The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia's Struggle Against Autocracy And Beijing

>> Glenn Tiffert: Thank you all for joining us today.

>> Glenn Tiffert: I'm Glenn Tiffert, the co-director of the Hoover Institution program on the U.S. china and the World, and this is part of our speaker series today. We're very lucky to have Jeffrey Wasserstrom join us. He's Distinguished professor of History at UC Irvine.

 

He's written, co-written, edited, or co-edited a dozen books, including works of academic history as well as general interest volumes. He works with documentary filmmakers and he served as an advisor to the Hong Kong International Literary Festival in years past. He received his PhD from University of California, Berkeley, a fine department.

 

I might add, taught for 15 years at Indiana University in Bloomington, where in addition to offering courses, he served for three years as the director of their East Asian Studies Center. And he's given years of service to to our profession of historians, first as acting editor of the American Historical Review, which is the core disciplinary journal in history, and from 2008 to 2018 as editor of the Journal of Asian Studies.

 

His most recent books are Vigil Hong Kong on the brink, published in 2020, and the milk Tea Inside Asia's Struggle Against Autocracy in Beijing, published this year, the latter of which he's gonna talk about today. Jeff, it's an honor to have you join us. And the floor is yours, thanks.

 

 

>> Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Thanks so much. It's a real pleasure to be able to have this conversation. A conversation in Stanford will largely be a conversation between two Berkeley PhDs. Just showing the distance is not always unbridgeable between these two parts of the Bay Area. So when people give talks in general, in this day, when things are recorded, but especially book talks, there's always the risk that they're going to give the same talk that you've already watched a video of.

 

So I try to make sure that whenever I give a talk, I do something in it at the beginning that says you are listening to this here and now. I try to connect whatever I'm talking about to the place where I'm giving the talk and to the moment in time, because I do think things change.

 

And this forces, as a historian always interested in the present, it forces you to think about what's different than if you had been talking about this before. Just as a little example with the Milk Tea alliance book, which is about Hong Kong, Thailand and Burma, and the connection between protests in those three places in 2019, 2020, 2021.

 

When it felt to me a bit as though a kind of baton was being passed between pro democracy activists, first in Hong Kong, then in Thailand, then in Burma. And that they were picking up on strategies, tactics, songs, and symbols of one another. And that was going that way.

 

And the book began to be written in 2021. It took a few years to do it. I finished the book right before I finished it. I signed off on the proofs. November of 2024, not that long ago. But timing always really matters. If I'd finished it just a month later, there would have been the South Korean protests in which that had some kinds of they don't drink milk tea in South Korea.

 

And I'll mention why they don't quite fit in the milk tea alliance, but honorary members of it. But had I finished it just a month or two later, I might have brought that in some way. Fortunately, I'm writing a special preface to the Taiwan edition of the book that's being created, which does talk about that.

 

So this is about timing, but it's also about Stanford, because the first place that I gave a talk after the South Korean events had taken place. I had the pleasure of talking to Ki Wook Shin, a colleague here who has worked on the Gwangju events, has worked on democracy and repression in Korea many different times.

 

And was able to talk about what was similar and what was different there. So the moment right now, I could have thought of something about what was going on in the world. But the why you're listening to this talk right now is during noon today. I was able to drop in on the workshop on Modern Chinese and Taiwan history.

 

And I heard this really stimulating talk about Taiwan and its positioning itself in the world as a model for development in the 1950s and 60s and 70s in particular. And I was able to drop in on that before lunch engagement, and I had to leave right during the question and answer session.

 

But the last question I heard, which I didn't hear the answer to, was a really relevant question to what you're going to hear about today. The question was, when people think about the democratic wave of the 1980s, they often begin the story and sometimes end the story with the end of the Soviet system.

 

And they talk about Velvet Revolution and events in Poland and Czechoslovakia. What about the actual wave starting in 1986, in the mid-1980s, in the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan? The questioner asks, so asks the speaker to explain why was it, how was it that Taiwan could democratize that way?

 

And then I had to leave. But I can just imagine that's something to float in your head. But it's actually something I'm glad to bring up, because while I was interested in the passage, the influence of movements, as I said, 2019, 2020, and 2021, include ending with Burma.

 

One thing I did while researching the book was interview a participant in the Burmese uprising of 1988, which was another thing that was part of that wave of attempts to democratize, but ended with a brutal massacre. And when I asked this, he's a friend of mine and he's profiled in this book.

 

His name's Tunh Mint. And I met him at Indiana University when he came there and wanted to do a senior thesis on comparing 1988 in Burma, which he said nobody in America seemed to know anything about or have heard of. And 1989 in China with Tiananmen, that everybody in America seemed to know about.

 

And I asked Chen Min, like in 1988, how was it that you and your friends as teenagers thought about the possibility of rising up against this dictatorship that had been in power so long? And he said, jeff, the Philippines, we had heard radio broadcasts, we had heard about what had happened there, and we had thought about how they were under a system of dictatorial control and somehow they had ended it.

 

And it was both obvious and also not obvious because the way that we often study social movements are by putting them into struggles in political systems that seem immediately similar. And the Philippines was seen as rising up against an American backed authoritarian regime. Burma wasn't in that same category.

 

South Korea was, Taiwan was. But Burma was not that kind of way. So it wasn't necessarily. But one reason why Burma 88 I think, didn't fit easily into some of the imaginations. There wasn't a lot of press there, there weren't a lot of coverage. But it also wasn't either a rising up against Communist Party dictatorship or against an American backed dictatorship.

 

So one of the things that talking to tun has Made me realize and working on this book in which activists in these, again, different kinds of settings feel some kind of kinship and are looking for each other, looking to each other for inspiration is that sometimes it's not.

 

The only variable isn't whether the same ideological system is being challenged. Sometimes it's places nearby give you a sense that if people like us, people who are nearby, are doing something, maybe there's a lesson for us here. Thailand and Hong Kong, one is usually thought of as part of East Asia, one is Southeast Asia.

 

When I was studying at Berkeley, doing a dissertation on student movements in Chinese history, and I finished my dissertation in 1989 and said that there were some new movements. The new movement probably wouldn't amount to anything nearly as exciting as what I had described in the pages of my thesis.

 

Totally wrong. So I immediately changed my thesis into a book because then nobody will read your dissertation. But nobody suggested. What interests me now is nobody suggested, well, are you paying attention to Burma or do you know about the Thai protests of the 1970s that ended with a massacre?

 

Because that was a kind of different mode of knowledge. So one of the things that I'm interested in about this book project that I'll now continue in other things is to think about how places near to each other exert a special influence on each other. And sometimes that's also connected to the ideological side of it, to the type of system they're opposing.

 

But sometimes it's just nearby. As Neal Asherson, the great historian and journalist of Central Europe and also of Scotland, said when I was telling about this, he said, proximity matters, and I think that's true. So that's a long winded way of saying about the right now because of the Taiwan and the right here.

 

It actually is right here because that noon event at what took place here. But my ties to this place and this book's tie to this place go deeper. I was born in Palo Alto at what was then called the new Stanford Hospital. And now I'm sure it's called the old Stanford Hospital.

 

But also when I was doing my research at Berkeley on Chinese student movements, the history of Chinese student movements, I did a lot of my research here at Stanford, including in the Hoover. The COVID of my first book, which is on Chinese student movements, was from a photograph held in the Hoover.

