Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao

The following is a conversation with Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian of modern China. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jeffrey Wasserstrom.

You've compared Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong in the past. What are the parallels between the two leaders, and where do they differ? Xi Jinping, of course, is the current leader of China for the past 12 years, and Mao Zedong was the communist leader of China from 1949 to 1976. So what are the commonalities, what are the differences? So the biggest commonality of them is that they're both the subject of personality cults, and that Mao was the center of a very intensely felt one from 1949 to 1976. And when he died, there was tremendous outpouring of grief, even among people who had objectively suffered enormously because of his policies. Xi Jinping is the first leader in China since him who has had a sustained personality cult of the kind where if you walk into a bookstore in China, the first thing you see are books by him, collections of his speeches. And when Mao was alive, you might've thought that's sort of what happened with Communist Party leaders in China. But after Mao's death, there was such an effort to not have that kind of personality cult that there was a tendency to not publish the speeches of a leader until they were done being in power.

So there's some degree, as you said, that Xi Jinping espouses the ideas of Communism and the ideas of Confucianism. So let's go all the way back. You wrote that in order to understand the China of today, we have to study its past. So the China of today celebrates ideas of Confucius, a Chinese philosopher who lived 2,500 years ago. Can you tell me about the ideas of Confucius? 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.

Boy, so many contradictions always with Stalin, he was a communist but also a nationalist, right? That contradiction, it also permeates through Mao and all the way to Xi Jinping. But if you can linger on Confucius for a little bit, you write that one of the most famous statements of Confucianism is the belief that, quote, "People are pretty much alike at birth, but become differentiated via learning." So this sets the tradition that China places a high value on education and on meritocracy. Can you speak to this Confucius's idea of education, and how much does it permeate to the China of today? 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 was 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, a relatively positive view of human nature and the sort of changeability of humans through education.

I hope it's okay if we jump around through history a bit and find the threads that connect everything. Since you mentioned Tiananmen Square, you have studied a lot of student protests throughout Chinese history, throughout history in general, what happened in Tiananmen Square? So in 1989, this massive movement took place, the story of it's 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 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, that 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.

Can we talk about that, who's now called the Tank Man, the man that stood in front of the row of tanks? This was on June 5th in Tiananmen Square. What do we know about him? What do you think about him, the symbolism? It's an amazing symbol. 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...

How much censorship is there in modern-day China by the Chinese government? There's a lot of censorship. 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 direct censorship thing, like banning things. But there's also friction. She has three Fs, 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.

You mentioned that we don't know the degree to which this change has to do with Xi Jinping, or the party apparatus. And that question going back to Confucius of hierarchy and how does the power within this very strict one state work, what can we say, what do we know about the structure of this Communist party apparatus? How much internal power struggle is there? How much power does Xi Jinping actually have? Is there any insight we have into the system? James Palmer, who worked in Beijing as a journalist, and now is an editor at Foreign Policy, wrote an important piece a few years ago about just, we should really be straight about what a black box of the Chinese elite politics are. And really not try to pretend we know more than we do. We did used to have more of a sense of these ideological factions, but also partly about different views of how much tinkering there should be with the economy, and things like that. And they were also basic, partly based on personalities and personal ties, but we did have a sense you could map out these kinds of rival power bases and things. And we just have much less of a sense of that under Xi Jinping. It's very hard to know other than this small group around him, how it works. We don't have a major defector who says, yeah, this is how Xi Jinping... We have Xi Jinping self-presentation, and a lot of things that are then said about him.

There's a degree to which I think there's some confusion about a couple of things. One is when there's a sense that Trump is uniquely tough on the Chinese Communist Party, he has periodically said things about praising Xi Jinping as a leader, even sort of having praising Xi Jinping's strength and things. So I think for some ways, for the personality cult of Xi Jinping, some of this is useful, because the story that the Chinese Communist Party, they need to tell a story about why they deserve to keep ruling. And one of their stories is that because the world is a dangerous place, and there's not enough respect for China. So when there's very tough talk about China coming out of the White House, that's useful. And then the other part is about Xi Jinping being just the right person to have at the helm. And when there are discussions, when there's praise for him and his showing toughness, that also works well. So I think the argument among, at least some China specialists, is to say the Chinese Communist Party likes predictability, and Xi Jinping seems to like predictability in particular. And Donald Trump clearly isn't a predictable figure. So there might be a way in which this is unsettling. But I think the other part of it is the Chinese Communist Party wants under Xi Jinping, Xi Jinping wants to gain more allies around the world, to be seen with more respect around the world. And at the moment is in a position where he can present himself as an orderly, thoughtful gradualist figure. In some ways, I think as much as there's tension between the two capitals, there's a way that things are going in a way that benefits Xi Jinping, and can conceive it. That doesn't explain what their personal relationship is, and how they actually see each other when they're in the room together.

