Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao

Jeffrey Wasserstrom starts with a resemblance that can obscure a major difference. Both Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping have sustained personality cults: the leader's books, speeches and image become unavoidable. Recalling his first visit in 1986, Wasserstrom contrasts Xi's prominence with a period when a visitor could go days without intensely noticing who led the party. Yet Mao welcomed upheaval and mobilization, whereas Xi values order, stability and predictability and distrusts uncontrolled crowds. A shared commitment to Communist Party rule does not make their preferred methods identical.

Their treatment of Confucius sharpens the distinction. Wasserstrom describes Confucian relationships as unequal but reciprocal: a son owes respect while a father owes care; an older brother protects a younger brother who defers to him. The emperor's relationship to heaven extends the pattern beyond family and government. This vision locates good order in recovering exemplary conduct from the past. It sits uneasily beside Marxism's account of class struggle and historical progress, and Mao treated Confucianism as an obstacle rather than a resource.

Xi can nevertheless celebrate Mao and Confucius together by selecting symbols of Chinese power and greatness while smoothing over their conflicts. Wasserstrom also distinguishes the first emperor's walls from the much later Great Wall visible today. His point is about how nationalist storytelling assembles a usable past, rather than a claim that the traditions form a coherent philosophy. He cautions that knowledge of the historical Confucius, like knowledge of Socrates, is mediated through followers and later attributed dialogues.

Education supplies another continuity. Wasserstrom reads Confucian thought as relatively optimistic about people's capacity to change through learning and emulating exemplary figures. He links that outlook both to civil-service examinations, which made demonstrated mastery a route into bureaucracy, and to later ideas of remolding people through education. The example of China's last emperor surviving to be transformed into a citizen is not presented as evidence of general gentleness: Wasserstrom explicitly notes extensive killing and the often coercive character of such education.

An examination system does not place everyone on an equal starting line. Wasserstrom points to the advantage of expensive tutors and families pooling resources around their most promising candidate. The same culture that honors learning can therefore generate anger when connections bypass achievement. He connects that grievance to early 1989 protest posters attacking corruption, nepotism and university places obtained through the back door. The resentment was not simply hostility to success; it arose from the perceived violation of a heavily promoted standard for earning it.

Confucian hierarchy also contains a conditional account of legitimate rule. In Wasserstrom's explanation of Mencius, a ruler who fails morally can lose heaven's mandate and with it the obligation of deference. Successful rebellion then supplies retrospective evidence that the mandate was withdrawn. This is not a modern democratic mechanism, but it complicates an image of the tradition as unconditional obedience. Failed examination candidates becoming rebels provides another connection between educational ambition and political challenge.

Wasserstrom argues that 1989 is misunderstood when treated simply as China's version of the revolutions ending communist rule in Eastern Europe. Many protesters wanted the party to honor its own reformist promises, with political opening matching economic change. His memory of a 1986 Jan and Dean concert in Shanghai makes that frustration concrete: students welcomed participation in global popular culture, then security guards stopped them dancing. Openness without the freedom to use it became an everyday political experience. Officials' comparisons with Cultural Revolution chaos helped defuse those earlier protests, partly because students rejected the Red Guard identity.

In 1989, the May Fourth Movement's seventieth anniversary supplied a legitimating history of student patriotism. Hu Yaobang's unexpected death supplied a public occasion: mourning a demoted reformist leader could express dissatisfaction with surviving conservatives. When an official editorial again invoked chaos, protesters insisted they opposed corruption and supported reform. Economic unfairness, intrusive campus controls, speech demands and countercultural expression converged, including Cui Jian's performance in the square. Wasserstrom finds the comparison with the Prague Spring's reforming socialism more illuminating than a simple intention to abolish the party.