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

“To your sense of pleasure. And one thing that people forget sometimes or don't know is that Aldously wrote Brave New World taught Eric Blair, who became George Orwell when he was a student at Eden. And they were sort of rivals. And in fact, in 1949, Orwell sent his former teacher a copy in 1984 and said, you know, look, I've written this. Basically, it's kind of almost a little edible. Like I've written this book that displaces yours. He didn't say that. He just said, I wanted to have this. But he had criticized Brave New World in reviews as not having imagined a world of capitalism run wild like before realizing the kind of totalitarian threats of the middle of the 20th century. But Huxley wrote Orwell a letter in October of 1949, same month the Communist Party took control in China. Not that he mentions China.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mixed elements. I think there are moments when it can seem more one than the other. And there can be parts of the same country that seem more one than the other. I think. If we just think about Control through distraction and”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They focused on the part of 1984 that's like the two minutes of hate, these rituals of denunciation of people. For some people in China, it seemed like it was about their past, not about their present. And then by the 90s, 1984 is a very bleak culture of scarcity, a place where people just aren't having fun. And people said, like, you could read, some people would read 1984 and say, look, this is the world we're living in. It's a big brother state. But others said, well, that has some similarities to us, but he wasn't talking about a country like ours. Look, we've got supermarkets, we've got McDonald's. I mean, this is not, you know, we've got fast trains. We got things, we're living so much better in some ways than our grandparents did. And this isn't like that bleak world he was imagining.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something through allegory, something through imagining a place that looks a lot like a Communist Party ruled state so that people are going to read it. There were things that were banned throughout up until like the very last period of Gorbachev's rule. Everything's banned in the Soviet Union that are available in Chinese bookstores. You can buy 1984 in a Chinese bookstore. You've been able to since 1985. You can buy, again, it's not about China. And actually, for some people within China in the mid-1980s,”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things that you would expect to be censored that aren't censored. You can read all sorts of things in China about totalitarian. You can read Hannah Rant's book on totalitarianism, which would be the kind of thing you just, you know, you're not supposed to be able to read that in a somewhat totalitarian state or a dictatorial state of anything. But it's not specifically about China. Censorship is most restrictive when it's things that are actually about China, things about leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. There's intense kind of censorship. And certain events in that way, but a sort of like,”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People will use a VPN to jump over the firewall. But it's work. The internet moves slower. You have to keep updating your VPN. So you just create friction so that, okay, some people will find this out. And then flooding. You just fill the airwaves and the media with versions of the stories that you want the people to believe. So all those kind of exist and in operation. And I think the fear is the easiest side to say of what's blocked. So I'm always interested in things that”
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 lot of censorship. My favorite book about one of my favorite books about Chinese censorship, Margaret Roberts, where she talks about there are three different ways that the government can control the stories. And she says there's fear, which is this kind of direct censorship thing, I feel like banning things. But there's also friction, which she says. She has three F's, fear, friction, and flooding. And she says they're all important. And I think this is true not just of China, but in other settings too. So what friction means is you just make it harder for people to get answers or get information that you don't want them to get. Even though you know that some people will get it, you just make it that the easiest way, the first answer you'll get through a search. So a lot of tech savvy or globally-minded tapped in Chinese will use”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Long enough to be filmed and to draw attention and the film to circulate. Again, another image of the power of images. And he's disappeared. And there hasn't been a show trial or even a secret trial. And again, we don't know if he's still alive, but these are cases where I think the Chinese Communist Party really doesn't want a competing story out there. They don't want somebody to be able to answer what he was thinking.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was one that you knew what the result would be, which there was for Lio Xiaobo and others. Not even a hidden trial, but simply disappeared. And there's been somebody who's like another figure like this who's disappeared a couple of years ago in Beijing. There was a lone man who put up a banner on a bridge, Sitong Bridge in Beijing. It was extraordinary. It had denunciations of the direction Xi Jinping was taking the country. It was denunciation of COVID policies, but also of dictatorial rule. And the banner somehow he managed to have it up and get it.