Xi Jinping Revived China's Personality Cult. He Did Not Revive Mao's Chaos.

When Mao Zedong died in 1976, China saw an outpouring of grief on a scale that still startles. Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian of modern China at UC Irvine, tells Lex Fridman that some of those who wept most intensely had objectively suffered enormously because of Mao's policies. The cult around him, from 1949 until his death, was not a poster on a wall. It was a feeling that could survive the famine and the chaos his campaigns had caused.

Walk into a bookstore in China today and the first thing you see, Wasserstrom says, are books by Xi Jinping: collections of speeches, the leader's words stacked where a browser cannot miss them. After Mao died, the Party worked so hard to prevent another personality cult that an unwritten habit took hold. A leader's speeches were usually not published until that leader was out of power. Wasserstrom first visited in 1986 and could go days without being intensely aware of who ran the country. The face was not everywhere. The newspaper was not a scrapbook of quotations. That arrangement lasted for decades. Xi brought the old pattern back.

The largest commonality, Wasserstrom argues, is that Mao and Xi are both subjects of personality cults. The largest difference is their appetite for disorder. Mao reveled in turning things upside down. He talked class struggle, a Marxist vocabulary, but his favorite work of Chinese popular fiction was the Monkey King story, in which Sun Wukong turns Heaven itself on its head. He treated street clamor as a healthy political weather system. Disorder, in his mind, was a method of improvement.

Xi is orderly, concerned with stability and predictability. He does not like people on the streets in anything that cannot be controlled, even when the crowd is cheering him. "Xi Jinping, even though he has a personality cult, it's not manifesting itself" as a street movement, Wasserstrom says. The portraits and the collected works occupy official space quietly. They do not summon a carnival.

That temperament shows up in how each man treats Confucius. Xi talks positively about Confucian tradition, a body of thought built on stable hierarchy and clear ranks of superior and inferior. Mao treated Confucianism as feudal thought that had held China back. They still share a premise that also binds the leaders between them: China should remain under Communist Party rule. Xi lists both Mao and Confucius as models. The two figures had almost nothing in common, Wasserstrom notes, except that in Xi's telling both point to the same thing: the greatness of the Chinese past. Anything that suggests greatness can be fused. The First Emperor burned books and slighted scholars; Mao once said that if you had to choose, maybe the First Emperor had the right idea. Xi, Wasserstrom thinks, continually declines to choose.

To understand China now, Wasserstrom says, you have to study its past, and the past the Party currently celebrates runs through Confucius, a thinker of roughly Socrates's generation. We know less about the historical Confucius than the tradition claims. Much of what we have comes from disciples, attributed sayings, and dialogues written later. Like other axial-age figures, he was making a case for why he should educate the next elite, and promising a philosophy of how to run a polity.

He lived among warring kingdoms on territory that later became China, and he said there had once been a golden age when the lines between inferior and superior were clear. Hierarchical relationships were a good thing. The trick was that both sides owed something. A father deserved respect and owed care. A husband stood above a wife and owed her care; she owed him deference. Ministers stood to the emperor as the emperor stood to Heaven, a non-personified deity. The emperor was the son of Heaven. In this scheme there are no egalitarian relationships. Even brotherhood, which Westerners often treat as a natural equality, splits into older brother and younger brother.

Confucianism is conservative in the literal sense: backward-looking. It does not argue for progress. It argues for reclaiming a pure age when the relationships were in order. That sits badly with Marxism, which is about struggle and a history that moves from stage to stage. Xi wears both hats. Earlier in the twentieth century, Wasserstrom says, political camps fought over which Chinese past to claim: the Confucian order or the rebellious Monkey King tradition Mao loved. Hu Jintao's Olympics already hinted at a mix-it-all-together view. Xi, a nationalist who wants China acknowledged as great on the world stage, smooths over the contradictions. Greatness is the thread. Internal consistency is not.

