was in Shanghai and somebody was explaining it to me. They were talking about like going out to eat. Like I said, oh, we've got such and such. And I said, oh, that's like Yelp. I said, well, yeah. But Yelp just tells you the overall rating for a restaurant over time. We've got one that can tell you who's which part of the restaurant you want to sit in because there's a waiter that's in a really bad mood and people have posted enough information to do this. Or what the best dish there is in the last week. Forget about these sort of slow things. And you had a lot of things, you know, that were like, okay, you're smart city and controlled. You can learn things about ease of movement. And Singapore had some of these things tested too.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As well as the worst internet experience in the world. You know, you think about it with the worst is easy. You know, the great firewall, you try to search for what happened. You search for the tank man, you won't get it. You search for information about Dalai Lama and you get all these lies about him, search for things about Xinjiang. And it seem like it's a place where people are happy rather than massive extra-legal detention camps and where your life can be ruined by things you have no control over. But she said, like on other ways, when it comes to like consumer playing to your”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can sometimes make you feel like you're in this futureistic setting in terms of a lot of things that eventually came to other parts of the world would be tried out there. And I think the seductiveness is that some of these things are really, they both add to convenience at the same time they strip away. They're collecting information about you which can be also something that can make your life easier at the same time it's stripping you away of i mean we talk about the siling of information and targeting of ads and targeting of news and um so two things come to mind to to mention one is um christina larson uh a very bright journalist uh friend of mine who's now working on other things but was working in china and she wrote about this in mit technology review she said you need to think about china as having the best”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fear of friction, but is a powerful tool for shaping the The information Flooding is the brave. World. Yeah, it is. And I think it's a whole kind of The world has short attention spans and social media and how this all works. And Chinese Communist Party leaders, I've brought up Singapore and Deng Xiaoping and some other leaders were like looking at that and they're looking at, you know, there are all kinds of things that It both going to Singapore.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the flood I can already tell there's a lot of brill This is the most traditional form involving Threats and punishments for Roberts finds that fear based censorship is used selectively. Targeting high profile individuals such as journalists or activists. Average Is relatively low Fear alone is On And the flood”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They all Ways And reading about World War II Across all of history and all of culture. To sort of question the mainstream narrat”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is kind of, I mean, some of them are people who just got curious by something. And it is a porous system, even, you know, it's more porous than a North Korea, things like that. So there are, even if there's that fear, friction, and flooding, which Roberts talks about that ends up keeping lots of people on the same page as the government, there's still people who take the time to go over the firewall or get intrigued or they see an image sent by a friend of theirs on social media, you know, will share them something on WeChat, that it doesn't get picked up by the sensors, but they look at it carefully and they say, oh, well, wait a minute, that contradicts what the government sufficiently. Line is. So there is still ways in which that creativity and freedom of thinking persist.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I guess maybe this is a good time to mention something that I do think about, and sometimes people will think because of censorship and that there's an idea of sort of brainwashing within China population control. And I periodically will get students from the mainland. And I have a lot of students from the mainland in my classes. I teach Chinese history. And I feel like, okay, now I'm contradicting the version of the path that's been drumbeat into them. But I'll still get students who are incredible free thinkers, who have come through that system and it just doesn't hold or there are limits to it.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Phenomenon of bookstores. There's also a few bookstores called the Nowhere Bookstores that opened in Chiang Mai and Taipei and The Hague. And I heard when maybe it's going to open in or is open in Japan. My son time collaborator, Amy Hawkins, who covers China for The Guardian, wrote a great piece late last year about this overseas bookstore phenomenon, sort of carrying on the conversations that people thought they might be able to have in China and then couldn't and imagine someday being able to hold in China but maybe can't.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My next book when it comes out in June, this book on the milk tea alliance, about struggles for change across East and Southeast Asia, including in places that are worried about the kind of rising influence of Beijing. And it seems just perfect to be holding it in the kind of place that can't exist in Shanghai. Places like that, they stop being able to exist on the mainland, then they could still exist in Hong Kong. But now in Hong Kong, one of the coolest bookstores has had to close up. It just didn't feel like it could continue operating and tightening control there. And it's reopened in upstate New York. So you have this.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kinds of ideas that then take them to the next level and talk about the applicability to the situation in China. Some of those bookstores have closed or have had to become kind of really shadows of what they were. And one of the best ones, not the one I wrote about in Nanjing, but a similar one, a Shanghai one, which was literally an underground bookstore. It was in a metro station. And it had really freewheeling discussions of liberal ideas in the early 2000s and early 2010s. But then it just got less and less space to operate under Xi Jinping when things started narrowing. And it then had to close in Shanghai. And it's just been reopened. in DC as JF Books. And it's become in this really interesting cultural hub. And I'm really delighted it's where I'm going to hold the launch.