 After the noon block, I'm Jay Fidel here on Think Tech and we're doing history is here to help and which is a very true and totally totally useful statement about history. You cannot lose the context. Don't lose the context. Anyway, we have Jeffrey Washerstrom. He's a history professor at UC Irvine. Joins us by Zoom. We really appreciate it. Thank you for joining us Jeffrey. It's great to be. I just wish I could be in Hawaii in person to join you. I hope that will come soon. I think it will come soon. And Peter Hoffenberg who was scheduled to join us cannot because the internet is not working in his neck of the woods. So anyway, we're talking about Hong Kong on the brink today. Things will never be the same. And let's take a look at that because you've been writing and thinking about that for a while. Jeffrey, and I'd be really interested in your thoughts about whether this is a one-way and tragic street or whether it will lead to something maybe different, maybe not what we wanted, but that will be functional as a city of China. What do you think? So I think there are a couple of things about Hong Kong speaking as a story and that first of all people who make predictions about Hong Kong have been notoriously wrong and Hong Kong has made fools of forecasters over and over again. From as far back as 1841 when the British were given Hong Kong as a victor's prize in the Opium war and the British negotiator was essentially fired by his boss back in London because he'd gotten a barren hill with barely a house upon it. There would never be a great mart of trade. And of course, that's exactly what Hong Kong became. There were also people who said in 1997 when Hong Kong was going to go from being a British colony to being a special administrative region of the People's Republic of China that was supposed to be able to largely go its own way for 50 years under something called one country, two systems where defense and diplomacy would be handled by Beijing, but a lot of other things would be handled locally. There were a lot of predictions that Hong Kong would instantly die and would become just like any main wet city. And of course, that didn't happen. And actually in the first years of this deal, which was a pretty incredible deal, it was saying you would have a capitalist city inside a communist country, you would have a city with a relatively free press and a place that had a very tightly controlled press. And to a lot of extent, the same deal was made with Macau, nearby another former colony, that one of the Portuguese. In the late 1990s, early 2000s, there was a sense in which it seemed to be surprisingly workable, be working better. So it made fools again of the forecasters. But then there has been, I think, a really worrisome slide, especially in the last especially in the last decade in which Beijing has been trying, the Communist Party in Beijing has been trying to show that in its mind, the two systems part of one country, two systems, all they really meant or all they really wanted to mean is a different way to make and spend money in the city. And that this idea that it was a place where the two systems meant you could have a different ability to hold protests without being cracked down on the way you were in the mainland, the idea that you could have schools in which textbooks could talk about taboo subjects like the June 4th massacre of 1989 that took place in Beijing, that can't be talked about on the mainland, can't be taught, but can be talked about in Hong Kong or could until recently. And so we've had, especially since 2014, a series of dramatic protests by people trying to defend a different way of life and try to buttress these always weak but their democratic quasi-democratic institutions, trying to buttress them because they could see these moves toward encroachment and they could see time running out and quite very bold and dramatic protests that have been repressed and increasingly militant protests and increasingly repressive actions until things peaking in 2019 with the biggest protests and also the biggest acts of repression. And then the story since then is a kind of tightening of the vice by Beijing. Hong Kong still isn't dead and it's not going to be dead. It's an amazing city in a lot of ways and people there are determined to keep preserving what they can of a distinctive lifestyle. But a lot of things have been destroyed, including the sort of more vibrant civil society, more independent courts, more freer press, quasi-democratic institutions that didn't give people, there was never a way a majority of pro-democracy forces could take the legislature. It was always, the deck was always, the game was always rigged, but you could still have real debates in the legislature before a bill went through and that alone is important to a democracy and you had some degree of separation of powers. The courts could tell the police that they'd gotten out of line when they arrested somebody. All of this is eroding and it's very distressing and people I know in Hong Kong feel it's happening incredibly quickly that the things that they prized about life are going away very quickly, but externally it actually seems, and here I think the Communist Party has been quite clever, it seems to be happening gradually. It's