Three-Finger Salute to Autocracy w/ Jeffrey Wasserstrom

What can we learn from a decade of protest in Asia?

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Jun 21, 2025

Beneath the Winds is a series from the Monitor about the impact of the U.S.-China rivalry in Southeast Asia and the international record of both powers throughout the region.

Three-Finger Salute to Autocracy w/ Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Diego

Hong Kong, Thailand, Burma, and Taiwan—all are linked by their shared appreciation of milk tea and by their long histories of resisting authoritarian politics at home and abroad. In the 21st century, these movements had much in common: all were primarily decentralized movements led by young people; they were all labeled by authorities they protested as “color revolutions”; all demonstrated remarkable resilience in sustaining street protests, direct action, and international messaging despite authoritarian repression. The lessons from these movements are all the more pertinent today as authoritarian politics continues to proliferate throughout the world. Jeffrey Wasserstrom, in his new book The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing, narrates the stories of three ‘milk tea alliance’ movements, in Hong Kong, Thailand and Burma. We previously published Nick Zeller’s review of the book. In this written interview with Wasserstrom, we asked for his perspective on questions that the book provokes in relation to the Milk Tea Alliance movements.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine, where he also holds courtesy affiliations in Law and Literary Journalism. He has written, coauthored, edited, or coedited more than ten books. Prior to The Milk Tea Alliance, his most recent books are: Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (2020) and China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, updated third edition coauthored with Maura Elizabeth Cunningham (Oxford, 2018). Wasserstrom has contributed to many general interest venues, e.g., the New York Times, the TLS, and the Wall Street Journal. He is an advising editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and an academic editor of its associated China Channel. He served as a consultant for two prize-winning Long Bow Film Group documentary, was interviewed on camera for the film “Joshua; Teenager vs. Superpower,” is an adviser to the Hong Kong International Literary Festival and is a former member of the Board of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.

Diego Ge: How would you assess the relationship between the 'Milk Tea Alliance' (MTA) movements (Thailand, Myanmar, Hong Kong, Taiwan) and social movements in the West? What common problems do they face and what different issues might they encounter?

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Activists in each of the main MTA settings face different challenges and have different amounts of space in which to operate. In Taiwan, for example, the issue is sometimes trying to get members of the populace at large to be as concerned as they are about problems they view as important, such as Beijing’s influence. In Myanmar, it is easy to make the case for the need to oppose junta but figuring out how to keep people from despairing about the possibilities of standing up to such a brutal regime can be tough. In general, though, it can be hard to maintain enthusiasm for struggles, especially when they face major setbacks, and to find reasons to continue to believe that a cause is worth fighting for. Expressions of solidarity among people in a single place can help with that, but so can expressions of support from and friendships with people in other places, whether these expressions and friendships involve online exchanges or in an earlier era sending letters back and forth or in person contact. Not feeling isolated helps people stay committed, feeling that others are battling similar problems can be sustaining.

I read a lot about Cold War era human right activism in the former Soviet bloc while working on the book. I also had exchanges with some veterans of movements there, like my Hungarian friend Miklos Haraszti. When Miklos referred to things like Hungarian intellectuals writing a group letter in support of their Czech counterparts facing persecution in the 1970s, I thought of parallels to the MTA situation. I also was intrigued by a story Miklos told me of traveling to Poland with a friend to meet up with a Polish activist they admired, Adam Michnik. It paralleled a story in my book about a Thai protester going to Hong Kong to meet Joshua Wong, and one I don’t tell in the book but that is referred to in the special Preface to the Taiwan edition of it I’ve written about a Hong Kong activist going to Taiwan to meet participants in the Sunflower Movement. I mention the former Soviet bloc struggles in passing in the book, but I thought about them a lot while writing it, especially as they offer hope in the sense that there were big defeats in multiple years--1956 in Hungary, 1968 in Prague, 1981 in Warsaw--but later victories to celebrate when Communist Party rule ended. (Bringing this up will help readers understand why, even though Miklos isn’t mentioned in the text, he is one of two people I dedicate the book to.) Technologies change a lot, the Asian settings of the MTA are unique, but there are themes that show up again and again in varied places.