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best ideas circulating. So he might say, well, the teenage me would have really. Really loved this. So some of the coolest bookstores, the things that I just was amazed could exist in the early 2000s. So you can still read, you can still buy copies of 1984 and you can still get some of these other things. But that was a time when more and more of those things were being translated fresh. I'm not sure you get permission to translate some of those things now. There's more of a sense of caution. When some of those bookstores would also then hold events that would talk about”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I wrote about imagining a revivified Mao going, wandering this really cool nanjing bookstore in the early 2000s. And just being amazed at what you could read there and what books were for sale. And I thought about how he'd be like, what's going on? Is the Communist Party not in control? I mean, he talked about how art and politics needed to in some ways go together and you've got all these kind of things. He'd also be, he also would have been shocked by all these, there were all these books about like how to start your own cafe and bar and sort of celebrating entrepreneurship, how to get into Harvard. It's like, you know, all of these things just wouldn't compute from his time. Although I said it would actually maybe make him nostalgia for the time of his youth in the 1910s. He was a participant in the May 4th movement, which was a time of reading all over the world, looking for...”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gave a talk at the Foreign Correspondence Club. And then I went to hear a talk there because I was just curious about what the culture in this foreign correspondence club. And there was somebody talking about human rights abuses in different parts of Southeast Asia, saying things very directly and then said, and there are things going on in Thailand that we're not going to talk about. And there was this kind of, yeah, self-censorship can be a very powerful thing.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a way in which you can say at the international, the foreign correspondence clubs in different parts of Asia, you can have an event that's about the country won over that you can say basically anything you want. But when it gets to the things in the place where you are, it's touchy. I should give credit for that insight. Shivani Matani, who's written co-wrote a very good book on Hong Kong Among the Braves, She was talking about that, that in Singapore at the Foreign Correspondence Club, you could have an event on Hong Kong that could say all kinds of things that you couldn't say at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondence Club. But at the same time, when I saw her in Singapore, she said there was a Singapore refugee, a political refugee in Hong Kong, who was giving a talk at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondence Club, saying kinds of things that he couldn't say in Singapore. And in Thailand, I...”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think it's like one of these really good examples of how, you know, China is distinctive, but it's not unique. You have other settings where you have these no-go zones that you learn. And one example is in Singapore, there was this So, National University of Singapore has a world class history department. But no Singapore historian in it. Nobody who focuses on the history of Singapore. Because it's incredibly wide-ranging, analyze. But when you're actually talking about the family that's been most powerful in Singapore, then it gets to be touchy. In Thailand, which I've been working on recently, you have this Lais Majesty laws that make it very dangerous to say certain kinds of things about the king. And so in all of these settings, you have to figure out ways to work around. And there's a”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are more 1984, more Brave New World parts of the country, and there are also more Brave New World, more 1984 moments.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The parts in Brave New World revisited that refer to China are scalpeled out. And this, I think, shows the subtlety of the censorship system. You can buy these books and you can read about them, but the parts that really show you how to connect the dots that's taken out. And I do think that the Brave New World side of things, I think with China, I was feeling it was definitely moving more toward Brave New World except Tibet and Xinjiang being more the crude boot on the face 1984 style of control. But then during the COVID lockdowns, when people were being so intensely monitored and controlled, even places like Shanghai that it seemed much more the brave new world kind of style had their Orwellian moment. So you have it now, I think it's”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the 50s. And he kind of said, actually, it seems, and he mentions China there, he says that in Mao's China, they're kind of combining the two things of this. And I'm really fascinated by that because they published in China on the Chinese mainland. It was published in Taiwan and Hong Kong too. It's called a dystopian trilogy. And it's a box set where you have semiatens We who inspired both Orwell and Huxley to some extent. That's one book. And then there's Animal Farm in 1984 is the second book. And then the third volume is Huxley's Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited. And it was published in complex characters. You can buy it in Hong Kong. I compared it to the book you can buy on the mainland. And it's all the same except”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, and the dissection of language is just so amazing. No, I think you've got a point there. And I went back and reread. Brave new world, and it's fascinating, but it's very messy. I think there's a clarity to Orwell's 1984. There's a clarity to Margaret Atwood's handmaid's tale, similarly, the construction of the elements. And she was a big fan of both 1984 and Brave New World. So there's a way they go forward. But there was a kind of, it's not exactly a sequel, but Huxley did write something called Brave New World Revisited.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he just said, you know, it's a great book and everything, but I think the dictators of the future will find less arduous ways to keep control over the population. Basically saying more like what was in my book than in yours”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source