Historical Battles: Rewriting China's Past to Shape the Future
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Hello and welcome to another edition of Barbarians at the Gate. I'm Jeremiah Jenny, broadcasting high above, well, moderately above the streets of Geneva. Joining me from the other side of the Eurasian landmass, such as it is, down in the heart of Bangkok, how are things in Thailand, David?

Very nice. You may feel, you may hear a lot of taxi and traffic noise outside. I saw some tourists just an hour or so ago

with their cameras out and of all the things you could take pictures of or videos in Bangkok, it's the traffic that amazes the tourists. It's like Beijing, only worse. So everyone's always saying, "Look at this phalanx of motorcycles and trucks," and what they call the tuk-tuks, the little very dangerous sort of... Now they're sort of e-vehicles, but

weaving in and out of traffic. And then you can also take motorcycles, which I've done once and I told my wife never again. It was the most terrifying experience in my life. So for me, I spent so much time in China that surrealistic traffic doesn't seem like an attraction for me, but the tourists here really find it amazing.

I'm also realizing a lot of other similarities with China, which is the government's kind of invisible here. You don't really see it that much. It's not the sort of overriding presence in the people's lives here with posters everywhere. But they do worship the king, or the king is worshipped.

And we went to a movie the other night, and I was surprised to have this film at the very beginning in praise of the king that was like a choir. It was almost like a pan to Chairman Mao, showing all his contributions and his sacrifices for society. I said, whoa. And I've been told by the U.S. Embassy here, do not make fun of the king. Do not make jokes. It is not funny.

It's a nice place to visit, but I'm not sure I would want to live here.

Well, I mean, I spent some time in Thailand, and when that national anthem plays, you stop what you're doing. And if you don't, you get some side eyes, or even worse sometimes, particularly in some of the smaller towns. With us today, joining David and I, is Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chancellor's Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, a leading expert on modern Chinese history and authoritarian government. He's written a number of books, including Vigil, Hong Kong on the Brink,

He's also one of the authors behind China in the 21st Century, which everyone needs to know. He is perhaps one of the greater examples of a public intellectual, somebody from the history field who has really worked very hard throughout his career to make history and the study of China accessible to everyone.

a broader audience. Jeff, thank you once again for joining us on the podcast. How are you? I'm really glad to be joining you. And I'm from Irvine, California, which is as far from Bangkok in many ways as imaginable. You won't hear any traffic noises outside. But it's interesting. If I could just jump in with David, his comment. I was thinking to be on this show, I was thinking about the first time I went to China.

And one thing, when I went to China the first time in 1986, you could go for days without weeks, without seeing a picture of the most powerful person in China. There just wasn't an image. You could kind of forget about Deng Xiaoping.

And one of the things that happened, and this was true under Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin too, you weren't always aware of who the most powerful figure was, and they weren't seen as sacred figures. But things started to shift. The last times that I went to China in the 2010s, you didn't forget that Xi Jinping was in charge. And you didn't see it quite the way

You know, you see images of the king in Thailand. But there was a sense of not being able to forget that. And you also have some ways in which the national anthem comes up, you know, the national anthem. And when you're talking about policing that, that's one of the things that's been happening in Hong Kong. You know, that's been one of the ways that people are trying that the central government and its collaborators in Hong Kong are trying to enforce things.

So there's this odd kind of convergence. And I've sometimes, I've thought that Xi Jinping might have a Lais Majesté envy of sorts, you know, that there is that

ability to police things. And if you look back at it, the first time I started paying attention to Thailand, which is part of what in the end led me to take a couple trips there in the last couple of years. On the last one, it was great hanging out with you, David, there. The first thing that really got me paying attention to Thailand was when the booksellers

from Hong Kong, that one of them was spirited over the border from Thailand onto the mainland, Kway Min Hai. The reason why they got in trouble was really about these gossipy books about the private lives of the equivalent of a royal family. So there was a way in which I think we can think about, as different as these two places are, there are odd

kinds of intersections or convergences. And I gave a talk at the Thai Foreign Correspondents Club, and I could basically say whatever I wanted about Xi Jinping, but it was clear that I couldn't say whatever I wanted about the King of Thailand. And if things were reversed and I were in another setting, if I were in Singapore, I could... Shabani Matani, who I ran into in Singapore a couple of years ago, said it was really interesting to track what you can say and can't say

in different foreign correspondence clubs because in Singapore, you could say whatever you wanted really about the Thai king or Xi Jinping, but not about the Singapore leaders. Whereas in,

In Hong Kong, the FCC could have somebody on even now to talk about Singapore in a kind of tell-all way. So there is this kind of difference of what you can say where, which I think is very relevant to what you want to talk to me about today. I think your point about how maybe Xi Jinping has a little bit of envy over what the...

