Wasserstrom, Jeffrey
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Wasserstrom frames Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong as sharing a sustained personality cult (a departure from the post-Mao norm of not publishing a living leader's collected speeches) and a shared commitment to Communist Party rule, but as near-opposites in temperament: Mao reveled in chaos and mass mobilization (his favorite fictional figure was the rebellious Monkey King), while Xi prizes order, stability, and — unusually for a Communist leader — open veneration of Confucius. He unpacks Confucianism itself as fundamentally about stable, reciprocal hierarchy (father/son, husband/wife, ruler/minister, older/younger brother — even "egalitarian" relationships like brotherhood were hierarchical) rather than progress, making it philosophically at odds with Marxism's linear, struggle-based view of history; Xi's genius, in Wasserstrom's account, is refusing to choose between contradictory strands of Chinese greatness (Confucius, Mao, even the anti-Confucian First Emperor) and fusing them into one nationalist narrative. He traces China's civil-service exam tradition and Confucian belief that "people are pretty much alike at birth but become differentiated via learning" to a durable cultural premium on education and meritocracy, complicated by Mencius's doctrine that Heaven withdraws its mandate from unjust rulers — a built-in theological justification for rebellion — and notes that anger at nepotism undermining meritocracy (not just calls for abstract democracy) was a primary driver of the 1989 protests.
On Tiananmen, Wasserstrom (who was in China in 1986 for smaller "warm-up" protests, partly sparked by security guards stopping students from dancing at a Jan and Dean concert) argues the 1989 movement is widely misunderstood in the West as a bid to overthrow communism, when it more closely resembled Prague Spring — an attempt to pressure the Party to live up to its own stated reform ideals ("socialism with a human face"), fueled by anger at corruption, nepotism, and incomplete liberalization, coinciding symbolically with the 70th anniversary of the 1919 May Fourth Movement and the death of reformist leader Hu Yaobang. The movement escalated once independent labor unions began joining students — a combination the Party has never tolerated — leading to the June 3rd-4th military crackdown. He discusses the "Tank Man" photograph as the reason the regime cannot rehabilitate the event's narrative: it depicts the People's Liberation Army looking like an occupying force, the opposite of its founding mythology as national protector; the man was never tried, likely killed, and simply disappeared, a pattern repeated with a 2022 lone protester (the Sitong Bridge banner-hanger) whose fate is also unknown. Wasserstrom argues the Party learned from Tiananmen's visual failure and has since worked hard to avoid iconic images of repression (using police rather than soldiers, rubber bullets and tear gas rather than live rounds during the 2014 and 2019 Hong Kong protests, and banning nearly all photography from Xinjiang's detention camps).
On censorship, Wasserstrom builds on Margaret Roberts's "fear, friction, and flooding" framework — direct threats/punishment (fear) mainly target high-profile figures rather than average citizens; friction makes information technically accessible but effortful (VPNs, slower connections); flooding drowns out unwanted narratives with volume. He notes the counterintuitive fact that books like 1984 have been legally sold in China since 1985 (Brave New World too, though a Hong Kong "Dystopian Trilogy" box set has all references to China's Mao-era surveillance scalpeled out of mainland editions) — general dystopian/totalitarian theory is tolerated, but material specifically and traceably about Chinese leaders or events is heavily policed. He argues China increasingly resembles Brave New World's control-through-pleasure-and-distraction more than 1984's naked coercion (citing William Gibson's "Disneyland with the death penalty" description of Singapore, an explicit model for Chinese governance strategies), except in Xinjiang and Tibet, where control remains crudely 1984-style, and except during COVID lockdowns, when even cosmopolitan Shanghai experienced an "Orwellian moment." He frames the post-Tiananmen social compact as an implicit trade: the Party would deliver more consumer choice and private-life autonomy in exchange for no political choice — a bargain now strained by slowing growth and by a global (not just Chinese) tightening around surveillance and private life, including from tech companies, that makes "more choices" a murkier promise than it was.