One of Confucianism's famous claims, Wasserstrom writes, is that people are pretty much alike at birth and become differentiated through learning. There is an optimism in that sentence: human nature can be shaped, and people exposed to exemplary figures will want to become like them. Education is emulation. That optimism, he argues, still shows. The Chinese Communist Party killed on a large scale, but it often held that people could be remolded. China was one of the few places that did not kill its last emperor. The idea was that anyone, even him, could be turned into a usable member of the new polity, however forceful the schooling.

Over time the same faith produced one of the world's early great civil service exams. Bureaucracy would be staffed not by the right families but by people who could survive a brutal test, a bit like the American bar exam in the years when passing it really did make a career. Families pooled resources around the brightest child. Meritocracy always had an asterisk: a good tutor bought a better chance. Failed candidates sometimes became rebel leaders. Mencius, Confucius's major early interpreter, supplied a theory of justified revolt. The emperor ruled at Heaven's will, but if he did not act like a true emperor, Heaven would remove the mandate. You would know which side morality was on by whether the rebellion succeeded.

China no longer has the imperial exam. It has the gaokao, which can determine what kind of institution you enter. The culture still places enormous weight on study and on the belief that effort should be rewarded. The side effect is a special fury when the spoils are handed out through the back door. The first posters of the 1989 Tiananmen protests, Wasserstrom notes, were not abstract hymns to democracy. They were attacks on corruption and nepotism inside the Party. Students felt they were grinding through exams while some positions were being given away. Western coverage later framed the whole movement as a democracy struggle. What first lit the anger was a sense that the meritocratic bargain had been broken.

The 1989 movement is largely suppressed inside China and widely misunderstood outside it, in part because it arrived as communism was unraveling in the Soviet bloc. Wasserstrom wants the events pulled apart. The protests were an effort to push the Chinese Communist Party to do a better job of living up to its own ideals, and to support the liberalizing, opening-up current that had taken shape after Mao. Students felt economic reform was running ahead of political reform, and that the Party's gestures were half-finished. He compares it less to 1989 in Eastern Europe than to Prague Spring in 1968: socialism with a human face, not a bid to abolish the Party.

There was a warmup. In late 1986, Wasserstrom was in Shanghai when students took to the streets for the first time in significant numbers since the Cultural Revolution. Fang Lizhi, a physicist often called China's Sakharov, had been talking about democracy. A smaller grievance stuck in memory. Jan and Dean, an American surf-rock act, played Shanghai's first rock concert. Students got up to dance; security made them sit down. For them the night summarized the whole era: "We're gonna give you rock concerts but not let you dance." Officials called the unrest a return to Cultural Revolution chaos. Posters went up about "new red guardism." Students did not want that label. The protests wound down.

1989 was a resonant year: the bicentennial of the French Revolution, and more important, the seventieth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which had helped lay the ground for the Communist Party itself. Then Hu Yaobang died. He had been associated with the reformist wing, demoted after taking a light line on the 1986 protests, still an official and therefore entitled to a funeral. Students used the commemorations. Posters said, in essence, that the wrong people were dying: some too young, some as if they would never die. The *People's Daily* answered with an editorial about "chaos," code for the Cultural Revolution. This time the students refused the frame. They called themselves patriotic, anti-corruption, and supportive of the Party's liberalizers.

The squares filled with a mix: anti-corruption, democracy, speech, and counterculture. Cui Jian, the country's most popular rock musician, came to Tiananmen and was celebrated. Conservative leaders inside the Party gained the upper hand. Students from the provinces poured in and did not want to leave just as they arrived. Then workers joined and formed an independent union. The Party could, to a point, tolerate students. It knew from the twentieth century that students were treated as a potential intellectual vanguard, and that other classes might follow them, a pattern very different from American suspicion of campus activists. Once labor was in, troops were called. On the night of June 3 and the early hours of June 4, the army moved in near the Square and behaved, Wasserstrom says, like an army of occupation. The People's Liberation Army is supposed to be the force that saves China from foreigners. That night it looked like an invading one.