 

I did my work on protests as a dissertation, sometimes you never completely go away from your dissertation topic. I thought I had because the kinds of protests I studied in China basically stopped happening in China, the kinds of things that I was interested in. Student led mass movements that then brought members of other social classes out onto the streets together.

 

That's what my dissertation was about. I thought of as the May 4th tradition and then Tiananmen tradition of Protestants, and I thought it had hit basically a dead end. And I began working on other topics and so forth. But then in the 2010s, things started happening in Hong Kong that were very different from what I had studied originally, but were reminiscent of it.

 

And I had a sense, a somewhat sense of deja vu sometimes when I was studying what seemed to be a rebirth of that tradition in Hong Kong, even though it had its own distinctive features. And I began paying attention to Hong Kong. And that brought me back eventually to writing this book, Hong Kong on the brink in 2020, which was about the protests of 2019 and giving them a history, the Umbrella movement and the 2012 protests against national education.

 

I finished it while the protests of 2019 were still going on. I felt that there was still more I wanted to do with the subject. And so in some ways the Milk Tea alliance book evolved out of that as a kind of sequel of sorts. But in many ways I thought about it in reflecting on being here, speaking about these books, that the road to writing this book, and then also in a sense to writing this one, began with a chance encounter, in part that was orchestrated by a historian at Hoover, Ming Chan.

 

Because in 2013 I went to Hong Kong where he was teaching. I had met him in Stanford when I was doing my research, but I met up with him in Hong Kong and he said, you've got to come meet this super kid, Jeff. You need to. The kid's name is Joshua Wong, and he had been part of the protest in 2012 that I'd been interested in, but I'd like two days in Hong Kong, and he said, you really need to meet him.

 

I said, okay, he said, well, arrange an evening, we can meet him in a hotel with his parents. He said, okay, I'm going to spend time with a 16 year old, 15 year old and his parents and yeah, you need to talk to him about studying in America, because I don't think things are going to be in Hong Kong, a place he can stay.

 

So we talked, so I met him. He was very impressive, but I thought, what am I doing? I thought he had had his big moment in 2012 and it was casually interesting to meet him. I had no idea that then the next year the Umbrella Movement would begin.

 

The movement would be giant. The 2012 protests were amazing because they succeeded in blocking plan to be Patriarch education. But then 2014 happens, and Joshua Wong isn't the whole story, but he's part of the story. And then I went back to Hong Kong. I was now hooked on Hong Kong.

 

I went over during the Umbrella movement. I was just there for a few days, but it was the most utopian space I had ever been in, in the encampments there. And so I was hooked on this story. And I met up with Joshua again at a later point.

 

And then in 2018, I met up with him when it seemed again that Hong Kong had sort of run into a dead end. And he seemed quite despondent. And it was actually writing about what had happened and feeling that the writing was on the wall for the end of the possibilities for protests in Hong Kong and for free spaces in Hong Kong, that I wrote an article for the Atlantic about my encounter with Joshua Wong, then when he was very despondent.

 

And that led to me getting a contract with Columbia Global Reports to write a book about Hong Kong that was going to be about the end of the period when there could be protests in Hong Kong and was basically going to be published in 2019 and be about why we should look back on and not forget the times before 1990, 2019, when there could be protests in Hong Kong.

 

And then there were the biggest protests in the history of Hong Kong. So if you're sensing that one theme here is that I'm a bad person to go to for predictions, you're right. One of the key things to take away about long time studying student activism, and youth movements, and social movements in general I think it matters.

 

If you're talking about sort of theses I've come up with, it matters that protesters of a new generation are influenced by things that earlier generations in their own locale have done, but they're also influenced by things from other places. And even in an area of global transmission where everybody's on the Internet seeing everything happening everywhere, it often matters what's happening nearby in places that are thought of as somehow similar or connected there.

 

So that's one thesis. Another kind of argument, again that comes out of the book is what's interesting about social movements, they are fundamentally unpredictable. And that the unpredictability is part of what is important about them as historical phenomenon, as. Contemporary phenomenon, and that if you look at the history of movements, you'll almost always get to points where the smart money would be on them failing.

 

And they often, and sometimes even usually fail. But that doesn't mean that they won't succeed at some future time. That this is something that the history of, the history of Asian protests is definitely true. But it's also true if you look at the history of other places like Central Europe, and you think about all the points in time when if you stop the story at a certain point, you'd say, wow, that was a heroic figure who took part in some bold moves in the 1960s that failed, and then somehow still did it again in the 1970s, and it failed.

 

What was he thinking? It's never going to work. And then in 1989, if you're thinking of Vaclav Havel, it does. So I think those, if those are two things you take away, I know there are some high school students here, if you take away, like, you know, was there a main point in this rambling talk that this guy gave?

 

Those are a couple of things that it matters to keep in mind, traditions that are inherited and influences from different parts of the world. It is also important to keep in mind the fact that many movements that ultimately succeed fail and fail and fail again before they do succeed.

 

And I will, you know, I have lots. I'll just tell you just as a sketch, because I'm coming to the end of the time I want to talk the book. It profiles some activists in Bangkok, particularly one Netiwit Chatafat Faisal, who I think is incredibly extraordinary. So much so the most interesting intellectual under 30 I've met or I know now and perhaps I've ever met, a translator, a publisher, a military, a conscientious objector who organized protests and then also went to protests.

 

It wasn't significant so much as an organizer, but a participant in protesters and protests, and sometimes went along to protest just to sell copies of the books that he and his press had published on the side. Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel, Rebecca Solnitz Menexplain things to me so that if you know how to say mansplaining in Thai, you've probably learned it from Netwit and his group's books.

 

So there's a chapter on Netwit, who was a friend of Joshua Wong, influenced by Joshua Wong and by the Hong Kong protest. There's a chapter on Hong Kong where I focus on Agnes Chao, one of the other Main leaders in 2012, active in 2014. And now a political and now an exile in Toronto.

 

And then I have a chapter on Burma, and I just showed you some. I put up some images. I'm not giving a PowerPoint slide, but one of the things that I talk about is transmissions. And I think these are things that just these images, as I just point to them and describe them very, very briefly, will give you a sense of some of the transmissions.

 

The far corner is a picture of the umbrella movement in Hong Kong. And what I haven't talked about is the Hong Kong umbrella movement was influenced in part by Taiwan's Sunflower Movement. The year before, Taiwan and Hong Kong activists looked at each other a lot, were watching the banners.

 

One of the banners at the far corner says, taiwan beware. Hong Kong's today could be your tomorrow. So that's about connection between places. Next to it is a picture of the protest in 2018. Joshua Wong is one of the people in Balaclava. He's with two members of the Russian punk dissent group Pussy Riot.

 

And they were there. And so the connections between movements are not always just between the ones next to each other. One of the things I focus on in the book, this entity called the Milk Tea alliance that ties Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand and Burma. All I'll say about the milk tea is these are all places where the iconic form of drinking tea has milk, has sort of a sweetened milk in it.

 

And on the Chinese mainland, the iconic form is without that. So they thought, what do we have in common besides the fact we're worried about rising Chinese power? Well, we all drank our tea with milk in it. And so it's a playful thing. They took. They also took playfulness from popular culture, including the Hunger Games movies and novels in which teenage rebels rise up against a much greater armed and more powerful capital.

 

And spoiler alert, they win. So this is very inspiring. And that's a poster called the Younger Games that has Agnes Chao cosplaying the hero of the Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen. That kind of idea of drawing from the same kind of symbolic repertoire was adopted in Thailand. And this is from 2020 in Thailand.