happening step by step. It's not happening via a massacre of people in the streets. It's happening with one thing one week, one thing the next. And while that's very fast if you're in Hong Kong, it seems slow if the news cycle is spinning in amazing direction. So they're the largest arrests of Hong Kong of democracy figures, close to 50 of them were rounded up a week or so ago, but that was a time when there were shootings on the streets in Myanmar nearby. It was a time when there were big stories, well the pandemic obviously, but many things that kind of that distract us. So you know, I think Hong Kong will, it will live on, it will still be a fascinating city, but a kind of Hong Kong that was radically different from mainland Sydney's nearby that I think has disappeared. You know, my limited knowledge of this, I see Hong Kong as divided into several groups, visa fee, the mainland China moves on it. Number one is you have the students, boys, syphorists, the other ones who protest, the whole umbrellas and the like, and they must be very unhappy right now because they've been repressed, you know, they're whatever protest power they had has been severely curtailed. Then you have the small shopkeepers. I'm sure Hong Kong is a lot of mom and pops down every street and alley and they're not terribly interested in the political things that happen. Just leave me alone to do business. I don't care to protest and I don't care to join the Communist Party either. Then you have the money and the money could be Hong Kong money that has existed since what did you say, 1841 you know, with the British influence and you have the Chinese money and it's been a portal, you know, for investment. A lot of people in China and rather in Hong Kong make a lot of money in China, you know, investing through the portal. It's quite remarkable and they are happy enough to be left alone. I mean, happy enough to make peace with the Chinese government. Just leave me alone to do business and I'm happy. I'm sure they will prevail. I mean, they will be part of the new Hong Kong, if you will. Did I miss a group? Did I miss a group? Who else is the group there? The students, the shopkeepers, the big money guys. There's also, so I mean, I'd say what's left out is there are foreign businesses. Yes. And so one of the things that was a check on kind of outright repression was if it happened too fast after 1997, the foreign businesses would have pulled out. And so what protected Hong Kong to some extent, the metaphor that's been used as the goose that lays the golden egg, that Beijing wanted to have Hong Kong as a city where foreign businesses could have a foothold to then move into the market, into the China market and where there could be different rules, more of a rule of law that would guarantee contracts and things like that, a comfort level, an international city. And what's interesting also in Hong Kong is you can be a Hong Konger without being ethnically Chinese. It's in a way that you can't be a Beijing or you can't be a full member of Chinese mainland society unless you're ethnically Chinese. So Hong Kong was special that way. It was multi-lingual Cantonese and English as the lingua franca, but then increasingly recently Mandarin in the mix as well. But dividing into groups that you have the students and pro-democracy figures who are former students and in some cases are in their 50s, 60s, even 80s. And I'd say another group that's been quite passionate about the movement that sometimes for God and have been important have been Christian groups, church groups, which also have a different ability to operate in Hong Kong than on the mainland. But I think what was important in cases like the 2019 protests that brought so many people onto the streets and so many people in favor of the movement was there were people who might have wanted to be just left alone and didn't necessarily care that much about big political issues. But once students, once youth were on the streets and were initially using largely nonviolent tactics and the police were using tear gas against them, there was a feeling among a broad spectrum of society that the moral high ground was the young people on the streets. And that the police who had been the Hong Kong police were widely respected were seen as one of the most professional forces that something was out of whack morally. And so you had a period and even when some youth became militant and were engaged in some acts of violence, which is important to remember did happen, largely vandalism attacking buildings, attacking symbols, but very, very occasionally hurting people. There was a sense that most of the violence was coming from the other side, was coming from the police, and that the government wasn't doing anything to ring the police in. And so you continually had, even when there was a lot of militancy on the street, you continually had 60% or 70% of the populace that thought the government should do more to ring the police in. And so that kept a movement going. And you know, we know about these movements in other places, including in the United States. And a big issue becomes who's seen as having the moral high ground in this. And for me, watching the Hong Kong protests was very reminiscent of early in my career, right after I was in