Jeffrey Wasserstrom: evaluation

Transcript context

…Killed. I assume he was just disappeared. It’s interesting because very often, figures are made an example of in one way or another. I mean, Liu Xiaobo was imprisoned and not allowed to get enough medical care, so you can talk about him having died earlier than he should have. But there’s been relatively few for political crimes recently, sentencing to death and things like that. It’s much more just remove them, imprison them. But the tank man, there was never a trial, even a trial that was one that you knew what the result would be, which there was for Liu Xiaobo and others. Not even a hidden trial, but simply disappeared. And there’s been somebody who’s like another figure like this who’s disappeared. A couple of years ago in Beijing, there was a lone man who put up a banner on a bridge, Sitong bridge in Beijing. And it was extraordinary. It had denunciations of the direction Xi Jinping was taking the country. It was denunciation of Covid policies, but also a dictatorial rule. And the banner, somehow he managed to have it up and get it long enough to be filmed and to draw attention and the film to circulate. Again, another image of the power of images. And he’s disappeared, and there hasn’t been a show trial or even a secret trial, and again, we don’t know if he’s still alive, but these are cases where I think the Chinese Communist Party really doesn’t want a competing story out there. They don’t want somebody to be able to answer what he was thinking. How much censorship is there in modern-day China by the Chinese government?…

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