Thai government can do about criticizing the Thai king. The new patriotic education law came into effect this year in 2024. And this law, in some ways, kind of codifies trends that we had already been seeing in terms of crackdowns on academia, journalists, writers. What was

permitted discourse in talking about China's past. It seems like Xi Jinping often frames the idea of historical nihilism and patriotic education in terms of national security. This is something that's not just, please don't hurt my feelings, but something he really sees as a threat to his rule. Yeah, it's a great question. And it's something that I think, I mean, historians, we have to be thinking about a lot. And I guess there's a...

A way to think about it is that there's the uses that regimes always make of, you know, positive stories about the past as a way of justifying their rule. And, you know, we saw a real emphasis on the kind of optimistic telling positive stories about China's past in the opening ceremonies to the Olympics in, say, 2008.

And there it sort of skipped over the way of dealing with the things that didn't fit into that narrative. We're just kind of skipping over it. So you jumped from Zheng He's voyages basically up to moonshots, and you sort of like left aside this messy stuff. But there's been an increasing amount of policing of how you handle that messy stuff. And it used to be that you could say, oh, there are a few subjects you just

have to be very careful talking about. There was a period when it was, if you went to China and you were giving a public talk, be careful about the three Ts, Tiananmen, Tibet, Taiwan. And now it's almost, or it started to become in the last decade, a question of sort of a proliferation of the topics that might be considered sensitive. And I mean, I became aware of this on one of my last trips to Taiwan.

to China, which was a while ago, because I haven't been to the mainland since 2018, and I haven't been to Hong Kong since 2019. So I haven't been to any part of the PRC since 2019. But in the mid-2010s, I was going to give a talk on the Boxer Rebellion, and I thought, well, it's kind of nice. I don't have to be concerned the way when I'm talking about 20th century student protests or the post-49 era, what I can't say. And I heard that it was actually...

kind of dicey to get permission for me to give talk on the Boxer Rebellion because I was talking about its legacy and images of it. And my host said, we had to assure the powers that be that you weren't going to bring up kind of contemporary arguments about people who were critical of kind of hyper-nationalism using the kind of tag of boxers. There was sort of a debate online at that

point where some people were saying if China's closing itself off,

it shouldn't close itself off because that would be like going back to the boxers. We don't want to do that. And some other people would criticize them back online. And this occasionally happened throughout the early 2000s saying, well, you're going to call me being like the boxers. Well, what do you want to be like? Do you want to be like the Bagbo Lianjun? Do you want to be like the eight allied armies? Are you supporting the people who kept China down in 1900? So even something about like...

talking about 1900 was suddenly, or not so suddenly, but was more sensitive than it had been.

Yeah, I would give a talk at this high school in Beijing. It was an international school, but with a lot of students who were Chinese parents and had foreign passports. And every year I would give this lecture, a series of lectures on the boxers. And it's pretty standard, a similar lecture I would give to my university students, but just a little bit for a high school audience. But one year during COVID, I gave the entire series online.

And apparently one of the Chinese parents was listening to my particular take on the boxers, which I don't really think is that controversial. It's sort of a mishmash of Escherich and all the other people I've ever read. The teacher couldn't remember the exact thing I had said, but apparently this parent threw a complete and total fit over the propaganda that I was giving them about the boxers. It was probably something along the lines of maybe the boxers...

weren't that nationalistic if they were killing so many people who were actually Chinese. But I'm just speculating here. It seems to me that there's this concerted effort right now to not just erase parts of history, but also to sort of revise almost all of it.

along the lines that they have in mind. I'm thinking of the newest agenda of merging Marxism with Confucianism and trying to... Another way of asserting the 5,000-year idea that it's not just 1949 and then everything was... But actually, they all work together in a beautiful, organic way.