But anyway, let me, if I can lay out this particular complexity we're in now, this trade war between us and China. Now, you're not an economist. In fact, you think deeply about the history of peoples and the history of China. You think about culture, you think about protests and the movements and so on. And there's some degree to which this trade war is less about the economics. Now that layer is also very important and we could discuss it, but there's also a deeply cultural standoff almost happening here, which would be interesting. So in April, as people know, Trump escalated a trade war with China using tariffs, raising them on Chinese imports to 145%. Xi Jinping then responded by raising tariffs on US goods to 125%, and suspending exports on certain rare earth minerals and magnets to the US. The Chinese government also indicated, it would limit the import of Hollywood films, and restricted certain American companies from operating in China. Now after that, Xi Jinping broke silence on April 11th, and again on April 14th, and since, basically saying that China is not backing down and positioned himself in China as the "responsible superpower," that promotes, as you were saying, the promoter of the reasonable multilateral global trading framework in a stable global supply chain. He said "For over 70 years, China's progress has been built on self-reliance and hard work, never on handoffs from others, and it remains unafraid of any unjust oppression. Also, he said there are no winners in a trade war and going against the world will only lead to self-isolation. This was all set as part of a tour of Southeast Asia, and he was calling on China and the European Union to defend international rules opposing unilateral bullying. At the same time, I saw that China's escalating internal propaganda, including interestingly, it would be nice to talk to you about it, the use of the Mao Zedong 1953 speech during the Korean War where he says, "We will never yield." My question is, with this standoff, who do you think will blink first? Where does this go?

But since you brought it up, we'll talk about Hong Kong, but let's talk about Taiwan and maybe there's some parallels there. Given Xi Jinping's emphasis on the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and the unification with Taiwan being a crucial part of his vision for China, what do you think are the chances? And how willing is he to use force to annex, to forcibly gain control over Taiwan in the coming years? I'll frame it in a way that I think does lead into talking about Hong Kong, because I think these are connected issues. In 1984, the year, not the book this time, that's when a deal was struck basically, between London and Beijing over what would happen to Hong Kong. So Hong Kong Island became a British colony at the end of the first Opium war, the 1840s. And then Kowloon Peninsula near there became a British colony in 1860 after the second Opium war. But then there was a large amount of territory of what we now think of as Hong Kong, called the New Territories, that became under British control in 1898, but was not a colony. It was a 99-year lease.

2047 is 50 years from the 1997 handover that you were talking about with Hong Kong. On top of that, 2049 is a hundred years from Mao taking power. It feels like at that moment, China could take Taiwan, because it does seem that there's a kind of value for history in China, and they take these days very seriously. On the other hand, as you have studied, there is some tensions, and displeasure, and protests, some of the biggest in human history in Hong Kong. And so put all of that together, and so many possible trajectories of human history could happen here. Yeah, I'm particularly interested in youth movements. And one of the things, I think generation is such an important factor. And people know that generation's important, but somehow, sometimes people think that if you divide people up into economic groups, you divide people up into a racial or ethnic class, that groups, that that somehow is more tangible. But I think with things like the Hong Kong protests, that there was a process of what was seen as mainlandization, of Beijing just moving to make the things that were really distinctive about Hong Kong less distinctive, and minimizing the differences. And this process sped up dramatically after the 2019 protests. And there was just partly with the distraction of COVID and the distraction of the world, there was this imposition of this national security law that basically did away with the differences.

Since you mentioned the Long March and the unlikely coming to power with the Communist Party, let's go back. We began comparing Xi Jinping and Mao. Let's go back to Mao. How did Mao come to power? The road to Mao coming to power, we need to first say that China was under rule by emperors until 1911, overthrown by an upheaval that was partly by people who wanted to change China into a republic, but also some people who wanted to get rid of the last dynasty was a group of Manchu-ruling families. So they saw them as ethnic outsiders. So it was a strange combination of ethnic nationalists who wanted China back under the control of Han Chinese. Other people who thought the time for rule by emperors was over and wanted to establish a republic. And Sun Yat-sen became a provisional president of this newly formed Republic of China. But then-

If you look out into the 21st century, what are some of the best possible things that could happen in the region and globally with China at the center of the world stage? What are the possible trajectories you could see culturally, economically, politically, in terms of partnerships and all this kind of stuff? It's such such a hard moment to be imagining these things. I've long wanted to see a return of China to this path toward a more ... I wasn't one of the people who imagined that there would be this convergence of China's emergence into evolution into a liberal capitalist kind of country. But I'd love to see a return to that more kind of tolerance of diversity within China, variations within China, of more space for civil society. And it's a hard time to even imagine that, because Hong Kong kind of represented that place that was somehow within. It was an amazing thing, I think looking backward, sorry, rather than forward. I think it's really extraordinary how much leeway was given to Hong Kong for a period there. That was really special. No Communist Party-run country had ever had a city within it that had as free a press as Hong Kong had then, as much tolerance for protests.