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I assume he was killed. I assume he was just disappeared. It's interesting because very often figures are made an example of in one way or another. I mean, Liu Xiaobo was imprisoned and not allowed to get enough medical care so you can talk about him having died earlier than he should have. There's been relatively few for political crimes recently sentencing to death and things like that. It's much more just remove them, imprison them. But the Tank Man, there was never a trial. There was never even a trial that was a”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stations in 2019, and all these things are really brutalizing, but they don't make the kind of images that sear in the mind the way something like the Tiananmen tankman image or the image of a Vietnamese woman being burned by napalm, young woman that became another of the iconic images during Vietnam War, those images really can have an extraordinary power. And I think the Chinese Communist Party is now aware of that. There are no really gripping, there are very few photographs allowed of the Xinjiang extra-legal detention camps. Very little, there is an awareness of how much power a photograph of a certain type can have.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A peaceful protest until there were some incidents, as there almost always are, of violence by crowds. And then they would show those images over and over again. They also worked very hard when Hong Kong protests began in the 2010s to try very hard to avoid any use of soldiers to repress them. It was all the police, and they tried very hard and managed to success because the Western press was often saying, will this be another Tiananna men? Will there be a massacre? Will there be soldiers on the streets? The movements in Hong Kong were suppressed without the use of shooting to kill on the streets. They were shooting to wound. There was beanbags shot. There were rubber bullets. There was enormous amount of tear gas. There was even tear gas let fly inside somewhere.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then I think it might have been the thing that would have gotten them to leave the square would have been to say, we want this to be acknowledged as a patriotic, that our goals are patriotic. We're not here to take China back into the cultural revolution. We're here to express our love for the country if it goes in the right way. So will you admit that? And you mentioned about the power of the image. And I do think the Chinese Communist Party learned something, have taken to heart the power of the image after that because we saw this in, but when there were protests in Hong Kong, the government on the mainland really wanted to tell a story there of crowds out of control. And initially there were in 2014, and again initially in 2019, there were very orderly crowds. And it had trouble with that story. So they tried very hard to ban images.”
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 so interesting to just speculate, and we just don't know because he was never able to be interviewed afterwards. But I think your emphasis on patriotism is really important because one of the students' main demands was.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't deal with now, even though sometimes they could tell a story about 1989 and they do tell a version of this, and some people believe this, I think, is that in 1989, China went one route of not having the Communist Party dramatically changed or relinquish control. And the Soviet Union and the former Soviet states went another. And you could say, well, look, and after 1989, the Chinese economy boomed. Life got better for people in China. Life got really terrible for a lot of people in the former Soviet blocs. Maybe we actually, maybe this was the right way to go. And you can make that kind of argument. But if you show the tanks and the man in front of the tanks, you just have a different kind of image of heroism.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it's probably not a student, you know, it's often described as a student, but he probably was a worker, and it is a powerful, powerful image of bravery. And I brought up the 1968 parallel for Eastern and Central Europe. There was actually a very powerful photograph of a man bearing his chest in front of a tank. Bratislava during what we think of as Prague Spring. That was a famous image of bravery against tanks. And in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, then still Czechoslovakia, the tanks that rolled in were Soviet tanks sent down there. And so not that people would know, but that was an image, what was so powerful in that was saying we're not going to put up with this invasion. Again, I think you have the People's Liberation Army looking like an invading force. And that's what the Chinese Communist Party, in a sense, 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
“The claim had to be made to try to suppress discussion of the event, particularly to repress that visual imagery that was that image of the man in front of a line of tanks, whatever the tanks did do him or not, the main takeaway from it would be this idea that there were lines of tanks in a city that was that the image was of the government as having lost the mandate to rule and they really didn't want to have that image out there in the world.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they try for the first months after it to try to get this narrative to stick. They talk about tanne a lot. They talk about these things. They show images of the tank man. The problem with it is that lots and lots of people around Beijing had seen what happened and knew that in fact there had first been the firing on unarmed civilians with automatic weapons. And then there had been many, many people. Some students, but a lot of ordinary Beijing residents and workers who were just mowing down. So lots of people knew somebody who had been killed. So that story just didn't work. And then I think”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at this. He wasn't mowed down. And they tried this whole story with Yiannan initially of saying, look, the students were out of control. Everybody should remember what happened during the Culture Revolution. And the army showed restraint. And there were a small number of soldiers who were actually burned alive in their tanks. Once the massacre began, people got outraged and they attacked the soldiers. But by selective use of footage, the Communist Party could say, look, actually look at this. The heroes, the martyrs were these soldiers.”