graduate school, right as I was finishing up the 1989 protests happened in Beijing and across the mainland. And there too, there were some people who were on the streets because of strong political convictions. But others began to support the movement because they thought that the people on the streets were behaving more in step with the ideals of the country than the people in power. And so that you had that situation again in Hong Kong. Does that ever work? It didn't work in viral Russia recently. Where does it work? Where can you have a protest these days that actually works? So it does work. And I'll, you know, this is one thing I remember to, I want to keep in mind. South Korea, around the same time as the umbrella movement, there was what came to be known as the candlelight revolution in South Korea. And it was people on the streets complaining about corruption of a woman who was the daughter of a former right-wing strongman there who had been in power before South Korea democratized. South Korea democratized, she rose up and was behaving in some ways like, you know, in the family tradition, you know, she had no patience for protest, but there was also a corruption issue. And people turned down on the streets in, it was youth, but it was also families and this, and it was an ongoing peaceful movement. And she was, she was hosted from office and she's now in jail. So it can happen. It did happen in Taiwan. You know, Taiwan, when I started studying China, the mainland in the mid 1980s, the mainland was under one party rule, communist party rule, and it was starting to experiment with reforms and was trying to open up to the world. Taiwan was under right-wing authoritarian rule. And so they were kind of in the nationalist party, which had been the opponent of the communist party. So they were both in control of these different places. And it wasn't obvious what the trajectory would be going forward. Taiwan, when I started studying the two places, Taiwan was still under martial law. There had been protests. It was very hard to be a dissident in either of those places. But you flash forward to the early 21st century and you have Taiwan as a well-working democratic system for various reasons. I mean, it was a long struggle to get there, but it does, it can feel sometimes like these never work. And sometimes you have a, you have a protest that has no immediate effect, but it has a long-term effect. It has a long-term change effect. And hopefully that, that can happen because, you know, governments have to change with the times, governments have to change for social changes. And if they, if they don't do that, they become archaic and dysfunctional, arguably in the United States too. Yeah. And I think it's, what's interesting also to remember when I go back to that period in the 80s, when I was in graduate school, how many things, you know, we didn't see coming. I mean, it was clear that the Soviet system had incredible deep flaws, but it wasn't clear it was going to disappear. And it wasn't clear that places like Poland, another place where, and Czechoslovakia, another other place is where nonviolent protests did succeed. In the mid, even as late as the mid-1980s, it wasn't clear at all. I was reading the letters from prison out of Miknik, a Polish journalist. And he was talking about why he was given the choice of leaving Poland. He could get out of jail if he promised to just leave Poland and not make trouble there anymore. And he, he chose to stay because he loved the country. And this is what some Hong Kongers love Hong Kong, the way people love a country. They're staying. Some are going abroad to try to keep the struggle going in, in exile. But so I was really moved by the letters that Miknik wrote. But I read a review of his book in the New York Times. And it said, it said 1986 would mark the 40th anniversary of places like Poland being under communist rule. And there was nothing to celebrate for people who wanted to have a freer society. And there's every reason to think that when the 50th anniversary comes, the situation will be the same. By 1996, Poland was in a very, Poland had solidarity, had won an election, had gone from being a banned political organization with the leaders in jail and to being a party in power. Now, of course, a lot had to happen. There had to be a Gorbachev. There had to be various things in the world that had to happen that we didn't see coming. So I guess that back to that idea of the foolishness of forecast, I think history is incredibly important to help understand the present, but it really doesn't help us predict the future. No, in the case of Poland, it was fragile. And now it hasn't remained the same. Yeah. But I wanted to ask, it struck me, it's subjective, but it struck me at the time of the umbrella movement and all the trouble preceding the new security law, that the boys in Beijing would find a way to repress this. They didn't want it to happen. You make a list of options and how you're going to repress it. You tick off, you check off those options, and you start a campaign of repression. And little by little, you discourage the people who are protesting and ultimately you squash the protest. I think this is doable. It's doable in our modern times. It's doable with modern communications