Ryan Ho Kilpatrickby Ryan Ho Kilpatrick
語言:
English
Photo Credit: Book Cover
In 2020, an unlikely coalition of activists formed online. It brought together protest movements in Hong Kong and Thailand and, before long, fanned out across Asia. By some definitions, it included Taiwan, Burma, Malaysia, Mongolia, and India. People throughout these places were united by two things: opposition to authoritarianism and the rising sway of Xi Jinping’s China, and a habit of adding dairy to their tea.
The #MilkTeaAlliance began an online movement that revelled in memes and trolling China’s “little pink” nationalists, but the informal grouping soon emerged offline as well, with Hong Kong protesters sharing tactics and supplies with their counterparts in Southeast Asia. As the space for civil expression narrowed in some areas, activists also “protest swapped.” Hongkongers converged on the city’s Thai consulate to condemn repression by the military junta, while Thai students sang the banned protest anthem “Glory to Hong Kong” outside the PRC embassy in Bangkok.
In his new book The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle against Autocracy and Beijing, author Jeffrey Wasserstrom argues that the seemingly unlikely Alliance is just the latest expression of pan-Asian solidarity — a powerful force that once united disparate anticolonial and revolutionary movements in the 19th and 20th centuries, shaking the continent’s ancient autocracies and its newer colonial overlords alike.
Wasserstrom, a professor specializing in Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine, is well-known for his work on the region’s social movements. The Milk Tea Alliance picks up where his previous book, Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, left off in 2020, cataloguing the political developments of the past five years. We spoke with him about what unites the Milk Tea Alliance and what the future holds as democracy comes under siege throughout much of Asia and all across the world.
Ryan Ho Kilpatrick: Your book focuses on Hong Kong, Thailand, and Burma. But many other countries have also been included in the Milk Tea Alliance (MTA). Why did you choose these three places, not other, arguably contested MTA members? The shape of the MTA is amorphous and oftentimes contested between an “anti-authoritarian” vision of the Alliance and one that is simply “anti-Beijing.” Malaysia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Nepal, and Japan are all included by some accounts, so where one draws the line always says something interesting.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom: This is a case where timing was crucial. If I had done the book quickly in 2020, the trio of cases would have been Hong Kong, Thailand, and Taiwan. Those were the three original places where people talking about the idea of a “Milk Tea Alliance” online were based. I didn’t get going on the project, though, until well into 2021. By then, protests had broken out in Burma and some activists there had embraced the MTA idea and some youths in Hong Kong and in Thailand were expressing solidarity with those activists. I was fascinated by the flow of tactics and symbols from Hong Kong in 2019 to Bangkok in 2020 and from there to Burma in 2021. It made me think of an anti-autocratic relay race with a baton being passed from setting to setting. There were some specific angles that gripped me, such as activists in all three places drawing on symbols from The Hunger Games and one song, “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Misérables, showing up in each.
There was also a personal reason I felt drawn to bring in Burma. The first activist from Southeast Asia I ever got to know was Tun Myint, a political exile who left Burma after taking part in the 1988 uprising there. He ended up at Indiana University, where he sought me out in the 1990s to help him on a senior thesis comparing the Burmese events that he was part of and the Tiananmen events of 1989, which I had written a lot about early in my career. I knew that Tun, whom I have stayed in touch with over the decades, was getting involved in online efforts to support the new protests in his homeland, so I thought I could bring him into the book. I had always thought his story was a compelling one. When I interviewed him for the book and he told me how, as teenagers, he and his friends were inspired to act in part by hearing about the People Power protests in the Philippines, a case of influence flowing between Asian countries a la the Milk Tea Alliance period well before the MTA term was coined, I knew I would find a way to make him a character in the book.
By 2023, I was finding that a lot of Hong Kong exiles participating in political actions outside of Asia were less interested in events in Thailand and Burma than in what members of the Tibetan diaspora were doing. Perhaps if I had started later, I might have run with the idea not of the MTA but of the ties as well as differences between the efforts abroad by people from different edges of the PRC, with Xinjiang also serving as a case study.
One thing that kept me following the Hong Kong, Thailand, and Burma path was that, as readers will soon learn as they start the book, there was one person linked to the MTA who intrigued me more than anyone else: Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal. He just seemed so special that he was worth placing at the heart of a very short book and using his story to give people who only thought of Thailand as a tourist destination new things to think about regarding that complex country. I think of Netiwit as the Buddhist bookworm of Bangkok and sometimes say he’s the most multifaceted intellectual I know of anywhere in the world who is still under 30.