The tanks rolled, and the image the world kept is a man standing in front of a column of them on June 5, grocery bags in his hands. The photograph is banned in China. Wasserstrom thinks the regime finds it toxic because it shows the PLA as an invading force, not a stabilizing one. A detail often forgotten: the man climbs onto a tank, the tank swerves, it does not run him over. The Party at first showed the video and said, look at the restraint, look how the Western press exaggerates. It also pointed to soldiers burned alive in tanks after the shooting started, and tried, with selective footage, to make the martyrs the troops. The story did not stick. Too many people in Beijing had seen automatic weapons fired at unarmed civilians. Students died, and so did ordinary residents and workers. Almost everyone knew someone who had been killed.

So the claim shifted from spin to erasure, especially of that image. Whatever the tanks did or did not do to the man, the takeaway was a line of armor inside a city, a picture of a government that had lost the mandate to rule. He was probably not a student. He was probably a worker. He was never interviewed. Wasserstrom assumes he was killed, or simply disappeared: no trial, not even the kind of hidden trial whose result everyone already knows. A similar disappearance happened a couple of years before this conversation, when a lone man hung a banner from Beijing's Sitong Bridge denouncing Xi's direction, COVID policy, and dictatorial rule. The banner stayed up long enough to be filmed. The man vanished. The Party, Wasserstrom says, does not want a competing story, and does not want anyone alive who can answer what he was thinking.

The Party learned the power of images. During the Hong Kong protests it wanted a story of crowds out of control. In 2014, and again in the first weeks of 2019, the crowds were orderly, so peaceful pictures were banned until incidents of violence could be looped. It also worked hard not to use soldiers. Suppression ran through the police: rubber bullets, beanbag rounds, enormous volumes of tear gas, even tear gas inside subway stations in 2019. Brutal, Wasserstrom says, but not the kind of picture that sears like Tank Man or the Vietnamese girl burned by napalm. There are very few photographs of the extralegal detention camps in Xinjiang. Officials know what a certain kind of picture can do.

Asked how much censorship there is in China now, Wasserstrom reaches for Margaret Roberts's three-part scheme: fear, friction, and flooding. Fear is the classic form, overt threats and punishments. Roberts finds it used selectively, mainly on high-profile journalists and activists; for the average citizen the risk of punishment is relatively low. Friction is a tax on access. Tech-savvy Chinese people use VPNs to jump the firewall, but the connection is slower and the software needs constant updating, so some people see the other version of the story and many more do not bother. Flooding is the quietest and, in his view, often the strongest: fill every channel with the version you want believed until other voices have no room to stand.

What gets banned is as interesting as what does not. You can read a great deal in China about totalitarianism, including Hannah Arendt. It is not specifically about China, so it is not in the hottest zone. The tightest controls fall on writing about China itself, the Party leadership, and particular events. *1984* has been for sale in Chinese bookstores since 1985. In the mid-1980s some readers locked onto the Two Minutes Hate and felt they were reading their past. By the 1990s others read Orwell's bleak scarcity and said: we have supermarkets, McDonald's, fast trains; our lives are better than our grandparents'; this is not that place.

Fridman has heard China described as closer to Huxley's *Brave New World* than to *1984*. Wasserstrom says the mix shifts by region and by moment. Huxley had taught Eric Blair, later George Orwell, at Eton. In 1949 Orwell sent his former teacher a copy of *1984*; that October, the same month the Communist Party took control in China, Huxley wrote back that it was a great book, but that future dictators would find less arduous ways to keep control, more like his own novel. Wasserstrom thinks Huxley got half of it. Tibet and Xinjiang have been closer to the crude boot-on-the-face of *1984*. Big cities like Shanghai have been closer to distraction, pleasure, and consumer ease. COVID lockdowns gave even those Brave New World places an Orwellian stretch. A mainland box set called the Dystopian Trilogy can include Zamyatin's *We*, *Animal Farm*, *1984*, *Brave New World*, and *Brave New World Revisited*. Compared with the Hong Kong edition, the only passages scalpeled out are the ones in *Brave New World Revisited* that refer to China. You may read the books. The pages that teach you how to connect the dots are gone.