 

An image of Jennifer Lawrence from the film of the Hunger Games holding up the three finger salute, the resistance symbol from the Hunger Games. And on it is written in Thai. I was told by my Thai collaborator on this basically says, let it end with this generation. So there's a generational side to this as well as others.

 

Down on the bottom far corner is a Milk Tea alliance, playful online symbol. Next to that is something that may be familiar to those of you who have read Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny. Do not obey in advance. Some of the Hong Kong activists printed up slogans from Snyder's book and made them into protest slogans.

 

That's one is in Chinese and in english. Netiwit is in the picture next to that. It's a blurry picture, but he and his friends. He's the one with glasses by the woman with a mask. The woman with a mask was the translator of Rebecca Solnitz. Men explain things to me, this is a whole group of them and they're holding up slogans in English and Thai from that same book on tyranny.

 

This was during a 2020 protest. And then finally holding up the three fingers connected to the Hunger Games thing. The Burmese protests have been very different, but they're connected in some symbolic ways. Is a group called Rap Against Junta that drew their name from a Thai group that was called Rap Against Dictatorship.

 

That had been important before then. Rap Against Junta was an homage to Rap Against Dictatorship. And they did a We Are the World like rap song where they got different groups from across the Milk Tea alliance area to each sing out to each give a verse about what was wrong with the dictator and their their place and made into a video called Dictators Must Die.

 

So that's just to give you a slight flavor of that. If I were more organized, I would play some rousing raps from that. I'll just say that the Thai rap from that, from the verse that the Rap Against Dictatorships member does says, basically, get away, you old men, it's time for a new gen.

 

And so the pop culture and songs and the influence of individuals on each other, these are very different figures. But that's what you get in this very short book. Thanks for your attention.

>> Glenn Tiffert: Jeff and I are going to have a little conversation now, but while we're talking, I want to encourage all of you in the audience to think about questions.

 

If you're comfortable asking the question yourself, please feel free to. But we've also got cards at the chairs, so if you're not coming. Comfortable standing up and speaking. Then please feel free to write your question on the card and they'll be collected and handed to me, and then we can take it from there.

 

And for those of you online as well, please feel free to contribute. So, you know, Jeff, as I read the book, I couldn't help but think of a great number of other figures. I mean, you, for example, profiled a number of people who I think are well known to people who watch Asia closely, like Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow.

 

But you could think about, for example, Malala. You could think about Greta Thunberg. You could think about Vladimir Karamurza in Russia. We seem to be at a moment right now in which, you know, there are figures who are rising up globally and who are being profiled as sort of a new age of activism.

 

Now, you've been a student of activism and social movements for a very long time. Do you feel that there is something special about this moment? Is it relatable to technology and social media that there's an immediacy that goes global in which it allows people in different countries to come together and form something called a Milk Tea alliance that might not have been possible before.

 

I was wondering if you could reflect on this particular moment in time and what might be special about this decade that we're experiencing.

>> Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Yeah, I mean, I think there is a special thing about the moment. It's a very mixed kind of story, though, and there actually are.

 

I tried to tell a regional story, and I was interested in its kind of echoes of some other regional stories, because I think the tendency in writing about social movements is to either write about just one place or to write kind of globally. We have books about the global 1960s and things like that.

 

And I was very interested in the kind of interplay and influence of regionality. And I'll give one more. This is one thing about giving this talk here at Stanford that I should have mentioned. I had the great pleasure of having lunch with Timothy Garden Ash, who visits here, and conversations with him about, well, first reading his work on Central Europe and the influences flowing there was tremendously important for thinking about that and then also having conversations with him about while reading this.

 

So what interested me in part about the Milk Tea alliance was why are there still. Why does these sort of regional connectedness still matter in a way that it's easier to understand why it did at a time before the Internet, before the connection? So I was interested in that density and connections in Central Europe.

 

The first time that I met Timothy was in Budapest at a conference at the 10th anniversary of the 1989 Upheavals. And I was the token China specialist there, saying, why didn't Beijing get the memo that Communism was over? But what was interesting to me, besides what I learned about the past, was that the former activists from different parts of Central Europe, it was like a reunion.

 

They were friends who had seen each other in part because they were nearby each other. I've also been reading about the period around 1900. Tim Harper has this wonderful book, Underground Asia. And there are other writings about this that talk about how people like Ho Chi Minh and his counterparts in Chinese revolutionary movement, that they would meet each other.

 

Liang Qichao and Sun Yat Sen were both in Japan and they met people who had led, who had been involved in the Philippine uprising in 1900. And again, these regional constellations. So I made a kind of conscious choice of the regional thing. But clearly there is this global story as well.

 

And people like Netiwit is incredibly globally minded. I mean, he's very interested in. They put out Extinction rebellion book translation. They're very interested in what is going on in Ukraine and Gaza. They're interested in all of these kind of global things. I chose not to write about it that way, in part because I'm also intrigued by the fact that even things that are global still do get localized and regionalized.

 

So the Hunger Games is a global thing. Why isn't this three finger salute used everywhere by teenagers standing up against impossible odds? Curiously, it's something that comes from Hollywood and from American fiction, but only in Southeast Asia has it taken off as a symbol. So this mix and that mix of the global moment and the local things is something that if you look back to like the 60s, there was this global 1968, but it was radically different what the symbols meant and what was being done in different places.

 

But there are. If you're interested in the global story, I can recommend other books. There's a fascinating book called if We Burn by Vincent Bevans, and it's about the protests around the world in the 2010s. And what he's intrigued by. The question he's intrigued by is why when there were more people on the streets than ever before in history, were so few of the movements actually ending up creating situations like more like what the protesters wanted.

 

How do you explain the irony of the 2010s as this amazing moment of mobilization and also then autocratic wave? So it's fascinating and I think it's something to still be watched. And I think one thing you touched on that is, I think, important and new since you mentioned Malala and Greta Thunberg.

 

It's not accidental. I mean, young women are playing more central roles in a lot of the movements that I'm talking about as well. So I do think that's something that you don't find. In the same way, the numbers, the people who would immediately come to mind would much more often be male in earlier periods and even up to Tiananmen.

 

 

>> Glenn Tiffert: I'm going to collapse one of the questions contributed from our audience with one that I had, which is, you know, many more countries, particularly in Southeast Asia and Asia more generally, but also Africa and other parts of the world, are becoming more tightly bound to the prc, largely through economics and trade.

 

And so to what extent will China gain sway over the politics within those countries? And certainly in Hong Kong, you know, the relationship with the PRC and mainland is the story. It was the sort of organizing theme around the protests. But to what extent is that also true?

 

Because your book is, in fact, you know, subtitled the Struggle Against Beijing. Is that also a driving force, for example, in Thailand or Burma?

>> Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Yeah. So with Burma, I think it's the least central as a cause of the movement. The cause of the movement is not people are not waking up thinking about Chinese power, but it partly provides the context for some of what's going on.

 

And there is concern and there was an ability of certainly Beijing's role to, to enable autocracies in different places in Thailand. It's, you know, there are plenty of activists in Thailand who are not ultimately concerned that concerned particularly about Chinese power. In Netowitz case, there was very much a clear concern and I did make a choice of picking some of.

 

He wasn't the only one. I met this amazing young guy named Francis, who was so inspired by the Hong Kong protests that on national day in 2020, October 1, he went outside the Chinese Embassy in Bangkok and sang Glory to Hong Kong, a song that had been banned in Hong Kong as a way of sort of saying twisting the tail of the Chinese authorities who he felt were closer to were enabling the Thai.

