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So what I think is most interesting about this is in a way that they existed at all for the first years after the national security law came in, and I think it reflects something very subtle and important about the way in which the screws have been tightening on Hong Kong.

There have been ways that some sectors have been targeted, like newspapers early on, but others have been allowed more breathing space to try to give a kind of international business community an idea that things can't be that repressive if you're able to see something going on that you couldn't see on the mainland.

So the bookstores are one example of a place that it felt that it was inevitable that they were going to be targeted and shut down, but the fact that it didn't happen right away made it a smaller news story globally than it would've been earlier on.

And the same thing has happened with different sectors of society being targeted by political persecution.

There are times, sort of in one news cycle it'll be journalists.

If we look ahead to two different moments, one the rise of CCP coming to power in 1949, but also this moment in 1989 that we've been discussing, how did these two quite different movements both find a way to draw on what happened in 1919?

Yeah, that's a great way to put it.

It's incredibly important.

1919 was a movement where some of the people who went on to found the Chinese Communist Party had sort of cut their teeth politically.

It was a crucial point in Mao's life, but in others.

And some of the people who were the youngish professors who were advising the students in 1919 went on to become key figures in the Chinese Communist Party.

And this is another thing about student movements kind of globally.

How does the party use history to frame this imperial expansion as timeless Chinese territory?

What happened in Tiananmen Square?

So in 1989, this massive movement took place.

The story of it's largely suppressed within China and largely misunderstood, um, in other places in part because it happened around the same time that communism was unraveling and ending in the, the former Soviet Bloc so I think it's often conflated with what was going on there.

Um, and so I think one of the key things to know about the protests in 1989 was that they were an effort to get the Communist Party in China to do a better job of living up to its own stated ideals and to try to support, uh, the trend within the party toward a kind of liberalizing, um-... liberalizing and opening up form, uh, that had, that had taken shape after Mao's death, and in a sense, the student generation of '89, and I was there in '86 when there were some sort of warm up protests.

There was a kind of frustration with what they felt was, um, a half-assed version of what they were talking about, that the, the government was saying, the party was saying, "We believe in reforming and opening up.

We need to liberalize.

We need to give people more, um, more control of, of their fate." And the students felt that this was being done more effectively in the economic realm than in the political realm, and that there were a lot of sort of partial gestures that, that suggested, um, the party needed to be pressed to really, really move in that direction, and it, it's, it'll seem like a very trivial thing, but I found it fascinating in '86 when I was there in Shanghai in late '86.

And so like put all of that together and so many possible trajectories of human history could happen here.