China is distinctive, Wasserstrom says, but not unique. National University of Singapore has a world-class history department and no historian of Singapore in it: you can study almost any country until you reach the family that has been most powerful there. Thailand has lèse-majesté laws that make certain talk about the king extremely dangerous. Foreign Correspondents' Clubs across Asia form a peculiar map, an insight Wasserstrom credits to Shibani Mahtani. In Singapore you can hold an event on Hong Kong and say things you could not say at the Hong Kong club. In Hong Kong a Singapore political exile can say what he could not say at home. In Bangkok a speaker can catalog human-rights abuses across Southeast Asia and add that there are things going on in Thailand that will not be discussed. Self-censorship does a lot of the work that statutes never have to.

Wasserstrom once imagined a reanimated Mao wandering a cool Nanjing bookstore in the early 2000s and asking whether the Communist Party was even in control. The shelves held guides to opening cafés and bars, how to get into Harvard, hymns to entrepreneurship. The teenage Mao of the 1910s, a May Fourth participant hunting the world's best ideas, might have loved it. Those shops also held events that asked how the ideas applied to China. Under Xi the space narrowed. A Shanghai bookstore that sat in a metro station, famous for freewheeling liberal talk in the 2000s and early 2010s, closed and later reopened in Washington as JF Books, where Wasserstrom planned to launch his book *The Milk Tea Alliance*. A beloved Hong Kong shop could not keep going and reopened in upstate New York. A few "Nowhere Bookstores" opened in Chiang Mai, Taipei, The Hague, and reportedly Japan. Amy Hawkins of *The Guardian* has written about this overseas-bookstore phenomenon: conversations people thought they might have inside China, continued somewhere else.

He does not want the picture too simple. Mainland students still arrive in his classes as free thinkers; the system is far more porous than North Korea. A WeChat image that slips past the sensors can contradict the official line. Christina Larson has argued that China can offer both the best and the worst internet on earth: a search for Tank Man or the Dalai Lama is a wall or a lie, while consumer tools can tell you which waiter is in a bad mood. William Gibson called Singapore "Disneyland with the death penalty." In Xinjiang, Wasserstrom says, the dark edge looks like *Minority Report*: a Uyghur poet described people disappearing off the streets, with cues as small as giving up smoking or not drinking. Writers would put a bottle on the table whether anyone drank or not, just to stay ahead of the pattern-readers. After 1989 the Party's unspoken compact was more choice in daily life and at the store, not at the ballot box. Growth is slower now, the material argument is harder to make, and the prying eyes of state and tech have closed in on the private life that compact once seemed to promise.

How much of the tightening is Xi himself? Wasserstrom had been reviewing a volume called *The Xi Jinping Effect* and Emily Feng's *Let Only Red Flowers Bloom*. Feng's reporting, from the mid-2010s on, describes a narrowing of the ways of being Chinese the Party will tolerate: less room for a Muslim identity that did not have to be traded against a Chinese one, less patience with Hong Kong's difference, less patience even with Mongolian-language revival in Inner Mongolia, more resurgent patriarchy, a push against feminist movements. Some trends predated Xi's taking power in late 2012. Wasserstrom's own trips from the mid-1990s until about 2018 felt, until 2008, like more breathing room each time. After the Beijing Olympics and the financial crisis, the Party was still insecure and also cockier. Xi had already been the designated successor and in charge of Olympic security. People who hoped the Games might loosen China the way Seoul's Olympics loosened South Korea watched the opposite happen. Elite politics, James Palmer has warned, is a black box. There has been no major defector to explain how Xi actually decides. A leaked secret speech had him blaming the Soviet collapse on leaders who neglected ideology and were not manly enough to keep control.