 

There are connections, there are ways in which in the case. Of Thailand. There are quite specific things. Recently, the Chinese government put pressure on the Thai government to send back a group of Uyghurs who had were looking for sanctuary in Thailand, sent them back in 2025. They had done the same thing in 2015.

 

That had been one of the markers in 2016. Netiwit, in the personal story, had tried to bring Joshua Wong to Thailand to give a talk. And the Chinese authorities have pressured the Thai authorities to block him, detain him at the airport for 12 hours and send him back to Hong Kong.

 

So there are direct connections in some of these cases. In other cases, it was one thing that gave them a connecting thread. But there are other things, I think the kind of youth concern about authoritarianism. And also, and this is one reason they're interested in Greta Thunberg in particular, there's a sense of frustration with the strategies that an older generation has used that have failed to solve a problem that they feel they will live a larger part of their life being shaped by.

 

So that let it end with this generation or in the Hong Kong case, saying, don't talk to me about what's going to happen in 2040, 2047. We're talking about how we're going to live our life. So that kind of youth connection, generational, maybe back to your earlier question.

 

 

>> Glenn Tiffert: Yeah, I think that touches on a point that one of our audience members raised in that there really is a generational difference here. There was an obvious passing of the baton in Hong Kong, for example, a decade ago, from an older generation to a much younger generation, a younger generation that was willing to push the envelope a little bit further and harder.

 

And we see this, I think, in others as well. I want to turn to the question of historical memory. One of our audience members has asked if there are opportunities here for historians, you know, know, in the future, for us now to be collecting and archiving this material.

 

So much of it is ephemeral because it happens in digital spaces. But number one, how can we do that better to ensure that we preserve it and can study it in the future? And then related to that, a question about historical memory and China's efforts to reshape it and deprive people of the resources necessary to understand that people a decade, 2, 3, 4 ago fought important battles and like you said about Vaslav, how maybe they did not win.

 

But these are inspirational and organizing principles around which a new set of people can organize and perhaps carry it to success.

>> Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Great. Great question. I love that one. And actually, can I. Well, the Slide. I'll just tell you there were two images in the slide. One of the Milk Tea alliance postcard and also this one of the the Thai Three Finger salute with this saying over it.

 

Both of those and other materials that I found very valuable I found in Amsterdam at the Institute for Social Histories archive, which is one of the really amazing places that collects materials on social movements through time. They have a great collection of Chinese political posters, as does the Hoover, but, and as is University of Westminster.

 

But it's one of the places that has this amazing collection and it had materials were donated to it. Ephemera, largely ephemera zines and things passed out on the streets in both Hong Kong in 2019 and Bangkok in 2020. So they have this collection of ephemera. So that's they're a model archive, a place if you want to I would like find out things about them.

 

I also did like people say is there any danger or aside to the kind of research I do and there isn't really. I'm talking to people who've been putting themselves in a lot of danger. But I did do something that perhaps was dangerous in the Amsterdam archive, at least if you believe in certain superstitions.

 

There was an umbrella that was used in Thailand inspired by the Hong Kong protests, but then it was localized. The Hong Kong protests were associated with umbrellas that were blocking tear gas and pepper spray. And on it though was an insignia associated with the 1930s and a Thailand movement against absolute monarchy.

 

So I opened that umbrella inside an archive, which was a risky thing to do but no, that's a place that's a model for archiving. I mean, I think there's great archiving done here of materials and collecting. And I do think the colle and documenting for Hong Kong now it used to be to document the mainland, you put stuff in Hong Kong.

 

Now it's got to be to document the mainland and Hong Kong you need to do with them outside of Kong. And you can follow this. There are some people who do a lot of attention to this who've moved from Taiwan to some in Berlin, some in Taiwan, all kinds of places.

 

I also want to put in a plug for Southern California has an amazing museum called the Wenda Museum that is about preserving. In part it started preserving documentation of material life under communism before 1989 in Europe. It's now expanded to also collecting things in other parts of the communist world as well.

 

 

>> Glenn Tiffert: So we have a question here from the audience about inviting you to reflect on how deep the Milk Tea alliance is. You know, in many instances, these were individuals across different countries who made connections with one another and self identified as the Milk Tea Alliance. Many of them are now either in prison or in exile out of their countries.

 

And so to what extent is this alliance? How has it, does it transcend the individuals who made those personal connections? Is it a transnational movement? Could you reflect on that?

>> Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Yeah, it is a. What was it? There's a review about to come out of the book that says the Milk Tea alliance title is a bit of a tease.

 

Because it's not like there's an institutional things that you think of with an alliance with more kind of sturdiness to it. There aren't institutions. It was largely a kind of loose, loose grouping of people with similar kinds of a set of beliefs and concerns. So it's not like we shouldn't think of it as parallel to institutionalized things.

 

We can think about it also more as a kind of overarching catchphrase that captures some things that were percolating in the same way that if you talk about the counterculture in a period in the west in the 1960s, you can't really pinpoint who was the leader of it, what were the institutions of it.

 

But I think it's more of a kind of suggestive thing. There was something like it that had even shorter of a period of existence called the Network of Young Democratic Asians Noida that was formed in 2015, I think it was, and had some of the same people, but also some other groups than the places I'm describing.

 

It was inspired partly by the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan, but also it had the Philippines and Indonesians. And it was a grouping that didn't last long, but it was the kind of thing that got people to know one another in ways that you. That often will lead nowhere.

 

But sometimes, like what I was describing in that setting when I was describing the Budapest conference, there were times and I talked to some of the people from that. The book is dedicated, in part, it's dedicated to Tun Mint, who I've mentioned, and also to Mikhaila Sarashti, my closest friend from that, who was a dissident before 1989 in Central Europe, and he talked about stories, about friendships that developed between people like him.

 

He went to meet. Adam Miknick, who was one of his heroes, from reading him in Poland. And he went there just because you could go from Hungary to Poland. And he wanted to meet this person. This was in the 1970s, before Solidarity. And he and his friend is Van Rev went there, and they met him, and that was a friendship that lasted.

 

And you could say at different points, yeah, but it didn't really lead anywhere. But at other points it meant things like if one of them was in prison, the others could write letters reminding people of their. So you have a sense where the Milk Tea alliance, it isn't doing anything right now.

 

You can think. I mean, it exists in the sense of expressions of solidarity and things like that. It doesn't really go anywhere, but it can help somebody. When Netiwit talks about Joshua Wong and his friendship and publishes books that were related to it in Bangkok, and word of that gets to Joshua Wong in prison, as it does how these things circulate.

 

It helps keep people from giving up hope for things. And that's something that can matter.

>> Glenn Tiffert: You mentioned prison letters, I'm just thinking about how Gramsci has never gone out of style in a sense too, right? I want to open it up to the audience in just a couple of minutes, but I have a couple of questions for you.

 

I really love the regional focus of the book. In the book, there are a few times in which the United States appears, for example, the translation of works by or the example of Martin Luther King. The United States likes to imagine itself as being central to democratization around the world.

 

But of course, it's a much more complex story than that in this particular moment, now that the United States and certain organizations that have played really important roles supporting civil society around the world is we're finding those institutions defunded. There's not as much opportunity to play that role.

 

How do you think that's going to affect democratization in Southeast Asia or more globally? Are we that central or perhaps just playing a supporting role?