and social media and the like. And all they had to do is get some smart guys in a room and they could figure out how to wage war on the Hong Kong free speech people. And I think they're winning and they will continue to win and they will have what they want long before 2047. They'll have a complete takeover before 2047 except for the money, except for the money classes in Hong Kong. But I wonder if you feel that things have changed around protests in Hong Kong and elsewhere, where a repressive government actually has the upper hand, because it has a toolkit such as we have never seen before. So yeah, I mean, I think it's taking a long-term picture. Whenever a new technology of communication comes along, there's enormous excitement about the liberating possibilities of that new technology of communication. And then there's a realization that it also gives new powers to those who want to repress or authoritarian states. And we've seen this, so there's a wonderful piece I'd love to talk about by Adam Gopnik who writes The New Yorker. And he says, when you're thinking about media revolutions, there are three points of view. One is never better, like finally this has come along, everything's great. The other is better never, if only this hadn't come along. And the third one is ever was, which just means that actually you still have the same sorts of struggles, they're just maybe accelerated and taken to a new wider global reach. And I think the, I'm in the ever was category of this because I do think we see both the liberating and the controlling possibilities. And there is, it's not exactly the same history doesn't repeat itself with new technologies as anything else. And in some ways, the darker side of the new technologies is darker than what we've seen before, the abilities of surveillance. But there are also always some kinds of possibilities back and forth. So both, both protesters have more in their toolkit. And we can see this in the way that they can get their message to a completely different part of the world in ways that they couldn't before. In 1988 in Burma, there was a crackdown and there were no images as far as I remember coming out of it. I didn't don't remember ever seeing a poem written by a Burmese who was being shot. And now, you know, I wake up in the morning that I can read poems by somebody who was killed the day before and I can see information about it. And it's not necessarily going to stop it, but that's something new in the protesters toolkit. But autocrats have new things. So when the printing press was brought out, it was thought like now this will undermine the authorities who control the written word. And radio is a great example. Radio was seen as something that would connect people in new ways and give democratizing things. But it was used by the by the fascists to spread Nazism. In 1989, table news broadcasts were seen as this amazing thing. We could see what was happening at Tiananmen. But on the other hand, the authorities could monitor with televisions and tell and pick up people who had been on the square because they could identify images. And now we have it all further with facial recognition software. And we have one of the things that the Hong Kong protesters, they did. It was when they were being monitored by some forms of the Internet, they started using telegraph telegraph channel technology that could communicate without the same ability of surveillance. They were doing crowdsourcing of protest venues. They were being very their slogan was be water. Move quickly. Readjust your tactics continually through social media and other communication. And this allowed their movement to in part grow bigger than than any expectation was that it could have been last longer and have more international impact. But at the same time, there were new methods of surveillance. And now one of the things that protesters say is that when they're arrested, one of the things the police do is take their mobile phones and start mining the contacts in them. And this is in all kinds of invasions into this. There are other ways that technologies are used and worrisome ways. So, yes, there's a whole new toolkit. There are new toolkits for protests. It does seem that it's getting harder. It's getting easier to get people onto the streets than it's ever been before, but it's in many settings, but it can be harder at least before the pandemic. But it can be harder, it can be harder perhaps than ever to affect change. Well, and we're the credit governments have a deep pocket. Good technology, new technology, new inventions to repress can be very powerful, but you can't do them without a deep pocket. And so, you have a big advantage that way. I wanted to ask you though, you talk about the first part of that process, that is the protester, the protest goes beyond the location. It goes beyond Hong Kong. And certainly, there's a lot of communication technology in China. I just wonder how fertile that field is for sympathy, empathy with the protestors in Hong Kong. And whether these protests and the sad plight of, you know, free with speech in Hong Kong is reaching China. What would imagine that Xi Jinping would like to put them, one of the reasons he wants to put them down is he doesn't want that same thing to happen