New Books in Popular Culture Jeffrey Wasserstrom, "Everything You Wanted to Know about China*: * But Were Afraid to Ask" (Brixton Ink, 2025)
Mar 31, 2026
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chancellor's Professor of History at UC Irvine and an expert on modern China, answers pressing questions about the PRC. He explores personality cults, Confucian revival, censorship tactics like the "three Fs," music and protest from Tiananmen to today, soft power and Hong Kong’s cultural fallout, and how scholars can better communicate China’s complexities.
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Shanghai Rock Concert That Became A Protest Symbol
- A 1986 Jan and Dean rock concert in Shanghai symbolized the limits of 'opening up' when security forced seated silence while students wanted to dance.
- Wasserstrom recounts students' frustration that cosmetic cultural openness (a concert) banned dancing, fueling broader reform demands.
Music As Mirror Of Politics And Nationalism
- Popular culture can be co-opted for nationalism or produce spontaneous resistance; cancelled concerts like Ayumi Hamasaki's expose diplomatic-cultural entanglement.
- Wasserstrom traces music's shifting role from Tiananmen solidarity to state-orchestrated boycotts and patriotic flooding.
Chengdu Shows Pockets Of Cultural Variation
- Chengdu can reveal diverse cultural spaces because regional distance from Beijing allows more experimentation.
- Wasserstrom cites bookstores in Chengdu selling dystopian works with Orwellian slogans still visible as signs of local variation.
