Speaker: Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Distinguished Professor of History, UC Irvine
Discussant: Moira Weigel, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University

In 2015, a group of Hong Kong filmmakers made an anthology film called “Ten Years,” made up of dystopian vignettes set in a dramatically transformed city one decade in the future. Now that 2025 has arrived, while everyone agrees that Hong Kong has changed a lot, some see the film as having proved prophetic but supporters of the Chinese Communist Party in the city itself and in Beijing insist that the metropolis has in fact been moving in a positive direction. This talk will bring in three kinds of comparisons to try to place the debate about today’s Hong Kong, and the dilemmas the CCP has long faced and continues to face in dealing with the city and its discontents, into perspective. It will ask what we can learn from looking at developments in Macau and Singapore in the recent past and in Shanghai circa 1950, back when that port was the most important urban center shaped by cosmopolitan and capitalist currents that the Party was striving to integrate fully into the PRC.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a Distinguished Professor of History at UC Irvine. Along with publishing in academic journals, he often writes for general interest periodicals, ranging from the New York Times and the Atlantic to the TLS, and he is on the editorial boards of two of them: Dissent Magazine and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His most recent books are a pair of interrelated short ones published by Columbia Global Reports–Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (2020) and The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing (2025). 

Wasserstrom was educated at UC Santa Cruz (B.A. in History), Harvard (Masters in Regional Studies: East Asia), and Berkeley (PhD in HIstory), and he is a past editor of the Journal of Asian Studies (2008-2018) and a past member of the advisory board of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. He will have a new book out in February from Brixton Ink, which is a short primer on the era of Xi Jinping: Everything You Wanted to Know About China* (But Were Afraid to Ask). He is now working on a book about Orwell and Asia that is under contract with the trade division of Princeton University Press.

Moira Weigel is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in the Harvard University Department of Comparative Literature and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University and a Sociotechnical Security Fellow at the Data and Society Research Institute. She writes and teaches about the history, theory, and social life of media and communication technologies, from the early 19th century to the present.

Her first book, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (2016, Macmillan), countered widespread claims that the rise of mobile phones and apps were bringing about the “death of romance,” showing that modern courtship practices have consistently coevolved with consumer capitalism and gendered work.  Labor of Love has been translated into six languages and appeared in dozens of outlets including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN, and  HBO.

Her current recent research focuses on transnational online marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay and China’s “four little dragons” (四小龍): Alibaba, Shein, Temu, and TikTok. She notes that despite tech competition, cross-border e-commerce (跨境電商) has made ordinary people in China and the U.S. ever more closely entangled.