Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
Sixty years ago, harsh autocratic rule dominated a region at the eastern edge of a continent. Quixotic quests for political change seemed to have little chance of succeeding—until they did. By the end of the 20th century, competitive elections had become the norm, and former political prisoners were leading governments.
Despite recent setbacks, voters in one of these countries just reversed years of authoritarian drift, joining forces to oust a would-be dictator. I could be describing Central and Eastern Europe’s trajectory from the Cold War to the recent election defeat of former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. But my description applies just as well to East and Southeast Asia. In 1966, autocratic rule prevailed in the Philippines, Taiwan, and South Korea, with determined democratic activists devoting decades to causes that often seemed hopeless. They endured brutal crackdowns, including South Korea’s 1980 Gwangju Massacre, which came 12 years after the Prague Spring was crushed and just before martial law ended Solidarity’s first great surge in Poland. Then came the breakthroughs.
In 1986, the People Power Revolution brought down Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship in the Philippines. The improbable journeys of Václav Havel and Lech Wałsa from dissidents to presidents had an East Asian counterpart in 1998, when Kim Dae-jung—once South Korea’s most famous dissident—became president. Taiwan, too, underwent a democratic transition during those years, holding its first direct presidential election in 1996. Fast-forward to this decade, and East Asia has again produced a striking example of democratic resilience. In December 2024, protesters, legislators, and ordinary citizens in South Korea rallied against then-President Yoon Suk Yeol’s declaration of martial law, defeating it within hours and setting in motion the process that removed him from office and led to his conviction and life imprisonment. Why, then, do defenders of democracy confronting today’s autocratic wave look to Solidarity rather than People Power for inspiration?
Why is Havel a more familiar model of democratic resistance than Kim? It is tempting to attribute the imbalance to enduring Eurocentrism. Certainly, Western observers have paid more attention to Hungary’s recent election than to South Korea’s 2024 democratic crisis. But when it comes to memories of the Cold War, something else is at work as well. Consider two of the most powerful images of 1989: a lone man standing before a line of tanks in Beijing, the day after the June 4 massacre near Tiananmen Square, and exuberant crowds taking sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall later that year. Both images are stirring, but only the European image evokes a dramatic change for the better. While the Berlin Wall fell, the Communist Party of China survived the Tiananmen protests and has spent decades trying to erase them from memory.
Tank Man’s courage is worth recalling, not least because of the CPC’s campaign to make the world forget him and the massacre’s victims. But the iconic power of that image can also distort our memory of Asia at the end of the Cold War. For all the horror of the Tiananmen crackdown, this period also brought extraordinary democratic breakthroughs elsewhere in Asia, as entrenched autocratic systems finally began to yield to democratic rule. If past struggles offer lessons and models for confronting authoritarianism today, it makes sense to search for them as widely as possible.
Aspiring autocrats, after all, have long understood the value of looking abroad. Recent studies have shown that those seeking to undermine democratic institutions increasingly learn from one another, surveying the world for usable strategies. Pro-democracy advocates have every reason to be equally cosmopolitan, looking not only to Europe and Asia but also to Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and elsewhere for useful lessons. One group I encountered several years ago offers a particularly revealing example. I had begun paying attention to youth activists in Thailand, a country I had not previously studied closely, and became interested in the young people behind Sam Yan Press. Founded in 2017, this publishing house has translated into Thai the work of thinkers and activists from around the world, ranging from Hannah Arendt and Rebecca Solnit to Mahatma Gandhi, the imprisoned Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In 2019, NetiwitChotiphat phaisal, Sam Yan Press’ founder and Thailand’s first conscientious objector, collaborated with two scholars on a Thai translation of Havel’s 1975 “Letter to Dr. Husák.”
The project reflected the group’s determination to learn from the people and movements of the former Soviet bloc. They were equally eager to learn from struggles closer to home. After South Koreans successfully resisted Yoon’s attempt to impose martial law, Sam Yan Press organised an online event bringing together protesters from Seoul and Thai activists fighting for democratic change in a country long marked by military coups and prolonged periods of military rule. The founders of Sam Yan Press demonstrate what it means to think globally while acting locally. Instead of treating democratic resistance as a primarily European story, these young activists have done what pro-democracy advocates everywhere should do: cast a wide net, borrow freely, and never assume that the most useful lessons will come from the places we have been taught to look.
The writer is Professor of History at University of California, Irvine.
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