way. But it seems to me that part of the reason for this new sort of, I guess, emphasis on control of history, which has always been there, but it's taken on a sort of a new role now, that part of it is a kind of an uncomfortable awareness that there's another, perhaps more realistic view of Chinese history that's going on outside of China, Jeff, in your sphere, and Jeremiah, in your sphere of

of scholars, both Chinese and foreign, that are telling the story of the Boxers, telling the story of the dynasties and so forth. And China realized that they are trying to establish a different narrative. And it behooves them to keep those other kind of noxious

annoying facts out of this new narrative that they're trying to create. But what strikes me is that this is a fool's errand, that there's no possible way this can succeed. But I think they think that they can. So I guess to make sure that I'm being historically accurate about the recent past, I'll say, you know, we can both overestimate and underestimate how much things changed when Xi Jinping took power. And I think the intensity of some of the

concerns has grown under Xi Jinping. But when I realized, when I was thinking about the boxers and thinking about... I brought up the opening ceremony of the Olympics, which had that mashing together of Confucius, sort of celebrating everything you could pull together from the imperial period as well as the current period. And I think it was 2007, there was a magazine that was shut down or the writer got in trouble about the

the way of specifically talking about the boxers, the freezing point controversy. So there was this, some of that was percolating then and can go back even earlier, but there's an intensity to it in the period of Xi. Some of it might have to do with what scholars abroad are doing, the idea of the new Qing history, the idea of at the same time that I think

the Communist Party has shifted from saying everything about the pre-revolutionary period was bad except for peasant rebellions were good, were like proto-good, to saying there were good things about the... Of course, there were problems with the imperial system, but there were things we can be proud about, period when China was one of the great powers in the world and emphasizing the evils of imperialism that really...

So there's been a sort of, you know, over time, a shift toward emphasizing the evils of imperialism even more than the evils of kind of feudalism and things, as it was talked about.

And at the same time that's going on, one of the trends or the most important trend in scholarship outside of China, I think about the pre-1911 period, is to say we just shouldn't routinely describe things before the founding of the Republic of China as China. We should talk about them as different empires.

that ruling families had that overlap with the space that is now geography that is now China, but perhaps operated radically differently. So getting away from this idea of kind of dynastic cycles of enduring China that happens to be ruled by a different set of people at different times that we call dynasties, instead saying, well, actually,

From 1644 till 1911, there was this Qing Empire that was a Manchu family that was not just Manchus that came in and

Sinified themselves, became completely stepping into the roles of Chinese emperors before them, but rather created something that was a fusion of some elements of the places above the Great Wall that they came from.

and what was preexisting and worked with a preexisting bureaucracy, but weren't just a kind of continuation of China, but rather to use the term Qing empire period. And they dealt with the relationship between different ethnicities very differently than the People's Republic of China does now. And so you have this kind of history that says in

instead of thinking, instead of talking about a singular country, instead thinking about these different periods. And in a way,

there's something unusual about how we teach Chinese history often or how we often have outside of this endurance because you don't typically say, "I'm teaching a class on modern Italian history. So let's begin with the Roman Empire and treat it as the Roman Empire got bigger and it got smaller, but still there's the... " We don't think about it that way. We don't assume that we

that we don't kind of project onto the Romans that they're basically like Italians now. We don't imagine them eating the same foods. We think of it as different and you could do the same thing with Greece, with Egypt. You can think about all these. We're more attentive to disruptions and alterations. And with China,

Perhaps partly because of the endurance of the written characters, perhaps because of figures like Confucius that you can track forward and you can say, okay, well, most of the followers of Confucius are still in this kind of Sinophone world. Whereas when you think about Plato and Aristotle, you don't think, oh, well, the Greeks are particularly in touch with them. It's just, yeah, anyway, so that's a rambling side of getting into this.

I'll tell you, that's a theme that I have talked about in many lectures and in my own classes and occasionally over a beer or two with academics in China. And it has led to many, occasionally, some rather pointed critiques of that idea that to destabilize the linkage between modern China and the historical dynasties, of course, opens up a whole sort of issues, not the least of which are territorial issues.

with my own specialty being the Qing Empire, that one in particular, as you noted with the new Qing historians and the grenades that have been lobbed in their general direction periodically over the last few years, touching some particular nerves.

Moving from the boxers to something that happened a lot more recently, you wrote this great book, Vigil Hong Kong on the Brink. And this was about the protests in Hong Kong a few years ago and how Beijing responded to them. And now we have a certain amount, not a lot, but a little bit of distance between those protests and then we've got COVID and now we're kind of on the other side.