I’ve also been struck in some of the best recent books about social movements in other places that I’ve read, such as 2025 books by Linda Gordon and Rebecca Solnit, by the emphasis the authors put on the emotional and psychological aspects of the feminist, environmental, civil rights and other struggles of the past. They emphasize the value of staying attentive to how improvements sometimes take place only gradually. They emphasize that even efforts that fail in the short run can have positive results in the long run, or in roundabout ways. They may effect changes for the better that were not exactly what the activists had in mind or called for explicitly, or they may fail but inspire others to act. They also stress that people can get things out of social movements, such as joy from the songs they sing and a sense of well-being from the friendships they form during them, that defy easy calculations in terms of victories and defeats. Those parts of Gordon’s Seven Social Movements That Changed America and Solnit’s No Straight Road Takes You There resonated with me when I read them after finishing the book.

So, too, did conversations I have had with two people from Belarus specifically about music and popular culture and playfulness in struggles that take place in very repressive settings, as the role of those aspects of the MTA are things I stress. I find it very fitting that my first California book launch I’ll do will be a dialogue with Sasha Razor, one of those people from Belarus. And that the other, Natalya Cherneshova, was part of one of the first events I did on Zoom related to the Hong Kong protests of 2019, after the National Security Law was imposed in 2020, and an event that helped get me thinking about what this book might be like was a session on activism in many parts of the world that included specialist on Thailand, Claudio Sopranzetti as well.

DG: How would you assess the relationship between MTA movements and the Trump administration (either the first one, 2017-20 or the second one, 2025-now)? How might the shutdown of USAID impact these movements? Do these impacts lend legitimacy to authorities' claims that they are 'color revolutions' instigated by the West to destabilize hostile developing country governments?

JW: On the one hand, I have no patience with the way autocrats in many parts of the world have tried to delegitimize recent massive protest movements as “color revolutions” instigated by Washington. Variations on this idea have been promoted by Beijing and its local supporters regarding the Hong Kong struggle and by Moscow and its local supporters to dismiss demonstrations in places like Georgia. I like to point out that, when it comes to Hong Kong, you just do not end up with more than a million people on the streets of a city due to this sort of activity. Ideas like this have a long lineage, going back to Beijing claiming the 1989 protests across China were the work of a small set of “black hands” in league with foreigners, and long before that, 1789 being the work of outsiders stirring up trouble.

On the other hand, international NGOs as well as foreign governments sympathetic to their goals can be helpful to pro-democracy movements in many settings. They do not create and rarely are the key to propelling movements, but they can help connect people with grievances to one another, provide training in skills that come in handy to activists, and so on. Because of this, it is easy to imagine powerful people in Beijing, Bangkok, and Burma, as well as many other autocrats and supporters of autocracy cheering the news of the latest Trump administration going after USAID. There is also a broader way that Trump’s actions and rhetoric lengthen the already long odds that activists in many settings have been facing. His position in the United States makes strongman rule seem even more of a global trend than it already was with the rise of Modi and Putin and so many others, and his moves against international institutions that can provide pressure on autocrats weakens them.

Anti-military rally in Yangon, Myanmar. February 9, 2021. Source.

DG: You state that the MTA activists, while broadly sharing the teleology of anti-authoritarianism, have vastly divergent (and sometimes unclear) prescriptive politics. Do you see this as a problem or strength?

