What does it mean to resist when resistance seems futile?

Inspired by the Soviet dissident toast "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 about the limits of power, the persistence of hope, and why even the most "hopeless" causes can reshape the future.

Benjamin Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History at Penn. His most recent book is To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction and the Pushkin House book prize. He is also the author of the multiple prize-winning Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia. Nathans directs the Robert K. Johnson Integrated Studies Program at Penn and is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.

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 serves as the director of the Center on Digital Culture and Society and deputy director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. He is the author of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (Columbia University Press, 2009), The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (Columbia University Press, 2016), and The Wuhan Lockdown (Columbia University Press, 2022). He is also the editor or coeditor of five books, including Engaging Social Media in China (coedited with Wei Wang; Michigan State University Press, 2021), Media Activism in the Digital Age (coedited with Victor Pickard; Routledge, 2017), and China’s Contested Internet (NIAS Press, 2015).