I was wondering if maybe you could take a look back at that period that you wrote about and thinking about this issue of control of history, control of the narrative. Do you feel like, you know, these were ideas, the fear or the anxieties of historical nihilism that had been going on or been building for a while, but do you feel that the events in Hong Kong in the previous decade, the ones that you wrote about, have

What role did they perhaps play in changing how the party thought about the past and how it might influence or inspire actors in the present?

Yeah, I'd love to talk about this. I've got a new edition of Vigil is coming out just in the UK and Europe with Min-Huei Jones, who started Mekong Review, has a new imprint and he's bringing it out. It has the 2020 book preserved, but then with a new foreword by Amy Hawkins of The Guardian and a new afterword by Chris Chung, who was a journalist in Hong Kong who stayed there up till the early 2020s and then moved to London.

There are a few ways into this. I mean, one of the ways to think about it is it's very much related to history. The first part of the Hong Kong protests in the 2020s was about pushing back in 2012 against patriotic education, the first part of the 2010s. That's the story. And there's an organization, and it's an amazing story. Still, it's these kids in their mid-teens, including Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow, who

are concerned that a new style of civic education and patriotic education could be the thin wedge toward a kind of mainlandization of the city they love. And so they organize protests and they're joined by sympathetic people, I mean, their peers, but also sympathetic people who are older than they are.

And amazingly, the Beijing-aligned chief executive of Hong Kong blinks, and basically they back down. And so this is a successful movement in 2012 that gets the idea of bringing in this new kind of patriotic education table. And then there's the 2014 Umbrella Movement, which is about trying to get a change in how the chief executive is elected. And that

doesn't succeed in doing that, but succeeds in getting a lot of people mobilized onto the streets. 2019, the protests begin with an idea of pushing back against an extradition law, which again is seen as, in this case, not even a thin edge to a wedge, but

the wedge that if anybody who initially was going to be a murder case that would be taken to the mainland to be tried, but if political cases could be taken to the mainland to be tried, if journalists could be taken to the mainland to be tried, then Hong Kong doesn't have its independent legal system. Hong Kong was never democratic under the British. It wasn't democratic, fully democratic at any point

in its history, but there was a degree of independence of the courts. And even in the beginning of 2019, that was still there. Even when there were protests in 2019, if people would be arrested, they would then be out on bail and they'd be talking to the press the next day. And that was so different from the mainland. So it was still different. So anyway, then the protests get crushed. And then in part under the cover of COVID, but for other reasons, the national security law gets imposed.

And what we've seen since then is the things that the protests we're fighting against are imposed. Patriotic education is essentially in. There's not the kind of independence of courts. There have been people who've been waiting for verdicts and trials for multiple years. There's very little doubt that they'll be convicted. The legal system, while still different in certain ways, looks a lot like the mainland system. And the press...

Though, again, still with some differences. The Internet's still freer from all reports and things, but still there's a sense of a tightening grip. And some of the symbols of this, of what's happened, have been historically related. The most obvious ones to talk about are related to Tiananmen. There was a June 4th museum in Hong Kong that was unimaginable on the mainland. Now it's relocated to New York.

There were bookstores that have become more careful about what they're carrying. One of the best of them, Bleak House Books, closed up shop, could deal with it, has reopened in upstate New York. You have...

a very interesting kind of way in which things that used to be happening on the mainland, and maybe this goes to your point, David, about the kind of impossibility of controlling these things, they can then open up and the discussions can be taken place in the diaspora and other places. Jifeng Books, my favorite Shanghai bookstore for a long time, closed up in Shanghai. There wasn't the space for the kinds of discussions, free ideas there.

It's opened in Washington, D.C. I'm going there in a couple of weeks and I'm very excited about that. It used to be that if you went to Hong Kong, you could connect with discussions that couldn't happen on the mainland. And now...

It's going to places completely outside the PRC to connect with the kinds of discussions you used to be able to have in Hong Kong. And I do think history comes into this kind of thing, and there has been more. And the strangest part of the Hong Kong story with history is that now the government doesn't want you to talk about Hong Kong having been a colonial, having been a colony of Britain.

which is hard to wrap your mind around because the evils of imperialism were supposed to be about colonization. But it was what the reason, one of the reasons it matters, it's all very convoluted, but

if Hong Kong had been a colony, if the UN had thought of Hong Kong and Macau as colonies, the expectation would be that colonies, when the colonial period ends, are supposed to have a shot at independence. And instead, these were becoming part of the People's Republic of China, so they had to be classified as something other than colonial. So it was kind of like through these gyrations of history to say that Hong Kong people were mistreated by imperialists

But those imperialists weren't exactly making it a colony so that you wouldn't have this idea that it should be decolonized. So there's all kinds of interesting discussions among China specialists outside of China with this idea of decolonizing Chinese history in different ways and rethinking the complexities of these things.

