Echoes of '89: How Today's Protests In China Stack Up With Tiananmen Square | Eli Friedman | TMR

Sam and Emma are joined by Eli Friedman, professor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and author of The China Question: Toward Left Perspectives, edited with Kevin Lin and Ashley Smith, to discuss the recent protests in China. Eli Friedman then joins as he gets right into contextualizing the last couple of weeks in China, and the protest that has risen from their “Zero Covid” policy, tackling the development of the Chinese public opinion for these policies, and the country’s relationship to covid writ large. Next, they tackle China’s history with mass protest movements, outlining the vast differences between these protests and the pro-democracy movement in 1989, and walking through the various current tensions in China’s relationship with Democracy and the West.

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Joining us now is Eli Friedman. He's a professor at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Author of the China question toward left perspectives edited with Kevin Lin and Ashley Smith. Eli is welcome to the program. Thanks for joining us. yeah, it's great to be here. Will you see protests in China? It's unclear I guess at least to me how widespread. but will you give us just I guess maybe a ten thousand foot view of contextualizing these protests relative to ones that we've seen you know like for instance in 1989? Where does this fit in that regard? Sure so there are a lot of comparisons happening between what's happening now in 1989. The scale is almost certainly not on the same level as it was in 89. When you had hundreds of thousands of people in Tiananmen Square. You also had big protests that were happening in other parts of China in 1989. and so the mobilizations have been smaller in scale; they've been more fractured, maybe in more cities this time than was the case in 89. They also have already more or less died down just in the past week and that's due in part to repression but also some important concessions that we can talk about. And so you know there's debate about how many people are actually on the street. This is maybe not the most significant thing but they're clearly not on the same scale. I think it's also worth mentioning that sometimes people have this misconception that China's an authoritarian country and therefore people never protest. and that's actually not true so after 1989 you don't have the same big scale very politicized kind of protest but you do have quite a lot of small-scale localized protests labor protests peasants whose land has been taken you know things over over environmental issues.