Any choice of settings is going to be a bit arbitrary, and in a very short book, I felt three was as many as I could bring in in any detail. If Thailand, which borders Burma, was to be at the center of the book, and if I was going to focus the Thailand section on Netiwit, who became friends with Joshua Wong and tried to bring him to Bangkok in 2016, the trio of settings kept making sense.
RHK: Although Taiwan isn’t included in your main trio of subjects, you are coming out with a Taiwanese edition of the book. How will it differ from the international versions?
JW: I was asked to write a special preface for the Taiwan edition, which, for a book that’s about 25,000 words long, might normally have been about 1,000 words long. Once I got going on it, though, I wrote around 4,000 words. I thought the publisher would ask me to trim it down, but the good people at Acropolis Books said they liked it that length or perhaps even a bit longer. It would, they said, be like an extra chapter. Since I write songs as well as books, and I deal a lot with singing during protests in my recent writings, I often turn to analogies from the world of music, so I think of the preface now as a “bonus track” on a CD. Whatever it is, this added part goes into the way that there was a sort of Milk Tea Alliance before the coining of the term in 2014, as Hong Kong student activist Alex Chow went to Taipei to see what he could learn from Sunflower Movement veterans just after they had staged their occupation and then took part in the Umbrella Movement. I write in the Preface a bit about how the book might have brought Taiwan into the story more if I had written it earlier, something I just mentioned. I also bring up South Korea, saying that I might have brought that setting into the book if I had taken longer to finish it. I signed off on the proofs of the English language edition of the book in November 2024, and the very next month, there was the short-lived martial law proclamation in Seoul and the protests that helped curtail it. South Korea is not a Milk Tea setting, but when people like Netiwit posted their support for South Korean youths taking to the streets, it felt like they were treating those activists as honorary MTA members. It was really great to have a way to bring South Korea into the story, the protests there and not just the end to martial law but the impeachment of the person who called for it being carried through was something positive to write about in a year, 2025, that has so far been one in which good news has been in woefully short supply.
RHK: Your account of the MTA follows a set of activists from each of these three regions: Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal from Thailand, Agnes Chow from Hong Kong, and Tun Myint and Nickey Diamond from Burma. How did you decide who would be the main characters, so to speak, of these places?
JW: I only got to meet Agnes Chow once, but she impressed me a lot that time I talked to her, and I found a video she made at the start of 2016 so affecting that I brought her into Vigil right at the start. It seemed natural to have more to say about her in this book that was partly a follow up to Vigil, and even though she was not a central figure in the MTA per se, her engagement with Japan was an example of the theme of transnational connections across a region that I knew would be part of the book. Netiwit’s intense interest in Hong Kong, and having not just promoted the MTA in posts but having a whole MTA section in the publishing house he founded, made him a natural to profile. Finding someone to talk to for the Burma part other than Tun was tricky. When I heard about Nickey and saw a video of him talking about his life, though, I knew I wanted to meet him, and I liked the idea that he was so different from Agnes and Netiwit — and so different from Tun as well. There is not a tight logic to the selection, but one thing I wanted to do was dispel stereotypes about young people in East and Southeast Asia among those who may rarely read about any part of that region. Introducing them to a set of varied activists with fascinating life stories and some common attributes like courage, while having different faiths and taking different roads into activism, seemed useful in and of itself.
RHK: We’re a few years on, now, from what you might call the high-water mark of the MTA in the early 2020s, when MTA discourse and exchanges were common both on and offline. What do you think is its staying power, its relevance today, and its future legacy? Will the bonds forged between activists in these regions last, or are they already being worn thin by the diverging and mostly dark paths that Hong Kong, Thailand, and Burma have all taken since then?
JW: I don’t see signs of the MTA becoming a more institutionalized force, and to some degree, divergence may well be the order of the day. It is hard to know, though, and I think what could easily endure is a readiness for people from different parts of East and Southeast Asia to keep being attentive to what those they see as kindred spirits are doing in other settings nearby. We live in a global age, of course, where the Internet and social media make it possible to see images and hear songs from all parts of the world, and yet there keep being cases in which people are disproportionately influenced by things happening relatively nearby. Proximity still matters.
I thought a lot about precedents for the MTA while writing the book. There was the Arab Spring, when there was also a sense of a baton being passed across borders. There was also the example of the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War when activists in Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest were mindful and sometimes supportive of each other’s struggles, and when friendships like that between Netwit and Joshua Wong were formed. One can see 1989 as a time when that MTA-like configuration, with opposition to Moscow being even more of a bond than concern about Beijing has been in the MTA setting, had its moment of glory, and then history moved on. There can be surprising aftereffects, however, as the case of Belarus illustrates. I became very interested in Belarus when protests there took place in 2020 that were similar in some key ways to those in Bangkok, and Netiwit even wrote an op-ed about this. In Belarus, some people sang “Do You Hear the People Sing?” A more important song there, though, was one referring to walls and calls to topple them that had made its way across Europe during the Cold War. It had its origin in Spain and then found its most important expression in Poland during the Solidarity struggle there. By 2020, in Belarus, many who sang it may not even have been aware of its Polish heyday, but for others, that gave it a special meaning. After all, in Belarus now, as in Poland then, a local strongman and the shadow of Moscow are both important sources of discontent.