in other cities on the mainland. But is there a fertile ground for that to happen? Is that legitimate worry? Is it happening? It's not really happening. I mean, to Hong Kong, the mainland is incredibly diverse. There are people, there are mainland Chinese who are very sympathetic, but there are lots who aren't. And in general, when Hong Kong, when Hong Kong became part of the People's Republic of China, there were some people who were hopeful that Hong Kong ways would sort of permeate the mainland, and that Hong Kong would, Hong Kong would be the influence rather than mainland ways influencing Hong Kong. And to some degree, it has happened. Modes of consumption and entertainment on the mainland are a lot or have been influenced a lot by Hong Kong. When I went between Shanghai and Hong Kong in the 80s, there were no luxury malls, no forms of entertainment. Yeah, Hong Kong was a lot more fun and a lot more ways to distract yourself and stay happy than in certain ways. Enjoy yourself than in Shanghai. Now, there's really not that much difference between the two of them, between the two of them in those ways. So things have flowed in that direction, but the kind of political control things meanwhile have flowed in the other direction. But the other thing is so the Chinese Communist Party, yes, it worried about any kind of contagion effect or spillover effect, but they worked hard, double time, to try to fill the airwaves on the mainland, to block images of positive things to the protest, and then to just flood the airwaves with their story about the protests, which was that these were chaotic, undermining the stability of the city, that the protesters were prejudiced against mainland people and some of them were, and that the protesters were violent. And what the government did was, I think they were worried on the mainland, but they became less worried once there were even isolated acts of violence that could be magnified and shown over and over again, violence by the side of the protesters. And they could create a narrative that made it seem like the protests were all about what were actually isolated incidents. And this is something we've seen again in the US with certain things, where is it an isolated, do you focus on in a protest 100,000 people who are engaging in non-violence or 10 of them who are engaging in violence? And there are going to be those 10. And if what you do, if what you do is have a state-controlled media system the way you do on the mainland, you just show those images of the violence over and over again, it becomes very hard to know whether that's what's going on or not. So there is some sympathy, but there hasn't been a way in which there haven't been sympathetic protests in the mainland. In the way there were, interestingly, in 1989, there were very big protests in Hong Kong and Macau in sympathy with the protesters on the mainland because Hong Kong and Macau had different systems, but knew they were going to be part of that. I wonder, you talk about the reach of the media and the propaganda to dampen the truth and so forth. We know China does that, including in this country, about things that are happening in China. We've had so many. But I'm interested in the world view of Hong Kong because Hong Kong is a child of the world, not just the UK, but a child of the world. A great court, a great example of some kind of global gathering process. And that's probably why in the UK a range of special visas or respected visas of Hong Kongers who they were led into it. And then, of course, the Chinese try to stop that. They are stopping it, I think. So you have a world reaction, a reaction, a popular reaction, a governmental reaction, diplomatic reaction. And I wonder if it's getting out or if the propaganda that comes from the mainland is dampening that, too. Do we have an accurate view or not? So I think the international view stayed quite sympathetic to the protests while they were taking place. And I think there is a lot of international concern about what's going on. But there are limits to what the international community can do, especially in its divided state. So I think one of the things, there were different ways in which the crudest moves that Beijing made, the imposing of the national security law, they did that last spring, when the world was battling the pandemic and very little bandwidth for these kinds of things, even if there was concern. And the other thing they took advantage of was the degree to which Trump had undermined the alliances that the United States had with other countries. All of this has allowed space for the expansion of the Chinese Communist Party's rule. Actually, I want to make sure I show, I have this book, Vigil, Hong Kong on the Brink. And with a lot of what you've been saying, I was thinking about the cover of it, which I had no role in designing, but I love. The Hong Kong flag is a white flag with a flower on it. And this is showing the white flag being dyed red in a process. And I also just wanted to mention it was going to be called Hong Kong on the Brink. The book was going to be called that. But then it turned out there was another book called Hong Kong on the Brink already out there. And it had been written. It was about the events of 1967. So Hong Kong's been on the