But at the same time, this is an area where Beijing doesn't want complexity unless it's introducing it through this. So I think history has... I think it's hard to do cause and effect, but I think definitely Hong Kong was a place where different kinds of history could be done. Most obviously, you could talk about and commemorate Tiananmen, and that's disappeared. And so Hong Kong's history has always been part of it. But there also has certainly been

increased concern with this whole controlling the narrative of the Qing era. And I became aware of that because I was part of a book that was linked to a British museum exhibit, and it's China's Hidden Century. And this was kind of like scholars contributing to a coffee table book. It's beautifully illustrated. It was linked to this exhibition at the British Museum. But

there was a criticism of the volume that was written by some Cass historians, so kind of leading prominent specialists of history. And then it got picked up, the criticism got picked up by Global Times, you know, that the approach to the Qing era in this book that in

particularly in Julia Lovell's introduction to it, which is this beautifully written introduction that basically says there's more to the late Qing period than just a story of humiliation and weakness. It was also a time of sort of

engagement with the wider world and trying to figure out what China should be like, what the country should be like, concerned that there were flourishings of the arts. It seems kind of unproblematic to say, let's look at this period and figure out the complex things going on then and think about it and have a place for

the evil's imperialism. There are discussions of that in the book, but making it complicated was not what you're supposed to do when it's a period that Beijing wants you to have a set line on.

I kind of get that a little bit, though, because there's an element of this. I just recently went to a documentary screening here in Geneva, a movie, a documentary about the return of artifacts to Benin in Africa. And it was a very well-done documentary. I don't think the themes were particularly that controversial because, you know, these were artifacts that had been looted. But

And during the question and answer section, there was one woman from Switzerland who began her, now again, she's doing this in French. My French is a little shaky, but I got the gist of it. The translation, she began her question with, we all know imperialism was bad.

But, and the minute she did kind of the French, you know, the minute she tried to pivot that, you could see there was this kind of collective gasp. And I get it a little bit because there's any time you have that but, like, I know that racism is bad. I know colonialism wasn't that great. It really feels like there should be a period there at the end of that sentence.

So I kind of get where they're coming from, but I agree with you in that from the way that particularly Cass has reacted to the attempts to

give a much richer or fuller story of Qing history have been nothing less than kind of strident, hysterical leadings that, you know, do not do much, do not do a service really to all the great work that's been done on Qing history in the PRC.

Sorry, rant over. It seems to me there's, I've felt it because I have gone on state media a lot and I get a sense that they're really stressing culture right now. Culture is looming larger and larger. Not history necessarily, but culture. And you know it's important when they have a

a mandatory adjective that you have to put in front of culture, which in this case is "youxiu de wenhua", right? And you have to say that.

China, outstanding culture. But it seems to me that they're trying to excise the issues that you were just talking about, empire and other minorities and various things, and just simply pulling out culture to reinforce this notion of civilization state, that the great thing about the past is this wonderful culture. Let's emphasize that. Another fool's errand? Or is this... Can they actually...

pull this off. So to link both of what you've been saying, I think the excising things is important and it's crucial to realize that there's excising going on in all kinds of historical narratives. So if I'm giving a talk on the boxers to an audience that grew up with the PRC's version of the history, then I'll emphasize, well, don't forget that they killed a lot of people and they killed a lot of Chinese Christians as well. I'm giving it to people who've grown up with a

an American or British textbook thing, I'll say, well, a key thing to remember is the boxers, they did some horrible things. They killed people. But if you just see the movie versions, 55 Days of the King, you have this imagining that they attacked foreigners. I'll say, well, wait, you're missing something. Most of the people they killed were Chinese. They were Chinese Christians. And then I'll say, but actually, the most people who were killed were by the invading armies that came in

and took revenge, often killing many people who had nothing to do with the boxers. So if you're stopping the story with the siege of Beijing, you're excising this incredibly important part of it, which is a major part that people grow up with for good reason, in part, in the PRC. There's a wonderful interview with, if I can mention, other podcasters on a podcast. So I like Cindy Yu's Chinese Whispers a lot.

