Jeffrey Wasserstrom: evaluation

Transcript context

…One of the things, and it’s a strange thing that I’ve become aware of having spoken with world leaders. I’m distinctly aware that there’s a real possibility that the black box we mentioned, that the Communist party of China will listen to the words I’m saying now. And so I have to wonder how much that affects my possible tourist-like trip to China. Because there’s a difference between an influencer that does fun things, plays video games, and goes over to China, and somebody that actually covers China to some degree. Whether critical or supportive or nuanced or any kind of way, in a full spectrum of ideas you can have about China, including Chinese history. Whether that’s going to be seen carefully, analyzed carefully, and have repercussions when you travel. And because of the black box nature, and because it’s, for me, personally, just a culture that’s very different than anything I’m familiar with, it makes me a bit nervous. It’s certainly gotten harder for journalists to operate in China. There was a way in which now journalists will look back to the early two thousands, and it was really quite extraordinary what they could do. Well, you have a lot of listeners. I think there isn’t that tight a watching of what an academic writes about the Chinese Communist Party. But there are certain things that clearly are tightly policed. And one is, discussions at the private life of Chinese leaders, and their families, and issues of really following money trails for corruption and things like that. So there was the case of the Hong Kong booksellers who were kidnapped. And one of them is still in a Chinese prison, he would be a good example. There’s Gui Minhai, the kind of person who was vulnerable. He was born in China. He is a Swedish citizen and he was spirited out of Thailand into the Mainland. And the reason why he was on the radar of the Communist party was because the publishing house in Hong Kong that he was connected to was publishing works about the top tier of the Chinese Communist Party, and contradicting the vision of them as a certain kind of moral exemplars. And that’s different from writing things about China has a bad human rights record or something like that, in ways like I did. These were books that were- … ways like I did. These were books that were exposes, or some of them kind of gossipy and lightly sourced, some of them much more serious, but they were about something that the Communist party leadership wants to make a no-go zone. And I’ve thought sometimes that Xi Jinping seems to have Lei’s majesty envy, but I don’t think it’s general criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party as a authoritarian structure, or place that doesn’t deserve to rule in very general terms. I don’t think that’s something that they then pick you up at the border and say, “No, we can’t let that person in,” because people are let in. And it’s not rational. It’s not a rational process. There are people who’ve been denied visas. It seems pretty inexplicable. There are things that now I think the rules are changing very quickly, all over the world, for what’s safe to say and do. Well, either way, I do know that the Communist Party and likely Xi Jinping himself, watched my conversation with Prime Minister Modi. They responded to it. And I will definitely go to China and I hope to talk to Xi Jinping. It’s a fascinating, historic, ancient culture and is the major player on the world stage in the 21st century. And it would be fascinating to understand the mind of the leader of that great superpower. Speaking of leaders, what do we understand about the relationship between Xi Jinping, and our current President of the United States, Donald Trump? Is there really a human connection, something approximating a friendship as they’ve spoken about? Or is it just purely real politic maneuvering? World leaders playing a game of chess? Or is it a bit of both?…

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