Brink before. And of course, it's now slid beyond it. But the title Vigil was added to it. I was very lucky to have an editor at Columbia Global Reports, the publisher of Hong Kong, or actually Jimmy So, who's been living in the United States. And he said, well, since Hong Kong on the Brink's already been used, you talk a lot about this vigil every year that's held for the anniversary of the June 4th massacre, we could call it vigil Hong Kong on the Brink. And the term vigil also implies watching over somebody who's ill or somebody you care about is ill or dying perhaps. And so that was a very powerful kind of image. And so I think to some extent the world's been ready to hold vigil. But what a lot of it is taking the form of expressions of deep concern. There have been some efforts to push back against the moves with economic sanctions of high officials. There have been a variety of steps taken. There's increasing outrage about what the Chinese Communist Party is doing at the other end of the People's Republic of China in Xinjiang, where there's been a massive human rights atrocities going on against the largely Muslim ethnic group of the Uighurs. And, you know, this is horrific. And again, there are statements of concern and there's pushback. But there are fewer there are fewer tools to use to pressure Beijing to change its policies than there used to be. Beijing is less dependent on the world community and the world community is so divided. So there are things that could conceivably happen. There's talk about boycotting the 2022 Winter Olympics that are going to be held in Beijing, even though Beijing doesn't really have snow, but it'll be held near their place with snow. I mean, I think one of the things that people might think about, regardless of whether they boycott, is simply to not allow it to be a celebration of the Chinese Communist Party the way, to some extent in 2008, there was a occasionally newscast would would would bring up human rights issues. But on the whole, there was a acceptance and amplification of what was a very kind of nationalistic message in the opening ceremonies. And it doesn't mean that you say that there shouldn't be, that they shouldn't, those ceremonies shouldn't have happened. But you could use that as a teachable moment to say, hey, well, the Communist Party is presenting the history of China as a single unified story for 5,000 years in which they're putting their stamp on it. Well, actually, if we could take this opportunity to learn a little bit about China, Chinese tradition is not just a tradition of control and hierarchy. There's strands within Chinese tradition that celebrate diversity of opinion. There's strands in Chinese tradition that have more of a democratic side to them. Taiwan became a democratic system while staying in many ways, initially at least culturally, Chinese. It's being pushed away from that. And there are always different strands in Taiwan. But in part, it's because the Chinese Communist Party is putting forth an idea of having a monopoly on what chineseness means, that there's been an effort in Hong Kong and in Taiwan to say, well, look, then we don't want to be identified with chineseness. It's not that we're denying our ethnicity. It's not that we're denying our ancestry. But we don't accept the way this is being defined. There's a move toward grappling with it that hasn't found a new kind of language for this, which I think people of Jewish descent around the world have developed to be able to say, I can be proud to be of Jewish descent, but I don't like Zionism, and I don't believe in the government of Israel. They can say that and separate that out. And we need to figure out a way that people of Chinese descent can have a way to establish a sense of chineseness separate from the Chinese Communist Party's effort to impose one. Is this strategy against Hong Kong, just a forerunner of a strategy against Taiwan? That is, you know, the one country, two systems strategy was supposed to be to ease the idea that there was talk in Beijing, you know, look at Hong Kong now, that could be your future Taiwan. And now there are some protesters who say, look at us now, Taiwan, this could be your future as a warning to do that. So it's definitely one of the reasons why it's important, even if there's no way to alter the direction that things are going in Hong Kong, to make there be a price to pay for the moves in Hong Kong is a way to send a signal about protecting Taiwan. It's hard to say. It could also be in some ways for Xi Jinping a way of being able to claim that he expanded Beijing's reach, expanded the country by really bringing Hong Kong in in a way that means he doesn't have to take Taiwan to be seen as a great leader who expanded the reach of the Communist Party, the way great leaders have wanted to be seen. I see what's going on in Hong Kong largely is fitting, though, within a pattern across the PRC of the parts that are already in the PRC of forced assimilation on various fronts, trying to do away with many forms of difference that were allowed to exist under the Communist Party rule. There's been more of a clampdown on various kinds of religious activities. There's been more of a clampdown on the use of different languages within China. And I think Hong Kong