In April 2025 the trade war escalated. Fridman lays out the numbers Wasserstrom is being asked to read as a historian, not as an economist: U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports raised to 145 percent; China answering at 125 percent, suspending some rare-earth and magnet exports, hinting at limits on Hollywood films and on certain American firms. Xi broke his silence on April 11 and 14, refused to back down, and cast China as the responsible superpower defending a multilateral trading framework. On a Southeast Asia tour he called on China and the European Union to oppose "unilateral bullying." Domestic propaganda reached for Mao's 1953 Korean War line: however long the war lasts, "we will never yield."

Talk of being bullied by a foreign power, Wasserstrom says, plays to the century of humiliation, the story Chinese leaders have told about the 1840s to the 1940s. In Southeast Asia the audience knows seasons of American force and seasons of Chinese force. U.S.–China relations are too often treated as a bilateral chess game. History keeps interrupting from outside the board. Nixon could go to China because the Sino-Soviet split had already changed the equation. Wasserstrom was in China in 1999 when NATO bombs hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and three Chinese citizens died; permitted protests gathered at the American and British embassies. A 2001 spy-plane incident followed. Many people then predicted a decade dominated by U.S.–China tension. September 11 reset the trajectory. In the present fight, China's ability to sell more consumer goods to Europe, Europe's shifting view of the United States, and India's relations with both capitals may matter as much as anything said in Washington or Beijing.

The humiliation story is a pillar of the Party's claim to rule: under our watch, this will not happen again. Anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States, including during COVID, feeds the same propaganda. For Xi, the desire not to be seen as weak is crucial. Fridman worries that pride will block a win-win and raise the chance of wider conflict. Wasserstrom's cautious hope runs through Taiwan. Military action there, he thinks, would be more likely from desperation, from a leader who is losing popularity and needs a nationalist story. Right now Xi can present himself abroad as orderly, gradualist, a force for stability rather than a challenger of every global rule. That posture, if it holds, might make a rash move against Taiwan less tempting.

Wasserstrom frames Taiwan through Hong Kong. In 1984 London and Beijing struck a deal. Hong Kong Island became a British colony after the First Opium War in the 1840s; Kowloon after the Second in 1860; the New Territories arrived in 1898 as a 99-year lease, which is why 1997 was a hard date. Island and Kowloon depended on the New Territories for energy, water, and food, so a partial handover was not realistic. He is careful to say *transfer of sovereignty*, not "return," because Hong Kong had never belonged to the People's Republic. It had belonged to the Qing empire, a different state. Colonies usually move toward self-rule. China's UN representatives insisted Hong Kong and Macao were not colonies, closing the independence road. The formula was One Country, Two Systems: Hong Kong would keep its own system for fifty years, from 1997 to 2047, without its own military. Capitalism was the agreed economic difference. Law, politics, and culture were contested from the start. Beijing told Taiwan to watch. This, it said, could be a model for absorption.

Beijing went easy on Hong Kong in the early years. It wanted WTO membership and the Olympics; a hard move would have endangered both. The mainland economy still depended heavily on Hong Kong. In 1997, Wasserstrom notes as a university person, Hong Kong's universities were the only ones in the PRC considered fully world-class. Over time global rankings cared less about academic freedom, Beijing's universities surpassed Hong Kong's, and the leverage faded. By the 2010s protests against "Mainlandization" grew. In 2014, after Beijing refused real elections for the chief executive, activists hung a banner that reversed the official pitch: Taiwan beware, Hong Kong's today could be Taiwan's tomorrow. Isabel Hilton and some Hong Kong activists also saw a Tibet rhyme. Mao had offered Tibet something a little like two systems; by 1959 the center got restless, the experiment exploded, and the Dalai Lama went into exile.

