The Many Shades of Dissent: Comparing China and the Soviet Union During the Cold War and After

Inspired by the Soviet dissident toast, and the title of Professor Benjamin Nathans’ Pulitzer-prize winning book, “To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause,” this conversation brings together Penn professors Benjamin Nathans and Guobin Yang to explore the creativity, strategies, and resilience of dissenting movements in the USSR and China.

From leveraging the law and disseminating uncensored texts to digital protest and everyday acts of defiance, the discussion will examine how people challenge authoritarian regimes in two of the world’s most powerful countries. While today’s Russia and China have followed different political paths, both have developed sophisticated tools of censorship, surveillance, and repression — tools that loom on the horizon in the United States as well.

Join us for a timely conversation–and a reception afterwards–about the limits of power, the persistence of hope, and why even the most “hopeless” causes can reshape the future.

Speakers

Benjamin Nathans teaches and writes about Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, modern European Jewish history, and the history of human rights. He is the author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter With Late Imperial Russia (2002), winner of the Koret, Vucinich, and Lincoln Prizes, and To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction along with the Pushkin House Book Prize, the Vucinich Prize, and the Zelnik Prize. 

Nathans is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, and has co-edited several volumes on Jewish history in Eastern Europe and Russia, including Culture Front (2008) and From Europe’s East to the Middle East (2021). From 2008 to 2012 he worked as a consultant for Ralph Appelbaum Associates, a leading museum design firm, chairing an international committee of scholars that helped design the content for the Museum of Jewish History in Moscow, which opened in November 2012. At Penn, he is a member of the Jewish Studies Program, the Russian and East European Studies Program, the Graduate Group in Comparative Literature, and the Graduate Group in Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies. 

Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Center on Digital Culture and Society and serves as Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China.  

A scholar of social movements, digital culture, global communication, and contemporary China, he is the author of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009), The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (2016), and The Wuhan Lockdown (2022). He has edited or co-edited seven books. His current research focuses on digital activism, civic storytelling, and the digital politics of emotions.

An elected Fellow of the International Communication Association, Professor Yang serves on the editorial boards of Sociological Forum, Social Media + Society, The International Journal of Press/Politics, International Journal of Communication, Communication Theory, Global Media and China, Chinese Journal of Sociology, and China Information.  He also serves on the advisory boards of Emotions and Society and Asiascape: Digital Asia