is an example of that process that's happening. Is it really necessary for Xi Jinping and his government and the Chinese culture, the Chinese vision of the future to do these repressive things? I mean, for example, I'm sure you're referring to Tibet and Xinjiang and Hong Kong and maybe soon enough Taiwan. What's happening in Mongolia too? Well, the way I think about it, I don't think it's necessary, but the way I think about it is governments to stay in power, particularly ones maybe that come into power via revolution and things. They have to tell stories. They have to have a story to tell, even if you're even if you're authoritarian state, you have to have some kind of story to tell about why it's legitimate for you to rule. And a lot of energy goes into that kind of story. And you can see that in any look around the world, you could say with Putin's Russia. And one of the ways one of the stories you tell is that before us, look how badly, whether or not you like exactly what we're doing, look at what the alternative was before. What are we taking? The Communist Party has told a series of stories since 1949 about why they deserve, first of all, why they deserve to rule rather than nationalists right away and then why they continue to continue to rule. And the stories have not have some of them have changed. So one story they told early on was the nationalist party officials were corrupt. Our officials aren't corrupt. And that was a pretty compelling story at first, but it no longer works. People within China think that the officials of the Communist Party are corrupt. There's been ongoing anti-corruption campaigns because of that. Another story they told was under the old regime, there were rich, there were poor, and society was very unequal. Under us, society, everybody will, everybody will live the same kind of lifestyle. Okay, that story doesn't work anymore, especially in the last 40 years or so. There's been a giving up on that kind of egalitarianism. But there was another story that Mao and others said, which was that before we took power, China was bullied in the world for a long period of time, and our territory was being chipped away at by different powers. And then after the Communist Party took power, well, over largely disunified China, they spent time trying to expand the territorial reach. That was one of the first places forcibly brought into the PRC, but brought in kind of the way Hong Kong was with a promise that people would be able to go, would have a high degree of autonomy, but if they became part of the country. And the story in Tibet, early 1950s, there was a fair amount of ability to allow things to go their own way. The Dalai Lama thought he could work with Mao and then Beijing exerted its control. People got, people pushed back when they saw Beijing is already more control, things exploded, repression came in. So there was a kind of precursor to the Hong Kong story, to that story. But so now there's still that need. So the other story later, the Communist Party told, was under our watch the economy, it's just booming and booming. And your material condition is getting better. Even if it's not equal, everybody's boat is being lifted. Now there's some doubt about how long the economy can go on. So what's left is this kind of nationalistic story. And that's what Xi Jinping is doubling down on over and over again. So that's how I would see. Very interesting. We're out of time, Jeff, but I do want to ask you whether a vigil Hong Kong on the brink is available on Amazon or somewhere else? Sure, it's available through bookshops.org through which is independent bookstore thing. It's available through Amazon. It's available as a audio book. It's very short. It only takes about two and a half hours to listen to the listen to it. It's about 100 pages. It's available on paperback. Well, things move quickly, even in the world of history, maybe especially in the world of history. So you must be writing or thinking about writing something else. What's the next one? So I'm working with a couple of very talented journalists on an updated spin-off from Vigil. It won't be called that. It'll take a couple of years for it to come out, but it'll carry, it'll draw on that, but it'll carry the story forward. And it'll have some illustrations. One of the journalists is a very talented artist. So it'll have some graphic novel kinds of elements. But I'm finishing up a book on the world in 1900 and particularly focused on China. The time of the boxer uprising and the shape of the world in a year of multiple crises. 1900 was a bit like 2020, where it just seemed things were coming apart at the seams and the world had suddenly gotten smaller, but it also gotten more dangerous. So it's a story, a book about China, but also a book about the world in 1900 with relevance for the world now. Fabulous. I can't help but think of Steve McQueen as the sand pebbles, if you recall, that movie. Well, the movie that comes into the book about 1900 is another one, 55 Days of the Peking with Charlton Heston and David Niven and the boxer uprising, basically a Western transpose to China. Perfect. Jeffrey Washerström of UC Irvine, thank you so much for joining us for this really compelling discussion. It's been a pleasure. I'm glad you had me on.