>> Jeffrey Wasserstrom: That's great. That's a great. That's such an important question. I think the role, it's important to not overstate the role of the United States in any of these movements, because that's used often to delegitimize the movements.

 

And so when people talk to me, I talk about the Hong Kong protests. Wasn't that. Wasn't the CIA behind this thing? And I say, no. Look, when more than a million people in a polity of 7.5 million are on the streets, that is not because of whatever the CIA was or wasn't doing.

 

But I think there are two ways in which the United States can be has been important in the past. One is through providing some sorts of whether it's training or materials or education that's then taken back there and things like that. And another is a kind of model of things to look at, whether it's things that are formally done in the United States or movements in the United States that can be inspirational.

 

And this is not a moment when any of that is happening. In my own sense, simply as a scholar saying, you know, I'm writing this as a scholar to try to understand these things. I feel you can't get away from things that are going on here because even as a scholar simply wanting to communicate about this.

 

And this is yet another Stanford connection. One of the places that's been most important for me to publish some material on Hong Kong Thai connections has been collaborating with a scholar from Thailand and publishing in the Journal of Democracy, which is something that as funding related to the National Endowment for Democracy.

 

So these are things that's something that purely as a scholar, trying to understand these things and to help with the idea that understanding these things is good can be challenged by the current moment.

>> Glenn Tiffert: And we have the longtime editor of that journal here in the audience today.

 

So yeah. So before we open it up, my final question to you, Jeff. I've long admired your work as a traditional academic historian of China, but one of the things that distinguishes you is as a public historian, you've emerged as one of the leading public historians and interpreters of Asia for general audiences.

 

Can you talk about your personal journey and the choices that you've made that took you in that direction? And at a time when Asia, and especially China looms so large, what other historians can do to be more part of the public discourse on Asia and America's role in the world and in Asia?

 

 

>> Jeffrey Wasserstrom: I mean, I think I stumbled into it a bit because I was working on a dissertation topic that was so related to what was the biggest news story of the moment. And I wanted I had just done this dissertation on movements of the early 20th century that directly influenced the movement of 1989.

 

And I thought I would write a magazine piece about it. And I actually had the I was not able to do that. I had been trained, my joke about graduate school used to be is you're trained for a career in teaching and writing, and they never teach you how to teach or how to write.

 

But it was more that they teach you how to write in a specific way to please a dissertation committee, and you do this specialized kind of thing. So I just realized, I sent in, I realized I had this through family, friends, there was somebody at the LA Times, which had a Sunday magazine then, who was willing to read my piece about why coverage of 1989 would have been better if people had known more about Chinese history.

 

And I said, okay, I've written a 350 page dissertation with hundreds of footnotes. Obviously I can't send that, so I'll send something really simple, 35 pages with 85 footnotes. And they said, this is not what you were gonna publish. And then I sort of thought, well, I want to try to figure out how, if anything like this happens again, I kind of know.

 

So I kind of did a conscious retraining and I got lucky enough to be asked to help with a documentary film that became the Gate of Heavenly Peace, about Tiananmen. And in advising them, I got to maybe shape three sentences. And those three sentences were more influential in how people thought about, have thought about Tiananmen than the 300 pages that were in the book.

 

And so I kind of felt like, okay, I need to figure out some way where I can be able to do both of these things. And at the time, I think it was a challenge because you just weren't. It was a time of very, a lot of interest on specialization and improving expertise.

 

And you were not. And you still won't get tenure on your op EDS or magazine pieces. You have to write in certain modes. You had to be kind of figure out a way to be able to operate in both those registers. I found it very pleasurable also to write short form, accessible.

 

I felt that there was a connection between the kind of writing I was doing there and what I was doing in the classroom, and also the conversation. It may be better at talking about China with friends who were not focused on China or family members. So I felt there are benefits to that in that way, I think it can make for a more integrated life.

 

But it's definitely a challenge. And it's important to realize there are different kinds of skills. It's important to find people who are doing that kind of writing that you take seriously, that it's for a general audience, and yet you feel it's utterly intellectually reputable. And sometimes that's found within the academy.

 

And then it's important to find the people outside of the academy who are doing that. Adam Hochschild, somebody who writes, who I love to read history by he's never been a history professor. I don't think he ever went to history graduate school, but yet he's doing everything like historian and connecting things to the present.

 

Find people like that. And there are some of those models in China studies too. There have always been. And find them and figuring out what they're doing and try to do that. We could learn a lot from that. Thank you. So let me open it up to the audience.

 

I'll start with Larry.

>> Speaker 3: So I want to offer a couple other factors, one of which you partially spoke to and another that I'd like to get your reaction to on why almost all these movements for democratic change have failed in this new century. So you spoke to the Beijing element.

 

Thank you for introducing it. And a lot of this has to do with relative powers. So it's not just that we aren't supporting right now democratic movements the way we were. And now, you know, Paul Wolfowitz sitting right here, he can comment if he wants to on these two examples which he's well familiar with from the Reagan administration.

 

But if you look at George Shultz's memoirs, we might as well pay tribute to them in this room.

>> Glenn Tiffert: We're in the Shultz Auditorium in the Shultz building.

>> Speaker 3: Yes, for the Philippines in 1986 and the first color revolution, really, and Korea in 1987. They were indigenous bred, but American diplomatic intervention got them over the hump at the end in terms of compelling the dictators to yield when there was this kind of mass mobilization.

 

And I think another Hoover colleague, Mike McFaul, has made a pretty persuasive case about the color revolutions also in the Journal of Democracy, that international pressure at the end helped to tip the balance. And it's not just that Beijing is there, but the diplomatic pressure from the United States and the west is really not there in these later cases.

 

And it's the relative power between the west and China that I think has shifted. So if you could speak to that. And then the second related factor, that some of these movements, either wittingly or unwittingly, and I think quite substantially wittingly, were employing tactics of non violent civil resistance dating back to Gandhi.

 

You know, the story. And then the work of Gene Sharp and the work of Peter Ackerman and the International Center for Non Violent Conflict. And there were kind of insights, mechanisms of mobilization, strategies of resistance. And I just have the sense there's been a lot of authoritarian learning and adaptation and very little kind of social movement learning and counter adaptation.

 

So maybe you could speak to that, too.

>> Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Wow, wow, okay. I'll begin by actually saying so. I mean, I hope this was a good succession process in your move. But I think the best book about the Learning going both of those directions is William Dobson's the Dictator's Learning Curve, which was an early awareness of the way in which autocrats of different ideological orientations so not often seen, not necessarily seen as being in the same grouping.

 

The way now increasingly they are via discussions of strongmen leaders and things like that. His book, I think it never got the attention it should have in the early 2010s. It was about this learning between Russia, China, and Venezuela. And anyway, places not usually thought of together. But he has some in that about activists trying to learn from each other.

 

And I do think that. Well, I guess one of the reasons why I find the Milk Tea alliance story so compelling is because there's that intense interest in learning from each other that I don't think is necessarily happening on a very large scale. There was some kind of learning in different places.

 

What were they doing in Hong Kong, particularly when it seemed that things were working to a degree. I would say in the broader kind of sense that you're absolutely right that the larger international environment is crucial to and often underappreciated when we think about the ultimate success of not just the protests but also revolutions in the past were true.

 

And this was one of Theda Skocpol's big arguments in states and social revolutions that you could say like, look, the commonsensical thing is that there are gonna be revolutions when there's really terrible oppression, but somehow there's often really terrible oppression and there isn't revolution. And she said the other things that have to happen is some part of the elite has to side with the movement, but also there has to be something in the international arena.

