This event will be the Southern California launch event for Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing, a short book about activists and exiles in Thailand, Hong Kong, and Burma published by Columbia Global Reports.

The author will be joined by Sasha Razor, who has written about 2020 protests in her native Belarus—protests that had a lot in common with those that took place in Bangkok that same year as featured in Wasserstrom’s book. The two will discuss topics such as the role of music, humor, and references to films and fiction in protest movements.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine. His previous books include an earlier one for Columbia Global Report, Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (2020) and, as editor, The Oxford History of Modern China (2022). He often writes for general interest publications and co-edits the China Section of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Sasha Razor, a native of Belarus, received her PhD in Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies from UCLA. She is a lecturer in Germanic & Slavic Studies and Film & Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her research interests include avant-garde cinema and literature, Belarusian and Ukrainian culture, migration and diaspora studies.

Presented in partnership with LAist, the official media sponsor for this event.