JW: It is both a weakness and a strength. The MTA is not a coherent movement, not something with formal institutions, or a formal agenda. If it were, its participants would need to have more clarity about what they want to achieve and how they want to go about trying to achieve it. As it is, the flexibility can help with the solidarity-generating side of things by simply being open to supporting those who share some very broad goals. If opposing and focusing a lot on Beijing was made a litmus test for inclusion in the MTA, Burma would not have been welcomed into it, as the main grievance many young people have against the junta has little to do with the Chinese Communist Party. There is more they share than just anti-authoritarianism, but it is hard to pinpoint these things. A generational concern, a sense that older people have kicked the can down the road on some major issues that they are now facing is there, which is one reason youth culture symbols matter a lot. It also explains why some in the MTA admire Greta Thunberg. Young women have played unusually high-profile roles in some MTA protests, and I don’t see that as accidental. It is not as influential or as powerful a force as some transnational configurations of the past with clearer ideologies were, but more vaguely defined constellations can still play significant roles.

DG: What social conditions underlie and enabled the MTA movements to form in authoritarian polities - and could there be a similar movement in Mainland China, or does the Chinese state exert much stronger control over the Mainland than it does in Hong Kong (2019), or the Thai/Burmese state in Thailand/Burma?

JW: I don’t see a scenario right now where large scale sustained protests take place in the Mainland. There’s too little space to organize, too much control over the media. But then again, if studying the history of social movements has taught me anything it is the difficulty of predicting where and when they will take place. I do, though, see connections of a sort between the MTA story and the story of mainland protests. There is a parallel in the high-profile roles young women have been playing in events such as the White Paper protests, as well as in #metoo and explicitly feminist actions. There has been an interest among admittedly small groups of Chinese studying abroad who are critical of the CCP in studying and learning from Hong Kong’s experience. And this brings to mind what has been happening in some MTA settings.

DG: Have authorities in China, Thailand, and Burma responded to the formation of the MTA, if so, how?

JW: One could say that the official response to the MTA began well before the MTA per se existed. The term only came into use in the 2020s but there were stirrings of the kind of cross-border connecting that defines the MTA in the mid-2010s. And then in 2016, when Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal, the Thai activist I talk about most in the book, tried to bring his new friend Joshua Wong to Bangkok to speak, the Thai government, surely in league with the Chinese one, detained him for 12 hours and sent him back to Hong Kong. More interesting to me in some ways that official responses to the MTA, though, has been the way that a parallel process to the learning from one another and supporting one another in symbolic ways that I describe among anti-autocratic movements has been taking place among autocratic governments. We see this globally, but there is also a regional side to it. Strongman rulers in many places emulate one another.

I see particularly striking parallels, though, between Hong Kong and Thailand in the way the authorities have done things, such as harass activists by leveling multiple complex legal cases against them, piling charge after charge on them rather than a single charge with a long sentence that might get more international attention. There have also been parallels, in a less coercive mode, in the public relations campaigns in those two settings to try to convince international travelers and businesses that talk of harsh repression there is overblown. I co-wrote a Journal of Democracy article on some of these parallels with a very smart Thai graduate student doing dissertation work at Cambridge on the MTA and related issues, Wichuta Teeratanabodee. I gained a lot from conversations with her while working on this book, and I look forward greatly to reading her dissertation on the topic and also benefited from some discussions with another grad student who recently finished a doctoral thesis on the MTA at Waseda University, Tuwanont Phattharathanasut.

DG: In all MTA movements - Thailand, Burma and Hong Kong - we see attempts by social movement participants to participate in electoral politics and acquire more political power within 'the system', simultaneously as they engage in direct action, demonstrations, and extra-parliamentary politics. In hindsight (with Hong Kong and Burma, in particular), would you say the effort could've been better spent outside electoral politics?

JW: I understand where the question is coming from, but I don’t think it works to draw too clear a divide between these modes of action, as working within the system sometimes provided networks that were valuable in direct action moments--and vice versa. In Benjamin Nathans’ powerful recent book on Soviet dissidents, he emphasizes, how others have as well in works on various settings, how it can be valuable to call on governments to live up to their professed ideals. This can mean invoking phrases in a constitution even when the authorities have shown no signs of honoring that document. Fighting electoral battles even when elections keep being turned into shams and parties are outlawed on flimsy legal technicalities, as has happened in Thailand, would seem to fit into this mode of action.