 

And I think that's what we're not seeing here. It's strange how Beijing can be part of it. We could imagine and this is again the lack of predictability. You could think about a moment when if Beijing's moves toward a kind of increased influence over a place oversteps things to a point that emboldens reaction.

 

One argument about why there were at least the tentative moves toward democratization that ended up bring a false dawn in Myanmar was this sense that the Hunter didn't wanna just become a kind of new colony of Beijing and so repositioning itself somehow. So we don't know what kind of repositioning there might be.

 

We're in a very different kind of world. So you're asking the right question, I don't have the right answer.

>> Glenn Tiffert: Could I briefly two finger that it's something that is on my mind before we go to others. And that is in the countries that you look at, several of them have long histories in which the Chinese minorities, while quite prosperous, have also.

 

There have been waves of discrimination and sometimes violent action against. And is there a risk in some of these places in which the movement for democratization acquires the racial or ethnic identity angle? Even in Hong Kong, there was a racialization of local Hong Kongers versus Mainland. And so how do we disentangle those themes?

 

 

>> Jeffrey Wasserstrom: It's a really. It's a really. It's a really important thing to disentangle. And when I'm not writing or when I'm not talking about protest, the topic that I'm often drawn to talking about is the way in which very unfortunately. Now we have a moment when both the discourse coming out of Beijing and the discourse coming out of some parts of the world with criticism of Beijing are both buying into or reinforcing the idea of a unified view of the Chinese people or of Chinese culture.

 

And that needs to be exploded, that we need to keep in mind the credible variations within China and the different kinds of versions of Chineseness there are and just are breaking apart that kind of thing, cuz I think it gets in the way of and makes too easy this kind of scapegoating.

 

So just this period of talking about, like, I don't call this Asia's struggle against autocracy and China, because I think when you say China, it too easily sets off associations in some people's minds that this is about the Chinese people or something, whereas Beijing, it's quite clearly meant to.

 

To be sorry for Beijing or.

>> Jeffrey Wasserstrom: But it's about, and yeah, I have my Shanghai and Hong Kong loyalties and all that, but it's really about meeting the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing. So I think it's possible to talk about however you do about the, and sorry to keep bringing up Netiwit as this kind of positive example, but I think he is in very ways positive.

 

He's now very involved in his group with a local preservation movement that's about preserving a shrine that's of particular importance. It has connections to Chinese religion and Chinese cultural traditions of a sort, so while he's anti-Chinese Communist Party, he's not anti-Chinese.

>> Glenn Tiffert: Thank you.

>> Jeffrey Wasserstrom: He is of Chinese descent, yeah.

 

 

>> Glenn Tiffert: Who's here in the front?

>> Speaker 4: My name is Yu Hui, and I'm a communication scholar from Taiwan and I joined social movement since I was freshman. So basically I was in a major social movement in Hong Kong. And thank you for your talk, it's inspiring. And also bring me back to the Sunflower Movement and the Umbrella movement, today Hong Kong and tomorrow Taiwan.

 

And actually, I want to respond. What's the definition of success during 1990s? Hong Kongers might defy themselves as economic animals, but when you see the umbrella movement in 2019 is amazing. The situation is different. And my question is that actually every semester I try to put those songs, zines, and newspapers to show my students.

 

And I found out that young Taiwanese students, they know little and little about this events. And my Hong Konger students feel frustration and Chinese students don't dare to say something. And so the CCP has long been emphasized on memory politics and is skilled at erasing and rewriting history.

 

So my question is that, for example, I want to show the South Park episode that marking Xi Jinping, and suddenly I found it. I couldn't find it on YouTube, damn it. I mean, what can I do? What can we do about this kind of battle? Memory politics, especially the CCP, is powerful and producing a lot of cultural symbols.

 

 

>> Glenn Tiffert: Thank you.

>> Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Yeah, I mean, this is back to another question. And actually Glenn has done very important work on South, sometimes the censorship and the disappearing of things can be very subtle. Be very, just sort of, and Margaret Roberts work about just flooding information with the version that the CCP wants.

 

There are ways to push back. I mean, one is that if you want to be kind of hopeful rather than despairing about this, there are some encouraging signs when Things like Hong Kong was a space for a different kinds of discussion to go on. It's closed off. There are now some bookstores popping up.

 

JF Books in D.C. it's this wonderful place that's keeping alive a different kind of conversation about China. There are a set of nowhere bookstores called I love the name even of the there's one in the Hague that I'm going to go speak at in October. I'm looking forward.

 

I spoke at JF in June and there are nowhere bookstores in Chiang Mai and in Taiwan and there are equivalent kind of things in Tokyo. So there are ways of keeping alive what Jeremy Barmay talks about as the other China alternative ways of thinking about China. And so I think it's important to do that what you were saying.

 

And another thing that, you know, there's lots to be very depressed and very discouraged about. The White paper protests in 2022 in China were a reminder as short lived and you know, quickly suppressed as they were, were a reminder that there was a whole set of people who one might have imagined had somehow been brainwashed, who clearly weren't.

 

And there was again one where young women were important figures in it in a way. There are ways that kept and in that case there was a memory of slogans from Beijing that were quickly squashed from a banner, but they were kept alive in part by some students from China studying abroad who then shared information back.

 

So there are ways in which the porousness keeps happening, and that's one of the things that keeps these from being totalizing.

>> Glenn Tiffert: And connecting to the history of the diaspora is critical here, right, the ideas will return back into China. Timothy, please.

>> Speaker 5: Jeff, thanks for a fascinating talk.

 

I want to push you on Larry's second point and ask you about violence. So all these movements embraced the philosophy and strategy of nonviolent action, civil resistance, the model of 1989, a new model of revolution, peaceful revolution. Take you back to the Philippines before that you can go back to Portugal, 1974, Revolution of the Carnations.

 

And in all three cases, at least in the short term, it hasn't worked. But in the case of Burma, after decades of truly heroic nonviolent action, a significant part of the mainstream opposition actually goes to violence, to armed resistance, joining the ethnic minority groups which have been doing it for decades.

 

Result estimates somewhere between 40 and 70% of the territory of the country are now controlled by the opposition. So some would say it was the armed resistance that paid. And actually it's not the only case where you have the mix of nonviolent and violent action. So you know the book I edited with my Oxford colleague Adam Roberts, Civil Resistance and Power Politics, South Africa, it was a combination of ANC and contain Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein and ira, which makes us good liberals rather uncomfortable.

 

So talk a bit more about the role of violence and perhaps the combination of violent and non-violent action.

>> Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Wow. Yeah, that's a very, very powerful question. I do think the idea. So the Hong Kong case is very interesting for this too, because it did spiral into an increased amount of militancy that was and in fact, the most sophisticated discussion of some of these issues I've seen have been in some of the writings on Hong Kong.

 

And in that case, I mean, I think there's an important distinction there. In Hong Kong, the case, the violence from the movement side was largely violence against property, not against people, and there was escalating police violence that led to it. But I think that's the place where there was the discussion.

 

It ended up in a dead end and the question was whether they were. Having the kind of mix that you were talking about that in some cases has led to change, but just in that case, the deck was stacked too much against them. It is interesting in how people remember figures that they sometimes simplify.