RHK: Speaking of those dark paths countries have taken, the MTA moment now feels like a hopeful one in retrospect. How have you found that MTA activists are sustaining hope even as their movements face constant setbacks and suppression?
JW: How people sustain hope is something that I thought about constantly while working on this book. One of the best interviews I did that did not make it into the volume was with an inspiring Uyghur legal scholar and human rights activist, Rayhan Asat. After I peppered her with questions during our very first meeting, she said she wanted to ask me one: had I found anything in my research and reading in history, she queried me, that I could tell her to help her stay hopeful? I told her that the best answer I could come up with was that history sometimes surprises us, that some efforts to bring about change that fail and fail again ultimately succeed. Some MTA activists are keenly interested in those surprises, and it is natural that some figures they are drawn to reading and talking about are people like Havel and Mandela who, if they had died at various points before they actually did could have been remembered as people who spent their lives working to bring about the end to systems that stubbornly endured.
Personally, I was surprised that working on this project was not depressing in the end, as the activists and exiles I met with often seemed to have a special sort of resilience. There are plenty of people who give up on struggles after a time, and others who are forcibly silenced. That is to be expected, but it was extraordinary to me how often conversations, even when dealing with dark turns and setbacks, were not devoid of moments of lightness. Even that conversation with Rayhan, someone I am now proud to be able to call a friend after we have had a few more conversations in various parts of the world, was not depressing. She asked me to tell her things to give her hope, but even though she has spent years working to try to find a way to get a brother she loves out of a camp, a conversation with her tends to have uplifting moments and even moments of shared laughter.
RHK: It was interesting to see how you drew a throughline from pan-Asian revolutionaries and reformers in the early 20th century to the MTA. While the term “Milk Tea Alliance” was only coined in 2020, you point out that cross-border solidarity between Asian movements for democracy and self-determination is not a new phenomenon. What are some of the historical precedents for the MTA?
JW: There are a lot of precursors, only some of which I could refer to in the book. The Tiananmen activists played a role in inspiring the Wild Lily protests in Taiwan soon after 1989, for example. Youths in Burma are being inspired by People Power struggles, and I also heard about protesters in South Korea being influenced by events in Manila in the 1980s. You can also look at other parts of the world and times long before social media, when a mix of long-distance and in-person encounters mattered, as participants in different Atlantic world struggles of the late 1700s exchanged letters.
RHK: The MTA first emerged as a social media phenomenon. Five years since then, the social media landscape has changed so much — X is not the “global town square” that Twitter, at least for activists and journalists, once was. We seem increasingly siloed online, and no real Twitter alternative has emerged. Conjecture about the direction of social media might be out of your wheelhouse, but do you think a similar movement could still arise today in the current landscape?
JW: It is outside of my wheelhouse, but the simple answer is we just don’t know. I am reminded of a comment an early theorist of the Internet made in the 1990s, which was that due to digital developments, Tiananmen might go down in history as the last time that it really mattered that large groups of people turned out in person in a public square. That turned out to be very wrong indeed, as a big gathering at Tahrir Square mattered a lot even at a time when online activism was a big part of the Arab Spring. What we often see is not so much one thing replacing another as the old and the new combining in novel ways.
RHK: You identify your new book on the Milk Tea Alliance as something of a sequel to your 2020 volume Vigil on Hong Kong. Do you have anything in mind to make it a trilogy, or more?
JW: I am now deep into a totally different sort of book, one about Orwell and Asia. It’s half about how his time in and thinking about the continent influenced his writing and half about how his works have been read in and used to think about the continent since his death. That is under contract with Princeton University Press, and I will be working on it until the end of 2026. Unlike Vigil and The Milk Tea Alliance, it won’t be a very short one, though not a long one either. After that, I would really like to see if the Columbia Global Reports team and I can come up with one more idea that works well for me and for them. I can’t see going beyond a trilogy, but it could be really interesting to do something on Taiwan and South Korea, moving between those countries in the 1970s, when efforts to end autocratic rule in the two places seemed destined to stay quixotic quests, and in the 1980s through early 21st century, when democratization efforts bore fruit in exciting ways, and in our current troubled era of the new world disorder.