"It’s so interesting to just speculate, and we just don’t know, because he was never able to be interviewed afterwards. But I think your emphasis on patriotism is really important, because one of the students’ main demands was, then I think it might have been the thing that would have gotten them to leave the square, would’ve been to say, “We want this to be acknowledged as a patriotic, that our goals are patriotic.” We’re not here to take China back into the Cultural Revolution. We’re here to express our love for the country if it goes in the right way. So will you admit that?”"

"So that was a hope early on, and there were ways in which some parts of Hong Kong’s style even permeated across the border. I think it’s hard to see it now with how Hong Kong has changed, but I hesitate to, I mean, an awareness of the unpredictability of things. There’s no way to know what kind of thing there would be for Hong Kong later. I do think there are things about Hong Kong that even in the failure of the movement have had repercussions that are not all negative. I think the Hong Kong spirit, which is being kept alive in diaspora communities around the world, is really interesting. There are things that are spreading. I think Hong Kong represented a vision of a different way of being Chinese, a different notion of Chineseness. And I think that is something that exists."

"And I think there are some elements of that, that even in failure, the Hong Kong movements, the Hong Kong protests of the 2020s were a last flourishing of that. And we can see some elements of that in, we can think of Taiwan, elements of that is another China as well. I think not allowing the particular version of Chineseness that the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping wants to make people think of as the essence of Chinese. China has multiple cultural strands, multiple traditions that people can tap into. And it’s something richer and more admirable, I think, than this narrowed down version."