The 2019 explosion looked, at first, like a surprising cause: an extradition bill. Hong Kong had never been a democracy under the British, but it had a stronger rule of law and courts that sometimes ruled against the government. The mainland's conviction rate sits around 98 or 99 percent. Before 2020, a politically charged arrest in Hong Kong often meant bail and interviews; on the mainland it did not. Extradition would have given Beijing a lever to punish speech. Hong Kong booksellers had already been spirited across the border; Gui Minhai remains in a Chinese prison. At the peak, one to two million people marched in a city of 7.5 million, among the largest protests on earth by share of population. They kept growing, Wasserstrom thinks, because they became a referendum on the right to protest itself. Police used strong-arm methods and the government never apologized or promised an investigation. When protesters used violence, it was often against property; when it touched people, others in the movement apologized or distanced themselves. That asymmetry pulled fence-sitters into the street. A city with a reputation for not caring about politics, only about a good life, no longer looked like that caricature.

Wasserstrom is especially interested in youth movements, and he thinks generation is the variable people keep underweighting because class and ethnicity feel more solid. After 2019, and with the world's attention on COVID, a national security law did away with most of what had made Hong Kong distinct. Older residents asked why the protesters could not have been more patient, why they had forced the center's hand. If you were 17 in 2019, and people were saying that by 2047, or even in ten years, the city you loved would be gone, you were being asked to spend most of a life in a place that was no longer that city. If you were 80, patience sounded rational. Climate activism has the same math: the younger you are, the more of the worsened world you will inhabit. In Thailand's 2020 democracy push, one slogan was to let it end with this generation. In Hong Kong, young people had already made the government blink on mainland-style patriotic education in 2012. In 2014, the fight for a real vote hit a wall. In 2019 they took a last stand on the rule of law.

Protests rarely come from nowhere. The most impressive books Wasserstrom has been reading emphasize that movements are often preceded by other protests that look like dead ends and actually leave skills, scripts, and repertoires. The 1986 Shanghai unrest laid ground for 1989. Hong Kong's 2012 and 2014 actions laid ground for 2019. Sometimes the same activists return; sometimes a younger cohort says that failed, so we will do it differently. It can look irrational to try again after three failures. Then the fifth time, or the twentieth, history moves. Eastern Europe rose in 1956 and was crushed, rose in 1968 and was crushed, saw martial law in Poland in 1981. In 1989 East Germans poured into the streets anyway. This time it was not crushed. Social movements, he says, are fundamentally unpredictable. Things that seemed built to last sometimes simply are not.

If Václav Havel had died in 1988, people would have said he was a fine writer whose political project he did not live to see. He lived into 1989 and became president. Rebecca Solnit's *No Straight Road Takes You There* argues for watching incremental gains on a longer clock. Taiwan and South Korea looked, for decades, like right-wing dictatorships that activists were quixotic to challenge; in the late 1980s those systems began to unravel. Hong Kong's movement failed in the short run, and Wasserstrom does not see the national security laws being reversed. That still does not make the attempt a fantasy. The Chinese Communist Party knows this logic from the other side. In 1927 it was nearly destroyed. The odds on that ragtag group ever taking power were terrible. It did.

Success is not a direction either. Wasserstrom dedicated *The Milk Tea Alliance* to two people who have lived the uneven terrain. A Burmese activist from the failed 1988 uprising went into exile, saw a 2010s democratization that proved a false dawn, went home, then was cut off again by coup and crackdown. Asked how he faces it, he said, "I feel helpless, but not hopeless." The other dedicatee is Miklós Haraszti, a Hungarian friend who helped end Communist Party rule, knew Havel, and now watches Viktor Orbán roll back much of what 1989 won. Fridman notes that youthful idealism can also produce the Russian Revolution and then Stalin. Some of the people Wasserstrom most admires are not chasing totalistic change. In Thailand, after a successful party was disqualified, activists he knows work at neighborhood scale: stop thoughtless gentrification, improve a block, build the social groups that make a slightly better world more likely.