 

So Mandela is often remembered as a symbol of non violence, where there was a. That there were different periods in his life. And there's a very rich discussion in the literature in the United States on the civil rights movement about the importance of not simplifying the story simply to the one figure of Martin Luther King and thinking about these different kinds of things.

 

So it's a very important question. I don't know how to have trouble wrapping my mind around. I do have one of the figures that I profile to invent, who I began talking about, I've thought about him for decades now, because when I first met him, he struck me as this very sweet, grounded, purely intellectual Buddhist.

 

And he talked about how when the movement had failed in 88, he joined a guerrilla group in the forest. I think with Myanmar and perhaps with other places as well. One of the best book I've read recently on Myanmar, a book by Claire Hammond, Shadow Travels in Occupied Burma.

 

And she talked about Myanmar, maybe it's in Myanmar, I think she says she used that term occupied. And I think one of the ways is that if we think about a place as occupied by a military regime, then we think about violence toward the occupier differently than when we think about protest and resistance.

 

And so she made the argument that for Myanmar at least, and she was talking about before the coup, really for that there was a feeling in many places that this was a form of militarized occupation. So it's not answering the question, but I think it's true that that's one of the most interesting discussions right now among people studying social movements.

 

And I think it's something to continue to think about. And maybe it's the sort of the halo around 1989 may be something that has. Has just cast a shadow over the way of thinking things after that.

>> Glenn Tiffert: Florence.

>> Speaker 6: Hi, Jeff. Thank you so much for the impressive book.

 

It really brought back a lot of memories about how Hong Kong were like before 21 night, especially seeing the poster. So I'm wondering, moving on, even this movement may not have been successful. Do you see? There will be new connections that could have emerged because of that. Like, as a Hong Kong historian, I pay a lot of attention to the Hong Kong diaspora in different parts of the world.

 

So I'm wondering from your observation, do you see that these are of people could be connected to, for example other political activists or exile that have left the country originally. And if you could see that, are there any future plans to study that? Yeah. Thank you.

>> Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Thanks.

 

I'm fascinated by it. I'm fascinated by the fact that Hong Kong in the movement in the immediate moment, failing. It was a movement that was generative in terms of having tactics and modes and symbols that inspired people other places in ways. And I think it added something to the repertoire of protests and action that actually Tiananmen didn't add to a global repertoire in that way.

 

Tiananmen gave an inspiring image of the tank man and inspiring sense of bravery, but there weren't strategic things that were done differently and Hong Kong activists did that people in other parts of Asia, but also other parts of the world talked about potentially learning from even if they were as simple as putting traffic cones over tear gas canisters and things like that.

 

The diaspora. It's been fascinating. It's something I want to keep tracking. I'm interested in that. It's also interesting thinking about segments of success and failure. One thing that multiple exiles from Hong Kong have talked to me about is how inspiring they find the Tibetan diaspora. And you could think of this as an utterly example of a failed movement, but they talk about the success of the Tibetans in exile, the success of being able to pass on to generations who have never set foot in Tibet.

 

A sense that there is something special about that as a place and a worry among Hong Kongers, I think is that in part because of this totalizing narrative coming out from Beijing and sometimes reinforced outside of Beijing of a single Chinese identity, that it's harder to explain to people quite what was so special and would be lost, that how would somebody who had never been to Hong Kong feel that they were part of this continuity.

 

So I sense that it's been very interesting to talk to members of the Hong Kong diaspora about that side of it. I don't plan I'm going to stay interested. I don't plan on doing a third book on this Hong Kong story. I want to do a third book for Columbia Global Reports to complete a trilogy that would be Vigil, the Milk Tea alliance and then one on Taiwan and South Korea as places unlike these others that have been trying to struggle to keep from losing hard won democratization goals.

 

And I think the case in. Yeah, anyway, so that first I'm going to write a book on Orwell and Asia, that's my next two years. But after that, if they'll still put up with me at Columbia Global Reports, I'm going to go back to them and say, how about a third?

 

 

>> Glenn Tiffert: I wonder if you could preview your thoughts because South Korea and Taiwan have had movements that are still so fresh in our memory in the last six, eight months. What your thoughts about Taiwan and South Korea, what might be different about them and what's worth paying attention to about those movements?

 

 

>> Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Yeah, that's really. I do have this. I mean, they asked me to write a special preface to the Taiwan edition, the Chinese translation. And it ended up being 3000 words, which is for a 2500 word book. So now I'm thinking, I said, like, you probably only want to have part of this.

 

He says, no, no, we want to do that, we want to have that. So now I'm calling it the bonus track, if you used to get a CD with an extra song. So I don't know. I mean, I do think that. I do think that the Taiwan, both the Taiwan and South Korea stories, like the Central European stories, are ones that are just, if you dig into them, they remind you of just how long a kind of time frame you need to think about with these struggles that, you know, Taiwan, I think it's worth remembering Taiwan still went through a longer period when you could not talk about 228, the massacre in 1947.

 

It was a longer period than the 36 years that we haven't been able to talk about Tiananmen, that there was that long period of martial law. And at any point in there you would say, what are people thinking about when they keep wanting it to change? And South Korea with Gwangju, with all of these things, just how long it can take.

 

In South Korea. I just want to find out more about what was going on there. And I think, actually I've been kind of amazed that there isn't a more intense interest in the United States in what was happening, what happened there, how was an impeachment that stuck, martial law turned back?

 

I mean, it's very complicated, and I need to learn much more about it. That's why I need to feel like at the beginning of the learning curve. But I do think that the Taiwan story actually is the interconnectedness between. It's definitely a place where Beijing's power is more central.

 

It's, in a way, the Milk Tea alliance story. It began with Taiwan, Hong Kong and Thailand, and with Hong Kong and Taiwan. The intense interest in both of those places. I think it's just. It's an interesting example, though, of how some kinds of moves from Beijing can sometimes backfire, that the insertions toward Taiwan and Hong Kong in both cases increased a sense of local identity there.

 

And I think that's one of the stories to keep pressing about Taiwan. Luckily, there's been this profusion of good writing, including very accessible works on Taiwan. A set of very accessible books have come out. Most recently, Chris Horton has one, Ghost Nation that I'm just starting to read.

 

 

>> Glenn Tiffert: Milk Tea Alliance, Boba Edition?

>> Glenn Tiffert: Yes. Here in the front. And then, Don, thank you for your insights.

>> Speaker 7: I had a special request, and then I wanted to ask a question. So the special request, as you had mentioned, there were three powerful sentences from the documentary.

 

So I was going to ask before we adjourned today if you could maybe paraphrase those so we could feel the power of that. And then the question I had has to do with something that's happening in the moment right now in Thailand with the border skirmish or border war with Cambodia.

 

And I wanted to see what you feel might become the outcome of that. And also the fact that the military is kind of in Thailand. It kind of meddles in the governance of the country. And you mentioned that you had been working with some of the people there that are kind of protesting for more democratization and things like that.

 

So what do you think is going to evolve in that situation in Thailand, given what's happening right now?

>> Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Yeah, so Thailand is such a complex. I think Thailand is so hard to wrap our minds around or to get attention focused on it, because it's not. It's a much more subtle form of control than.

 

It's never as bad as some of the neighboring countries. But the way in which elements of the kind of status quo, protecting elite reconfigure and rework to move against the newly formed progressive parties that keep doing better in elections, but keep being edged out of actually being able to take power.

 

It's a very strange and hard to track story and hard to keep focus on. And the border skirmishes are just hard to figure out now too. I mean, I feel more comfortable in the story of resistance to the status quo, but it's also really the status quo keeps reconfiguring itself in ways that are so subtle.