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 an amazing symbol. You know, he's on this boulevard near the square with this long line of tanks. And it's unquestionably this act of incredible bravery. And there's some interesting things about it, some that are forgotten. One is that in the end, he climbs up on the tank. The tank swerves. It doesn't run him over. And the Chinese Communist Party initially showed video of this and said, look, the Western press is talking about how vicious we were, but look at the restraint.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tanks roll in, and I think also you have that famous image of the man standing in front of the tank that's a banned image within China. And I really think the reason why it's so considered so toxic by the regime is because it just shows the People's Liberation Army looking like an invading force, not like a stabilizing force.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Potential intellectual leaders of the country and admiration for scholars is part of this that people turn out when students protest, something very different from the American case where there's a kind of often suspicion of student activists being necessarily on the same side as everybody else. But in China there had been from the history of the 20th century a sense of students as potentially a vanguard. So once there are labor activists joining the movement, then troops are called in and there's a massacre near Tiananmen Square on the middle of the night of June 3rd and early June 4th. And the army just moves in and begins behaving very much like an army of occupation, which is something the People's Liberation Army is supposed to be the one that saves. China from foreign aggression, and they're acting like an invading force.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To Beijing to join this movement. They don't want to end the movement when they've just arrived. So it's actually one thing that keeps it going is new participants are coming from the provinces. And even if some moderates want to leave the square, people want to stay, and then workers start joining in the movement as well and form independent labor union. And that really the Chinese Communist Party, to a certain extent, they might put up with student protesters. But they know from past experience that sometimes student protests lead to members of other social classes joining them because they look up to students as sort of.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moving toward socialism with a human face, more like trying to get the parties to empower to reform rather than necessarily doing away with them. So there was a kind of disjuncture happened at the same time as moves to end communism. But of course, I would say there was a possibility when all the protesters were on the square. It seemed that for a time that this might be seen as an acceptable kind of movement to just have a kind of course correction. But then there's also an internal struggle within the Communist Party leadership. And clearly the people who are more political conservatives, even if they believe in economic reform, are clearly getting the upper hand. And this is not going to be tolerated. And the students stay on the square when signals are given to try to get them out. Students from the country are pouring into”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's also a kind of counterculture elements that are like there are rock concerts on the square, the most popular rock musician Sui Jian comes to the square and is celebrated when he's there. There's a sense of kind of a variety of things rolled into one. And I brought up how it sort of gets conflated with the movements to overthrow communism in the Eastern Bloc. It was actually in many ways, I think, more like something that happened in the Eastern Bloc 20 years earlier. It was more like Prague Spring and other 1968 protests in the communist bloc, which was about”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you know, we're just trying to show our patriotism. We believe that there's too much corruption and nepotism. There's not enough support for the more liberalizing wing within the party. And so they keep up the protests. And there's a lot of frustration at this point. There are also economic frustrations at this point. The economy is improving because of the reforms, but it seems that people with good government connections are getting rich too easily. And so there's sort of a sense of unfairness. The students are also really frustrated by the kind of macro managing of their private lives on campuses. So the protest at Tiananmen Square and in Plazas all around the country and other cities as well become this mix of things. It's an anti-corruption movement. It's a call for more democracy movement. It's a call for more freedom of speech movement.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very high up. He had been sort of Deng Xiaoping's potential successor. And he dies unexpectedly. And there has to be a funeral for him because he dies still as an official. And the students take advantage of the opening of their having to be commemorations of his death. And they put up posters that basically say the wrong people are dying. Hu Ya Bang was younger than some of the more conservative members. They said. Some people are dying too young. Some people don't seem like they're ever going to die. And they, so they begin these sorts of protests. This is in April of 89. And the government tries to sort of get the protest to stop quickly. And they use the sort of same technique of they issue an editorial in people's daily that says this is creating chaos, which is a code term for take us back to the cultural evolution. And this time the students.