To understand Xi, Wasserstrom goes back to how Mao came to power. Emperors ruled until 1911. The revolution mixed republicans with ethnic nationalists who wanted the Manchu court gone and Han Chinese back in charge. Sun Yat-sen became provisional president of the Republic of China, then was nudged aside by a military strongman; the country fractured. Two organizations formed: a Nationalist Party around Sun, and a small Communist Party that included Mao, intellectuals of the May Fourth generation drawn to Marx and to a nearby Russian Revolution in a largely rural country that had become strong. The new Soviet Union renounced the concessions and indemnities czarist Russia had taken after the Boxer uprising of 1900. Leninism offered anti-imperialism plus a vanguard party. Sun was not a Marxist and did not believe in class struggle, but he admired Lenin and made the two parties cooperate against warlords and imperialism. He died in 1925. Chiang Kai-shek kept the alliance, then turned in 1927 and tried to purge the Communists.

Mao diverged from the orthodox Marxist claim that revolution comes from cities. He loved the idea of peasant rebellions driving Chinese history and argued that farmers could be a radical force. The Party went on the run, then entered a Second United Front after Japan invaded. After World War II a civil war followed. The Soviets backed the Communists, the Americans the Nationalists; neither client fully obeyed. The Communists won, and Party leaders still remember a disgust at Nationalist hypocrisy: rhetoric about national salvation, a small circle taking the spoils. The Nationalists retreated to Taiwan, crushed a local uprising, and imposed a long martial law. For a time both sides of the strait were Leninist, one-party, convinced that the age of being bullied must end, each with a personality cult. The sharp difference was Confucius. Chiang said the Communists had abandoned traditional values; Mao said the Nationalists were still wedded to them. Cycle back to the start of the conversation, Wasserstrom says, and Xi is in some ways living out Chiang's dream: one-party rule *and* a celebration of Confucianism. Both Chiang and Xi also had high-profile wives who functioned almost as first ladies on the world stage, while overseeing periods that stressed patriarchal values. Xi's campaign against difference inside the PRC has included a push against feminist movements.

After 1949 Mao was impatient and utopian. The Great Leap Forward imagined a quick industrialization that would outdo the West. It produced a famine that killed 30 to 45 million people, among the worst man-made disasters in history. Officials feared that honest numbers would be treated as political failure, so they passed up fantasy reports. A culture of fear around a great leader starved the center of facts; ego and faction did the rest. Khrushchev's de-Stalinization haunted Mao and helped prepare the Sino-Soviet split. The Cultural Revolution was another bid to recapture power, even at the cost of undoing state-building. After Mao died, the gradualist Deng Xiaoping became paramount leader and oversaw decades of growth. The official early-1980s formula was 70 percent right, 30 percent wrong, the same arithmetic Mao had applied to Stalin. Xi talks instead about the first thirty years of the PRC and the second thirty, and says one period's success should not be used to criticize the other. He sometimes implies a third stage, a post-reform era. He wants to inherit the Mao who fought the Korean War to a standstill and strengthened the nation, not the Mao who stirred youth into the streets and let things run out of control. Alliances stay in flux: early in the tariff fight, leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea appeared together, a grouping that would once have been hard to imagine.

Asked for hopeful trajectories, Wasserstrom wants a return to more tolerance of diversity inside China and more room for civil society. Looking backward, the leeway Hong Kong once had still amazes him: no Communist Party-run country had ever contained a city with that much press freedom and that much tolerance for protest. He hopes at least some people in Beijing can see the crackdown as a miscalculation. The PRC wanted soft power; Hong Kong films were loved around the world; creativity flourished there. Taiwan, imperfect and quarrelsome, has attractive norms worth copying after martial law and after a Leninist party. Even in defeat, he says, a Hong Kong spirit survives in diaspora, and protesters from Belarus to Thailand borrowed the "be water" tactic. New Zealand-based China scholar Geremie Barmé speaks of an "other China," as attached to Chinese tradition as the official version, but a tradition that includes Daoism as well as Confucianism, cosmopolitanism as well as hierarchy, universal concern as well as nationalism. The Chineseness Xi wants treated as the essence is one strand. Fridman's closing wish is the one Wasserstrom shares: bookstores in both Hong Kong and Beijing that still carry *1984*, *Brave New World*, and, he adds, Wasserstrom's own books. A society is tested by whether it can tolerate the pages it does not want you to read.