This morning I attended a talk “Tale of Two Cities” given by UCI’s Jeff Wasserstrom. Professor Wasserstrom is a historian and prolific author, online at The China Beat and The Nation as well as in the real world of books, most recently China’s Brave New World and the forthcoming Global Shanghai: 1850-2010.
I admire the way Professor Wasserstrom engages in the larger discourse on China, both as a serious academic as well as a communicator of ideas to the thinking public at large. The term ”public intellectual” is a bit nebulous and the line between ‘popularizing’ and ‘communicating clearly’ is a fine one, but Professor Wasserstrom walks it nimbly, and he has become a role model of mine in this regard.
The talk today was on the historical and contemporary relationship between Beijing and Shanghai, long time rivals to be sure, but Professor Wasserstrom suggests that the two cities share a number of historically significant connections, and used the topic as a segue into the lecture’s main takeaway: the importance of these urban linkages in terms of political opposition and popular protest. Professor Wasserstrom, who has also published a volume on student protests in 20th century China, argues that the government is less concerned about the numbers of local protests than they are about the spector of key issues linking the interests of different social classes or geographic areas. By way of example, he cited the cases of May 4, 1919 and the 1989 demonstrations, both of which had their epicenter in Beijing, but it was the expansion of the protest beyond the intellectual class and their spread to Shanghai and other urban centers which transformed local unrest into political crises for the government.
Perhaps its the time of the year, but it all recalls a bit Arlo Guthrie’s lecture on movements and semantics, which can be found in the final section of Alice’s Restaurant…
Good talk. Thanks to the Foreign Correspondents Club of China and the Cheung Kong School of Business for hosting the event.
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