 

So I think it's a very interesting place to look at, as Singapore has been for a long time of models for autocratic control that can sort of lead the world to think that it's not bad enough to be in any way a kind of pariah or a place you'd want to avoid, even can think about with Singapore, that you could go there to teach in ways that you might not think it would be doable for someplace else.

 

So there's a kind of. I think they're interesting because they are maybe kinds of autocracy that we should be more thinking about than a kind of old model. I don't remember what the lines were from the documentary that I contributed, but I know the line that stuck with me the most is, and Han Dong Fang, who was a worker leader and then spent decades in Hong Kong with the China Labor Bulletin, which is now just closed, which is one of the many sad things to be hearing about from Hong Kong.

 

I think he had the best line in it, which was basically he was saying, people were saying, should we have done this? Should we have done this movement? And there's always the second gaze discussing about movements, things like when they fail or when they're crushed, should you have just not done it?

 

And he says look, it's like you're starving and you go by a fruit tree and the fruit isn't ripe. The human thing is to eat it. And it doesn't matter if you know that the fruit isn't ripe and it's not gonna be right to eat. So he says it much better than I do.

 

But it is this kind of way in which there's something. And it is partly about the kind of emotional and symbolic and other sides of these movements that are. You can't break them down to kind of rational, completely cost benefit analysis, but that's-

>> Glenn Tiffert: Dom.

>> Speaker 8: Yeah, in the audience, there's always one person that asks an incredibly destructive question who should be ignored.

 

So I'm a candidate for that person. But I can't resist. If I may just make a statement as I look back on the conversation that you've had. There's one word that was never mentioned by anyone, either by you or by anyone in the audience. The word is technology.

 

Isn't there a risk that we drown ourselves in the kind of empathy of social movements? Everybody getting together, you know, making the right steps, you know, God bless them. Right. And yet we're living at a time in which technology is playing an absolutely crucial role in not necessarily constructive at all.

 

So either we ignore technology, so, you know, it's already nearly 5:30, so we can have dinner, or you might want to briefly mention some kind of touching between these two topics which are really vital. Technology on the one hand, social movements of protest on the other.

>> Jeffrey Wasserstrom: That's a great question.

 

I refuse to let you play the role of the destructive questioner. But I think one of the things is that technology is always important. Technologies of communication are the things I've thought about the most. And new technologies of communication always give new things to the toolkit of both maintainers of the status quo and challengers of the status quo, whether it's the printing press, the radio or television.

 

And there's always this idea that now that this is on the scene, dictators will never be able to get away with things, because will there be this, right? And it's never true, but it also is true that there's new things you can do so with technologies of control.

 

So what I think happens is technology always changes things, but it always changes things in. It's always wrong to assume that it changes things in a single liberatory direction. And probably also wrong to assume that it changes things in the antithesis of that. And I gave a talk on the book at Carleton College.

 

Tun Mint was there, he teaches there now. And I was talking. Somehow in one of the conversations this came up. And one thing that came up was drones. And I think I referred to the fact that the first. Time I became really aware of drones as surveillance objects was I went to the Tiananmen anniversary vigil in 2019 in Hong Kong, and somebody that I was with who was living in Hong Kong, as opposed to not, pulled a hat down to keep their face from being.

 

And it just didn't occur to me, like, why? Because this was being recorded. I use that example of like, okay, now you have something new, and you do, and that's totally new. What Thun told me about was in 1988, when he was a young student and he was in this protest, the army just moved in and just shot people during the protests.

 

And people didn't know where the army was massing to do that. And he had friends who were killed that way. And he said now he's getting stories back because he gets in touch with them, that there's some of the people in the resistance, they're using drones. Because his view was that the smarter people who are good at technology are largely so disgusted with the junta that they're going on the other side.

 

They're using drones to get information about where troops are massing. So that. And this is maybe in the Hong Kong way of be water, be flexible, that people who were going to protest in one place where before drones they would have been shot now are just regrouping and going somewhere else.

 

So that's just one other example of this technology that both empowers, and we can think about that with China. Now, the surveillance in the state, although it's also personal surveillance, but there's also things that percolate back into the country through technological forms of communication. So it changes everything, but it doesn't change in a unidirectional way.

 

So it's exactly the kind of thing that shouldn't. Should be mentioned at some point in an hour and a half of discussing something like this. But it's not gonna move in just one direction.

>> Glenn Tiffert: So we're almost done setting up for the reception, and Jeff is going to hang around after the talk, so if you'd like to engage him, please do at that time.

 

But before we adjourn, I want to sort of, in the spirit of Don's question, raise something that has only been mentioned peripherally, and that is Singapore. Where does Singapore sit in all of this? Because you're talking about countries that are in that region experiencing wave after wave of democratization.

 

Some of it failed, tell me. Or in the classic sort of undergraduate examination, Singapore discuss.

>> Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Singapore discuss. Yeah, I think Singapore is incredibly significant. I think Singapore is important in having been a model for the Chinese Communist Party to think about possible futures at a time when, you know, if there was again, going back to this idea, like, why didn't they get the memo, you know, in 1989, about the future being a post communist future?

 

Some of the one place that there was a great deal of interest in was Singapore, which had somehow combined the kind of idea of traditional cultural values of a sort with one party rule with being an attractive locale investment. And I think if we look at the moves that are being made right now in Hong Kong, there's an idea, an effort to try to turn it into some kind of a counterpart to Singapore.

 

They're even like quite specifically saying, we need to have big mega events, concert tours and things that you will. So we can go, there are various ways to spin this. I'll just mention one thing, just to end on a somewhat more playful note, because I said music is important in the book.

 

One of the things that made a lot of people of a certain group in Thailand upset when the coup happened was that Taylor Swift, who had never canceled a concert up to that point, was supposed to play her first concert in Bangkok. And after the coup, she canceled it.

 

And one thing that people struggling for democracy in Thailand have said is, when will we be the kind of country that Taylor Swift can come and play in? And when Peter, who was the head of the Move Forward Party that got, did better than any other group in the elections, the last round of elections, then was banned from politics when he looked like he might be able to form a government.

 

And Taylor Swift said she was looking for new places to go on her latest tour. He went on social media and said to Twitter, said, hey, Taylor, big fan here. Now that Thailand is moving toward democracy, it's going to be a democracy. Come here and I will do a duet with you as the new prime minister.

 

Fortunately, it didn't happen, but the reason why it comes around, if you were in Thailand, the place you could go still to see Taylor Swift west of Singapore.

>> Glenn Tiffert: Interesting.

>> Speaker 8: That's great.

>> Glenn Tiffert: Wow. I hope people in Washington are listening. I want to alert you. Thank you very much for joining us today.

 

I want to alert you to USCW's next event on August 13, entitled Risk Analysis in an Uncertain Age. It's an event of a very different flavor in which our colleague, Professor Elizabeth Pate Cornell from the Management Science and Engineering Department, who's really a titan in the field of risk science, is going to talk talk about how we integrate really structured, systematic risk analysis into our conversations about a range of problems so that we can reason through them more systematically and make better decisions.

 

Many of the issues we grapple with, particularly with respect to China, when you think of, for example, risk of war, fiscal time bombs, supply chain risk, pandemic risk, market risk, could benefit from a more systematic analysis. And so I hope you'll join us for this illuminating discussion. And I wanna thank Jeff for joining us today and you joining.

 

Please give him a round of applause.