On Xi personally, Wasserstrom stresses how little is actually known — no defectors, no unscripted interviews, only curated self-presentation (name-dropping Hemingway and Victor Hugo, the latter beloved in China since his 1861 denunciation of the Anglo-French destruction of the Old Summer Palace) — and situates Xi's anxiety about "not being manly enough," a phrase from a leaked speech blaming Soviet collapse partly on insufficiently forceful leadership, as a shared instinct with Putin's horror at the loss of Soviet-era territory. He connects this to China's foundational "century of humiliation" narrative (1840s-1940s), which both the Nationalist and Communist parties built their legitimacy on resisting, and which shapes Xi's current posture in the US-China trade war: neither side wants to be seen as capitulating, tariffs escalated to 145%/125% with China cutting rare-earth exports, and Wasserstrom cautions that US-China dynamics are never purely bilateral — the Sino-Soviet split and 9/11 both dramatically reset the relationship via third-party events neither Washington nor Beijing controlled, and today the EU, India, Japan, and South Korea are all live variables. He assesses that Xi is less likely to move rashly on Taiwan while he can appear as a stabilizing global force, but more likely to escalate from a position of domestic weakness or desperation.
On Hong Kong, Wasserstrom lays out the 1984 Sino-British "One Country, Two Systems" deal (a 50-year arrangement, 1997-2047) explicitly framed by Beijing at the time as a model Taiwan should watch — a message later inverted into Hong Kong protesters' 2014 banner "Taiwan beware, Hong Kong's today could be Taiwan's tomorrow." He traces Beijing's early restraint (Hong Kong then hosted the PRC's only globally top-ranked universities and mattered disproportionately to the economy) giving way after the 2008 Olympics to increasing impatience with difference, culminating in the 2019 extradition-law protests — the largest by population share he cites (up to 2 million of 7.5 million residents) — which snowballed into a referendum on rule of law itself once the government refused to hold police accountable while protesters (mostly targeting property, not people) periodically apologized for their own excesses. He frames generational impatience (younger people bear more of the future cost of gradual decline) as a recurring logic across Hong Kong, Thai, and climate movements, and stresses that protest movements are rarely unprecedented — they draw on scripts and networks built by earlier "failed" protests (1986 feeding 1989; 2012/2014 Hong Kong feeding 2019) — while conceding the 2019-20 Hong Kong movement did not achieve its aims and the national security law's effects look irreversible for now, tempered by the notion (via Rebecca Solnit and the idea of "the other China" per Geremie Barmé) that a more cosmopolitan, pluralistic version of Chinese identity persists in diaspora and in movements elsewhere that borrowed Hong Kong's "be water" tactics, "from Minneapolis to Minsk."
On Mao's rise and the Great Leap Forward, Wasserstrom traces the split between the peasant-centered revolutionary theory Mao developed after 1927 (breaking from Marxist orthodoxy that revolution begins in cities) and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, whose eventual battlefield loss he attributes partly to perceived elite self-dealing and abandonment of stated ideals — a disillusionment dynamic later echoed in the CCP's own legitimacy story. He describes the Great Leap Forward's 30-45 million deaths as driven partly by a climate of fear in which officials falsified success reports rather than report failure to the "great leader," compounded by Mao's utopian impatience and rivalry dynamics following Khrushchev's de-Stalinization. On Mao's rehabilitation today, he notes Xi's formulation that China's "first 30 years" (Mao) and "second 30 years" (Deng-era reform) should not be used to criticize each other, allowing Xi to claim the mantle of the Mao who "stood up to America" (invoking the 1953 Korean War "we will never yield" speech) while implicitly discarding the Mao of street mobilization and chaos — continuing Chiang Kai-shek's one-party, Confucian-inflected vision more than Mao's own revolutionary instincts, a synthesis Wasserstrom sees as defining Xi's entire project.
Excerpts
On why the "Tank Man" photograph remains the regime's most dangerous image:
“I think the reason why it's so considered so toxic by the regime is because it just shows the People's Liberation Army looking like an invading force, not like a stabilizing force... Whatever the tanks did to him or not, the main takeaway from it would be this idea that there were lines of tanks in a city. The image was of the government as having lost the mandate to rule.”
On Margaret Roberts's framework for understanding Chinese censorship as more than blunt banning:
“There's fear, which is this direct censorship thing, like banning things. But there's also friction... you just make it harder for people to get answers... And then flooding. You just fill the airwaves and the media with versions of the stories that you want the people to believe.”
On why the seemingly impossible sometimes succeeds, and why that matters for how to read failed protest movements:
“Protests are often preceded by other protests that may seem like dead ends, but actually provide people with the skills and scripts and repertoires to then carry out things on a larger scale after that... it can seem irrational to try to do something after the last three times people have tried to do it have failed. But then occasionally, history shows that the third time or the fifth time or the 20th time actually does succeed.”