Are young people in Asia less prone to speak out and perhaps generally politically motivated than those in other parts of the world? Pundits sometimes suggest this is the case, but the history of the last 50 years suggests that there is only one accurate way to answer this question: No! In fact, some of the most important youth protests in the world in the 1980s took place in South Korea and the Philippines, where students helped topple dictatorships, and in Burma and China, where democracy movements late in the decade were impressive even if they were eventually crushed with force. Young people in those and still other parts of Asia have taken to the streets since the days of People Power and Tiananmen. In the last decade alone, we have seen dramatic demonstrations, made up of crowds filled with young faces, rock Hong Kong in 2019, Bangkok in 2020, Yangon in 2021, and Seoul late last year.
This talk, by a specialist in East Asian Studies, Prof. Jeffrey Wasserstrom, who has recently been focusing on Southeast Asia as well, will place all of these events, and those of the recent past in particular, into historical and comparative perspective. Prof. Wasserstrom, a historian of China with extensive publications and Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, will address topics include similarities and differences between American student movements and those in different parts of Asia, the role of popular culture in Asian democracy movements, and the ways that activists in and exiles from Hong Kong, Thailand, and Burma have been learning from and expressing solidarity with one another since the late 2010s.