And I first paid attention to her. There was an interview with her a

in which she talked about how when she moved from China to England when she was young, it was really strange that people knew of the Boxers, but they didn't know about the Eight Allied Army. They'd never heard of the Baguio Lianjun. They didn't know that there was this invasion. But when you were talking about culture, David, and you pivoted to it, I've just been reading an amazing conference paper by Li Haiyan, who I think is one of the most incisive analysts of Chinese literature around. She's at...

Stanford. And she was writing about this whole notion of civilization and culture and how it's used in discourses in China now. And

the special characteristic of when you make this move to celebrate Chinese culture, and then you talk about it, you move to it as this kind of civilization is a way of saying that it has wider reach, that culture kind of stays contained within the place that I'm not doing justice to, a very sophisticated analysis.

But there's like a bigger claim once you get to it in the civilizational state idea. And it's part of what's going on. It's a kind of nationalism that has a kind of global, a suggestion of global relevance and importance to it, which, of course, is how in the West the term civilization, as it was used as

civilized versus everybody else being barbaric or backward, that there's something going on now about a kind of competition between different civilizational themes. And I think that's part of why culture is so important in the discourse of the Chinese Communist Party in a way that it wasn't earlier.

Jeff, before we let you go, I wanted to talk to you about a great article you had posted just recently. The title of the article was To Go or Not to Go. And you use as your point of departure Tim Waltz's relationship with China and what it means to be engaged with China

particularly at a time when there's so much polarization between China and the West and within China and within the West about each other. And I think what I'm most interested in is thinking about what is

What does this mean for academics, for researchers, for someone like you who is in the prime of their career, who has, to use a term from The Sopranos, made their bones? What does this mean for you and how you approach your work? But also, I was kind of curious, without giving away the secrets of the cohort, I was wondering, you're still an advisor of many up-and-coming China scholars.

and have been a mentor for many scholars over the years. I was wondering if maybe you could talk about what does this question mean, to go or not to go, mean for all academics, and particularly yourself and some of the people that you work with in your student cohort?

I think the main way to begin is to just say that there are multiple factors that are going to go into the decisions that somebody makes about whether to go or not, and the pressures to maintain a kind of connection to going to the People's Republic of China as opposed to studying it from afar. It matters if you have family there. I mean, it matters if you're from there. It matters if you're

of Chinese descent or not of Chinese descent in complicated ways. I think you're more vulnerable to potential threats if you're of Chinese descent, but also there are all kinds of reasons that you might feel personally that you just don't want to not be connected there if you're somebody who wants to be able to visit the graves of your ancestors. I mean, that's not something that I'm dealing with and I have to be aware of that so that certain kinds of choices

can be simpler for me. I think if you're about to, if you're working on your dissertation on Chinese history, there are all kinds of topics you can do that don't require going to the PRC. You can use archives in Taiwan. You can study the global reach of Chinese history. It's become much more acceptable than it used to be to do a topic that focuses on the diaspora. There are all kinds of things you can do. If you're working on ancient China,

All of the texts are basically, for many kinds of projects, will be available outside. But I think if you're going to go on to the job market to get hired at a liberal arts college to be their, potentially, professor of Chinese history, they're going to want you to be able to tell stories about the last time you were in China or what you encountered trying to do research in China. You'll be advising students. If you're training graduate students, you'll be advising students who are going to be

going to China to do research. So there's this odd way in which, well, it's not so odd. There's an expectation. You would think it was strange if somebody was teaching you French history and said, well, I've never been to Paris. You would just say, don't you want to have anecdotes to tell there? So I think there are all kinds of reasons for people, even if you said, in the end, I'm not going to use any of the documents that I find in an archive because...

because what I'm working on, the archival materials aren't necessarily there. There'd be a reason why you would want to have been there.