DG: In what sense are the Thai and Burmese protests struggles against Beijing, as you indicate in the title?

JW: You have hit on a weakness of the title, in the sense particularly of Burma. Putting in a phrase like “and/or” after autocracy might have been more fitting, but it would have been inelegant in a title. The set of Bangkok activists who interest me do see Beijing’s increasingly close ties to the Thai government as an important factor, though not all of their compatriots working for change share that concern, and the two exiles from Burma I profile are not all that focused on China. With Hong Kong, the connection between autocracy and Beijing extending its reach, is clearest. If Taiwan had been central to the book, we might have flipped this, making the idea of and/or in the title even more apt, as one could say that events such as the Sunflower Movement were much more about being against Beijing than against autocracy, at least in the sense of domestic autocrats.

As I was working on the book, I also became increasingly aware of ways that a specific concern with Beijing could lead to transnational connections outside of the conventional MTA framework. Many Hong Kong exiles are more interested now in connecting with Tibetan exiles, for example, than they are with linking up to any other group. There are also some efforts to increase ties to Uyghur exiles.

It’s a very short book, and I wanted to keep it short, and felt it needed to be focused, so I downplayed some of these themes. I did, though, slip a story into the acknowledgements about an MTA-like action involving a pairing of Hong Kong and Tibet--the joint protest trip to Athens that Joey Siu and a member of the Tibetan diaspora made, in which they put up banners protesting the upcoming Winter Olympics that Beijing was hosting and were arrested together for their action.

DG: In what sense could we say that the MTA movements are troubled by issues inherited from the ruling politics that they experience - particularly in relation to exclusionary practices within each movement?

JW: That’s a very good point to ponder, as I found a lot of examples of that issue in my early work on the Tiananmen protests. In the first book I co-edited, which was on the 1989 movements, there were some powerful chapters that dealt with that subject well. My coeditor, Elizabeth Perry, wrote one that highlighted class-based elitism among some student protesters, while in the second edition of the book we had a piece by Liu Xiaobo on the influence official discourses of “revolution” and by extension “counter-revolution” had in the movement, leading to rigidity of thinking. In the MTA, I have seen more issues in connecting across generational divides, as well as tensions, especially in Hong Kong in 2019, over militant versus less militant tactics.

DG: To what extent is the MTA primarily an online phenomenon - and is there potential for it to become something more?

JW: It is largely an online phenomenon, but there has also been a blending of the online and the in person. I don’t see it become more formal and institutionalized and more rooted in offline actions. And yet, there’s always been and likely is to continue to be a blending of the online and in person. A protest in one place that takes the form of street actions can gain sustenance from expressions of support in social media posts from other places. Friendships that began virtually or by one person learning about another via online reports can become deeper via in person interactions, whether this involved traveling within a region to meet up or meeting up in a place like London or D.C. or at the Oslo Freedom Forum as exiles.

I think Netiwit’s life story illustrates the need to make room for flows between the online and the in person. I begin with who he met at Oslo in 2018 and refer to his 2016 trip to Hong Kong to meet Joshua Wong whose activism had inspired him when he read about it online. I end the Preface to the Taiwan edition of the book, which should come out late this year or perhaps at the latest early in 2026 with a social media post Netiwit made when martial law was declared in South Korea at the end of 2024, not long after I had signed off on the proofs of the English language edition of the book. Netiwit expressed solidarity for the South Korean activists he had met in the past, in a sense suggesting they were honorary members of the MTA in his mind. He cared a lot about South Korea in part because he had gone there and, as a conscientious objector, found kindred spirits there in the anti-conscription activists he met. It was nice to be able to end the Preface that way, since the South Korean in person protests that followed the martial law proclamation were part of a successful fight against autocracy story; and those have such value in this dark year.

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