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Student activists then. It was an anti imperialist movement, but it was also a movement against bad government. And so the students thought, you know, the anniversary of that movement was always marked, commemorated in China, and people took the history seriously. People were reminded of what students did in the past. And so there was sort of there were a lot of reasons why people were itching to do something. And then a leader Puyobang, who was associated with the more kind of reformist, more liberalizing group within the Chinese Communist Party. He had been stripped of a very high office, demoted after taking partly taking a fairly light stance toward the 86-87 protest. And so he was still a member of the government, but he was not as high up in power.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they thought, you know, we're not like the Red Guards. We don't want to make chaos. We also are not fervent loyalists of anybody in power. The Red Guards had been passionate about Mao. The analogy partly sort of scared them. It also, it meant that the government was really serious about dealing with them. So then in 1989, the protest restart. And there are a variety of reasons why they can restart. The space for them, students are thinking about doing something. In 1989, it's a very resonant year, 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. People are thinking about that. But more importantly, it's the 70th anniversary of the biggest student movement in Chinese history, the May 4th movement of 1919. And the May 4th movement had helped lay the groundwork for the Chinese Communist Party, some member leading founders of it.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moving toward was letting them be more part of the world. And for them, that meant being more in step with pop culture around the world. And at the concert, some students got up to dance because that's what they knew you were supposed to do at a rock concert. And the security guards made them sit down. And for the students in Shanghai, this sort of symbolized what was a feint toward openness that really didn't have follow-through. We're going to give you rock concerts, but not let you dance. And so the protests went on for a little while in 86 and posters went up. The officials at university said, no, this is out of hand. We had chaos on the streets during the Culture Revolution. We can't go back to that. And nobody wanted to go back to that. So there were posters I saw that said, this is New Red Guardism. And the students didn't want to be associated with that. So it wound down pretty quickly.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Students protested, and this was the first time that students had been really on the streets in significant numbers since the Culture Revolution, or at least since 76. And the students were inspired by calls for democracy and discussions of democracy by this physicist Fang Lijer, who was a kind of often a Chinese Sakharov. He was a liberalizing intellectual. But one of the things that students in Shanghai were some of the most intense protests of that year took place were frustrated about was a rock concert of all things that Jan and Dean, the American surf band, which was kind of like the Beach Boys, only not as big. And they were touring China. It was the first time in Shanghai that there'd been a rock concert. And the students were really excited about this because this fit in with what they thought the Communist Party was.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Student generation of 89. And I was there in 86 when there were some sort of warm up protests. There was a kind of frustration with what they felt was a half-assed version of what they were talking about. The government was saying, the party was saying, we believe in reforming and opening up. We need to liberalize. We need to give people more control of their fate. And the students felt that This was being done more effectively in the economic realm than in the political realm and that there were a lot of sort of partial gestures that suggested the party needed to be pressed to really, really move in that direction. And it'll seem like a very trivial thing, but I found it fascinating in 86 when I was there in Shanghai in late 86.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in 1989, this massive movement took place, the story of its largely suppressed within China and largely misunderstood in other places, in part because it happened around the same time that communism was unraveling and ending in the former Soviet bloc. So I think it's often conflated with what was going on there. And so I think one of the key things to know about the protests in 1989 was that they were an effort to get the Communist Party in China to do a better job of living up to its own stated ideals and to try to support the trend within the party toward a kind of liberalizing and opening up form that had taken shape after Mao's death and in a sense the”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which really seems to subvert this whole idea of kind of meritocracy. And the 1989 protests at Tiana Mun, even though kind of in the Western press, particularly was discussed as a movement for democracy. But a lot of the first posters that went up that got students really angry were criticisms of corruption within the Communist Party and nepotism in the sense that people, despite all the talk, I mean, despite the fact that most people seem to be having to study really hard to pass these exams to get good positions in universities, that some of them were being handed out via the kind of backdoor. And that led to a kind of outrage. That's true in many places, but I think it gives a special anger against nepotism because of that, the way in which so much emphasis is put on kind of the standard exam way of Of getting ahead.