And it's amazing how different this is, or things change over time. There was a period from certainly in the 1990s and early 2000s where, of course, if you were doing a dissertation in Chinese history, you would spend time in China. You would probably go there for a year of language work. You would probably go back there to do your research. But when I was starting graduate school way back in 1982,

I was being trained partly by people who hadn't gone to China to do their dissertation research. Most of the people I was trained by had been to China, but not long before that, there were people who had never set foot on the Chinese mainland, that they'd done their research in Taiwan because that's where Imperial Archives largely were. And they hadn't been able to if they were Americans.

go to China necessarily. That sort of first, I was part of one of the early cohorts of China specialists who did their research in the PRC. There were a few people ahead of me who'd done that. I'm having the great pleasure of introducing one of them to give a lecture later today. Gail Hirschatter is speaking on our campus. And I think her dissertation was the first dissertation I read. Hers and Emily Honig's were the first dissertations I read that were

based on research that people did in the PRC. And a bit before that, I was doing reading dissertations by people who did all their work in Taiwan. I was trained by, in part, by Elizabeth Perry, who I think did all of her dissertation work in Taiwan. And then I

went to the mainland. I was going to say went to the mainland for the first time right after that, but it wasn't her first time in the late 1970s because she was born on the mainland in Shanghai just before 1949. But I was part of this cohort where it was a novelty to be doing dissertation research in the PRC. And

It was a novelty to have not gone to Taiwan first, even if you were doing that. And in 1986, when I was, or 1985, when I was getting planning to go to Asia for the first time, and I wanted to go to Shanghai, I was studying Shanghai history.

And there was some urging of me to not go to Shanghai first, but to go to Taiwan for a year and work on my language skills, which there are reasons why for my language skills, that might have been a good thing. But at that time, and this just shows how much

how different things were then. My vision of Taiwan and the mainland was that one was the ROC, Republic of China, which had a right-wing authoritarian government that didn't show any signs of liberalizing anytime very soon, never depend on a historian to make predictions. And the PRC was a left-wing authoritarian dictatorship, but it seemed to be

moving in a liberalizing direction under Deng Xiaoping. So if I had to pick between these, this was going to be living in an authoritarian state. I was studying Shanghai. Shouldn't I go to Shanghai first? And then things, by a few years later, it was so clearly a different kind of situation. So these things are

change very much generationally and you make their decisions. I think one of the things that's important is to hesitate to judge people on the choices they make and make room in your head for there being these different things. I'm making the choice now to not go to the PRC at the moment. I really want to go to Hong Kong. That's where I'd most like to go, but I feel it's fraught because of the interactions I've had with activists in exile

almost more than anything I've written because I don't think what I write is that important. But I feel like I'd probably be fine. I could probably go, but I would feel it difficult to see people I want to see there because I would worry about potentially getting them in trouble or under more scrutiny. And so I have this strange feeling about it, which

I realize is a bit like what the people I've known for a long time who studied Tibet or Xinjiang felt

And I feel bad now. I would come back from Beijing and Shanghai and I'd say like, oh, wow, in the early 2000s, it's amazing what you can talk about and how the late 1990s, how you don't have to worry that much about who you're meeting with. And they would look at me like, okay, that's your China that you're talking about. That's not the PRC that I'm engaged with, that my friends are living in. So I think that's the other part is also to

to really make room in your mind for how varied the PRC is and to know that there are different things you can do in different parts of it. And this is still true even under Xi Jinping's efforts to homogenize the country. I still hear stories about people who go to Chengdu who are doing things, having conversations, seeing books, things that are not the same as if the people who come back from Beijing.

From my selfish reasons, I think it's great that I know people who are going and come back and tell me these stories. So I like that. And I think some people should go. It's important not to close off. But I also respect people who feel that this is not the time to be going there. Jeff, it's always so great to get your input and to talk to you. Catch up as well. The book from 2020 is Vigil Hong Kong on the Brink.

You just mentioned it's coming out in a new edition. When do we see the new edition? So the new edition has a new subtitle because Hong Kong is no longer on the brink in many ways. Hong Kong over the edge. Yeah. Originally, the book was going to be called Hong Kong on the Brink. And it turned out there was another book already out called Hong Kong on the Brink about 1967. So places can be on the brink other times. So

Actually, the editors at Columbia Global Reports, Jimmy So, who's this wonderful editor I've worked with and I'm working with on a new book now, he said, well, what about calling it putting something ahead of Hong Kong on the brink? What about vigil? Because you begin the book partly with Tiananmen Vigil. I thought it was brilliant, a kind of poetic title.

The new edition is going to be called Vigil, the Struggle for Hong Kong. And it'll be out January 7th in the UK and Europe. Excellent. Well, thank you again for coming on. David, it's great to see you speaking. You have to go or not to go. When do you go back to Beijing? Next week.

I get into Beijing at about 2 in the morning and I have to teach an 8.30 class. Some things never change. Some things never change. And thank you to everyone who's listening. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Nothing left to do but cue those drums.