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Jeffrey Wasserstrom, The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle against Autocracy and Beijing, Columbia Global Reports, 2025. 104 pgs.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle against Autocracy and Beijing is a poignant and deeply affecting portrayal of youth activists in Thailand, Hong Kong, and Burma who displayed unwavering defiance, courage, solidarity, and integrity in the face of networked authoritarian regimes between 2019 and 2021. Published during a period of global democratic backsliding and amidst the violent suppression of pro-Palestinian student protests across university campuses, this succinct volume elevates transnational youth activism as a potent force of resistance—offering a vision for a radical reimagining of protest and kinship.
Mainstream geopolitical discourse often centres on nation-states and spectacular acts of violence or resistance designed to seize fleeting public attention. Wasserstrom, however, is interested not only in such dramatic moments but also in the endurance and quiet resilience embodied by youth activists as they resist authoritarianism and cultivate cross-border solidarity. The book follows four activists across generations—Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal from Thailand, Agnes Chow from Hong Kong, and Tun Myint and Ye Myint Win (also known as Nickey Diamond) from Burma. While each chapter focuses on a particular locus of resistance, Wasserstrom interweaves these narratives into a broader, interconnected story of authoritarian repression and youthful defiance.
The opening chapter, the longest in the book, centres on Thailand and the figure of Netiwit, a student protest leader whose activism has challenged both military and monarchical autocracy. In recounting Netiwit’s life and political engagement, Wasserstrom underscores his transnational intellectual curiosity, political acuity, and solidarity with fellow dissenters. His friendship with Joshua Wong—the prominent Hong Kong student activist now imprisoned—is rendered with particular poignancy, depicting two young men who supported one another’s interconnected struggles against autocratic regimes.
Alongside other members of the Milk Tea Alliance, they participated in acts of “protest swapping” (p. 41): while Wong condemned the Thai government’s repression outside the Thai consulate in Hong Kong, Thai student protesters sang the banned protest anthem “Glory to Hong Kong” outside the Chinese embassy in Bangkok. In 2020, Wong was arrested by the Hong Kong authorities mere hours after appearing on a panel with Black Lives Matter’s Patrisse Cullors to discuss youth-led resistance and state suppression. Both Wong and Netiwit embodied a transnational vision of liberation that transcended national borders. The protest-swapping practices described in the book not only circumvented domestic repression—they also deepened solidarity and reinforced the understanding that these struggles are fundamentally interconnected.
The second chapter examines anti-authoritarian youth activism in Hong Kong, with a focus on Agnes Chow. Prior to the 2019 Be Water Revolution, Chow had been cast as a real-life Katniss Everdeen during her candidacy for the Legislative Council. In a campaign poster captioned “The Younger Games,” she is depicted holding a bow and arrow, poised to strike. The subsequent persecution and silencing she endured for her activism and political engagement underscore the relentlessness of state repression. As Wasserstrom notes in the introduction, of the youth activists profiled in the book, only one—Netiwit—still resides in his country of origin; the rest have been forced into exile due to sustained political persecution.
The third and final main chapter features two Burmese activists from different generations. It offers a poignant portrayal of youth resistance and student protest movements that span time and geography. The chapter opens with the story of Tun, a former guerrilla fighter who participated in the 1988 pro-democracy uprising—known as the 8888 Uprising—before going into exile in the United States. While Aung San Suu Kyi was once heralded as a symbol of liberation during that period, she and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), would later lose the support of activists like Tun. Wasserstrom reflects on Suu Kyi’s refusal to condemn Beijing’s human rights abuses against Tibetans and Uyghurs, using this to illustrate the complex and often conflicted position occupied by Burmese pro-democracy activists within the Milk Tea Alliance.
Although the anti-junta movement to which Tun once belonged is, at times, linked with the Alliance, Suu Kyi’s conciliatory stance toward Beijing—and her party’s genocidal policies against the Rohingya—have placed her administration at odds with its principles. Later in the chapter, Wasserstrom turns to Nickey Diamond, a younger Burmese activist. Like Tun, Diamond has become disillusioned with Suu Kyi’s leadership and stands firmly against both the NLD’s Islamophobic tendencies and the military’s authoritarian rule. While Wasserstrom’s concise volume does not delve deeply into how Burmese activists, and those elsewhere in the Alliance, navigate the fraught tensions between Suu Kyi’s government and the military regime, this dynamic underscores the imperative for transnational activism to centre anti-authoritarianism itself, rather than rallying around individual figureheads.
Wasserstrom’s emphasis on the transnational circulation of artefacts and ideas is especially significant, serving as a timely reminder of the importance of cross-border solidarity and collective organising in the face of networked authoritarianism. The most striking example is the three-finger salute, a gesture popularised by The Hunger Games book and film series. When young people in Thailand, Hong Kong, and later Burma adopted this symbol of defiance, they transformed a global pop culture reference into a shared emblem of transnational solidarity, kinship, and resistance. As Wasserstrom observes, “The use of the salute cast the authorities the youths challenged into the role of the tyrant” (pp. 30–31). Though the authorities eventually banned the film and criminalised the gesture, the youth movements succeeded—if only for a brief moment—in harnessing popular culture to voice dissent alongside their peers across national borders.
Another poignant example underscoring the importance of material exchange is the circulation of umbrellas, raincoats, and goggles among Milk Tea Alliance activists. While Thai protesters raised umbrellas to “signify their solidarity with Hong Kong” (p. 36), their Hong Kong counterparts mailed them protest gear used during the 2019 movement, after the government had extinguished all forms of dissent (p. 41). This act of exchange deepens the sense of kinship among activists across national borders, affirming the interconnectedness of their struggles and their resistance.
The youth activists featured in this book are avid and voracious readers, drawing inspiration from thinker-activists across the globe. Wasserstrom is careful to name the intellectuals who have shaped the ideological foundations of the Milk Tea Alliance—Hannah Arendt, Martin Luther King Jr., Václav Havel, Liu Xiaobo, to name a few. He describes in detail Netiwit’s self-directed political education, informed by the transnational circulation of anti-authoritarian thought—works that would later influence his publishing endeavours and the founding of Sam Yan Press. This press, committed to translating and distributing anti-authoritarian literature, plays a crucial role in educating a broader public and sustaining the momentum of the movement.
The book’s conclusion is aptly titled “Beginnings.” In it, Wasserstrom traces a lineage of pan-Asian resistance and solidarity extending as far back as the early twentieth century. As a historian, he possesses a sharp awareness of the generational continuity among youth leaders, a legacy now carried forward by figures such as Netiwit, Chow, and Diamond. When situated within this longer arc of history, the present cycles of repression and resistance appear less isolating, less overwhelming. As Wasserstrom writes in his opening dedication, we must learn to cherish “the value of friendships that cross borders, and about what hoping against hope means—and why it matters.”
How to cite: Yam, Shui-yin Sharon. “The Courage to Dream and Defy: Review of Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s The Milk Tea Alliance.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 28 May 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/05/28/milk-tea.
Shui-yin Sharon Yam is a diasporic HongKonger and Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of two books—Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship and more recently, Doing Gender Justice: Queering Reproduction, Kin and Care (co-authored with Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz).
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