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been a lot of emphasis on education and sort of working really hard and excelling at some subjects and having, you know, there isn't the civil service exam, but there is the Gao Cao, an exam that really can determine where you get what kind of institution you get into. You know, getting back to this idea of meritocracy, which is strong in a lot of tradition, it also kind of, what it opens you up to is when there is a sense of unfairness in who's getting ahead and how the spoils are being divided, this leads to a kind of outrage. And some of the biggest protests in China have been about this sense of nepotism.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If he doesn't act like a true emperor, if he's not morally upstanding, then heaven will remove its mandate to him. And then there's no obligation to show deference for a ruler who's not behaving like a true ruler. And there it sort of justifies rebellion. And the idea is that if rebellion isn't justified, then heaven will stop the ruler from being killed. Heaven has removed his support, then the rebellion will succeed and then a new ruler will be justified in taking power. So it's an interesting sense that the universe in this Confucian view has a kind of moral dimension to it, but it also, it's when things actually happen that you see where the side of morality is.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You had this issue. And then it became something the system was out of whack and it needed a new leader. And also there was something built in that was not so much Confucius himself, but one of his main interpreters, early interpreters mentius, had this idea which can be seen as a crude justification for rebellion or for a kind of democracy to say that even though the emperor rules at the will of heaven, if”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Such a challenge in all these forms of meritocracy because you know you had the civil serving exams, but the question was who, if you had a really good tutor, if you could afford a really good tutor, you had a better chance of passing the exams. One thing that happened there was families would pool together resources to try to help the brightest in their group to be able to become part of the officialdom. And this kind of pooling together resources to help as a family was an important part of that structure. But there also was a kind of Was always a tension that, so what if you don't succeed? Some of the leaders of rebellions against emperors were failed examination candidates.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over time, this Confucian idea led to the creation of one of the early great civil service exams, an idea that bureaucracy should be run not by people who were born into the right families, but ones who had shown their ability to master these fairly intensive kind of exams. And the exams were things that could make or break your career a bit like at some points in the American past, passing a bar exam, a really intensive thing could set you on the road to a good career. In China, you had the civil service exam tradition. So I think this kind of emphasis on education and on valuing of scholarly pursuits. But then Chinese leaders throughout history, including up to Mao and Xi Jinping, have also found scholars to be tremendously difficult to control. So there's an ambivalence to it or contradiction again there.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is one of the few places where they didn't kill the last emperor, the idea was that he could become, anybody could be kind of turned into a citizen of this or a subject of this good member of this polity through the kind of education. Often it was a very kind of forceful form of education. But I think that's a carryover from the Confucian times.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, so there's an optimism to this, there's an optimism in the sense of a ability that people can be good. And when exposed to exemplary figures from the past, they'll want to be like those exemplary figures. So it's a form of education through kind of emulation of models and study of past figures and past texts that were exemplary. And it did have this idea relatively positive view of human nature and the sort of changeability of humans through education. And I think that shows through in all kinds of things, even the fact that while there were lots of killings by the Chinese Communist Party and other groups, there was often an idea that people could be remolded potentially.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like the great wall you see today. He built walls and they were fine. They were good. But the great wall itself didn't come into being until many centuries later. But still this idea of anything that suggests a kind of greatness is something that, in many ways, a nationalist above all else Xi Jinping is a Supporter of the party and single party rule that's something he clearly believes in. And he's a nationalist. He wants to see China be great and acknowledge as great on the world stage.