Lex Fridman: observation

Transcript context

…Yeah. And I think it’s one of these really good examples of how China’s distinctive, but it’s not unique. You have other settings where you have these no-go zones that you learn, and one example is in Singapore. So the National University of Singapore has a world-class history department, but no Singapore historian in it, nobody who focuses on the history of Singapore. Because it’s incredibly wide-ranging what you can do, analyze, but when you’re actually talking about the family that’s been most powerful in Singapore, then it gets to be touchy. In Thailand, which I’ve been working on recently, you have this lèse-majesté laws that make it very, very dangerous to say certain kinds of things about the King. And so in all of these settings, you have to figure out ways to work around. And there’s a way in which you can say at the foreign correspondence clubs in different parts of Asia… You can have an event that’s about the country one over that you can say basically anything you want, but when it gets to the things in the place where you are, it’s touchy. I should give credit for that insight. Shibani Mahtani co-wrote a very good book on Hong Kong Among The Braves. She was talking about that, that in Singapore at the Foreign Correspondence Club, you could have an event on Hong Kong that could say all kinds of things that you couldn’t say at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondence Club. But at the same time, when I saw her in Singapore, she said there was a Singapore political refugee in Hong Kong who was giving a talk at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondence Club saying kinds of things that he couldn’t say in Singapore. And in Thailand, I gave a talk at the Foreign Correspondence Club, and then I went to hear a talk there because I was just curious about the culture in this foreign correspondence club, and there was somebody talking about human rights abuses in different parts of Southeast Asia saying things very directly and then said, “And there are things going on in Thailand that we’re not going to talk about.” Self-censorship can be a very powerful thing. One of the things I learned about all of this, which is interesting, I want to learn more, is about the human psychology, the ability of the individual mind, to compartmentalize things. It does seem like you could not live in a state of fear as long as you don’t mention a particular topic. My intuition would be about the human mind. If there’s anything you’re afraid of talking about, that fear will permeate through everything else. You would not be able to do great science, great exploration, great technology. And that idea, I think, underpins the whole idea of freedom of speech in the United States. You don’t want to censor any, even dangerous, speech, because that will permeate everything else. You won’t be able to have great scientists. You won’t be able to have great journalists. You won’t be able to have… I don’t know. I’m obviously biased towards America, and I think you do need to have that full-on freedom of speech. But this is an interesting case study, and that’s actually something that you speak about, that Mao, if he were alive today and visited China, would be quite surprised. And you give the Nanjing bookstores an example. Can you just speak to this? If Mao visited China, let’s go with that thought experiment, what would he recognize? What would he be surprised by? So I wrote about imagining a revivified Mao going [inaudible 00:53:44] pondering this really cool Nanjing bookstore in the early 2000s and just being amazed at what you could read there and what books were for sale. And I thought about how he’d be like, “What’s going on? Is the Communist Party not in control?” He talked about how art and politics needed to in some ways go together, and you’ve got all these kind of things. He also would have been shocked by all… There were all these books about how to start your own cafe and bar and celebrating entrepreneurship, how to get into Harvard. All of these things just wouldn’t compute from his time. Although I said, it would actually maybe make him nostalgia for the time of his youth in the 1910s. He was a participant in the May 4th movement, which was a time of reading all over the world, looking for the best ideas circulating. So he might say, “Well, the teenage me would have really, really loved this.” So some of the coolest bookstores, the things that I just was amazed could exist in the early 2000s… So you can still buy copies in 1984 and you can still get some of these other things, but that was a time when more and more of those things were being translated fresh. I’m not sure you’d get permission to translate some of those things now. There’s more of a sense of caution. And when some of those bookstores would also then hold events that would talk about the kinds of ideas that then take them to the next level and talk about the applicability to the situation in China, some of those bookstores have closed or have had to become really shadows of what they were. And one of the best ones… Not the one I wrote about in Nanjing, but a similar one, a Shanghai one, which was literally an underground bookstore. It was in a metro station and it had really freewheeling discussions of liberal ideas in the early 2000s and early 2010s. But then it just got less and less space to operate under Xi Jinping when things started narrowing, and it then had to close in Shanghai. And it’s just been reopened in DC as JF Books, and it’s become in this really interesting cultural hub. And I’m really delighted; it’s where I’m going to hold the launch for my next book when it comes out in June, this book on the Milk Tea Alliance about struggles for change across East and Southeast Asia, including in places that are worried about the kind of rising influence of Beijing. And it seems just perfect to be holding it in the kind of place that can’t exist in Shanghai. So places like that, they stop being able to exist on the mainland, then they could still exist in Hong Kong, but now in Hong Kong, one of the coolest bookstores has had to close up. It just didn’t feel like it could continue operating and tightening control there, and it’s reopened in upstate New York.…

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