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it involves smoothing out all kinds of internal contradictions. You had the first emperor of China jumping forward a bit in 221 BC. He is anti-scholars. He burns books and he doesn't venerate these kind of rituals and things. So he was very much against the things that Confucius stood for and Mao, in a sense of having to choose between Confucius and the first emperor He said, well, maybe the first emperor had the right idea. You know, scholars can be a pain. So he said, like, if you have to choose between Confucianism and that. But Xi Jinping, I think, continually is kind of not choosing. And if he wants to say, well, look at the great wall, look at this wonderful, affect, that was a symbol of kind of strength and domination related to the first emperor, who, by the way, didn't build anything.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you could say that in many points in the 20th century, there was a kind of Kind of struggle between different competing political groups over which part of the Chinese past to connect with? Was it to the Confucian tradition or to the kind of rebellious monkey king tradition, which was what Mao connected to? Xi Jinping, and before him, to some extent, Hu Jintao, we saw this a little bit at the Olympics. There was more this kind of mix it all together view. Anything that suggested greatness in the past could be something that could be fused together. So Xi Jinping says that Mao is one of his heroes or one of the people he looks to as a model, but so is Confucius. And there's really, you know, they had so little in common, but they both in his mind and the minds of others suggest a kind of power and greatness of the Chinese past.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of conserved so in all kinds of ways, you know, it's irreconcilable to many things about Marxism and communism, which is all about struggle and all about actually a progressive view of history moving from one stage to the next.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and there was even a sense that it connected the natural world to the supernatural world. So the emperor was to heaven, this kind of non-personified deity like the emperor was to the ministers. So all of this had these relationships. So the emperor was the son of heaven. And for Confucius, he said, so we should study the text, we should study how the sages of old behaved, that society was becoming corrupted and was going away from that sort of purity of the sages when the relationships were all in order. So Confucianism was a kind of conservative or even backward-looking thing. It wasn't trying to, it wasn't arguing for progress. It was arguing for reclaiming a pure golden age in the past. So it was also a kind of”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And her owing him deference. And he had the same notion that then the emperor to the ministers were, these were all parallels. And there were no egalitarian relationships in Confucianism. Even something that in the West we often think of as a kind of quintessential egalitarian relationship between brothers in the Chinese tradition of Confucianism, there was only older brother and younger brother. There was no brotherhood was not an egalitarian relationship. It was one where the older brother took care of the younger brother and the younger brother showed respect for the older brother.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“China. But what he said was that there had been this period of great order in the past, that the lines between inferior and superior were clear, and there was a kind of synergy between superior and inferior. They kept everything ticking along really nicely. He thought that hierarchical relationships were a good thing, and that the trick was that both sides in a hierarchical relationship owed something to the other. So the father and son relationship was a key one. The father deserved respect from the son, but owed the son care and benevolence. And things would be fine as long as both sides in a relationship held up their end. And he had a whole series of these relationships, the husband to the wife was, again, an unequal one of the husband being superior to the wife, but him owing the wife.”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, we don't know that much about the historic Confucius. He's around the same time as figures like Socrates and Like with Socrates, we get a lot of what we know about him or think we know about him from what his followers said and things that were attributed to him and dialogues that were written afterwards. So you can have a lot of fun with these sort of axial age thinkers and what they had in common. Another thing that connects these axial age thinkers is they were trying to kind of make a case for why they should be able to educate the next generation, the elite, and sort of had a way of promising that they had philosophical ideas that helped keep decide how you should run a polity. Confucius lived in a time when there were these warring kingdoms in a territory that later became”
2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mao likes things to be turned upside down. He thought of Confucianism as a feudal way of thought that it held China back. So you can come up with things that are similar and you can come up with things where they're really opposites. But they both clearly did want to see China under rule by the Communist Party. And that's been a continuity and that connects them to the leaders in between them too 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