Welcome to season two of the China Books Podcast, a monthly interview series on all things China and bookish, hosted by editor Alec Ash and guests — stepping in for Mary Kay Magistad, who has wrapped up her first season of the podcast at a neat year of twelve episodes. We’re also celebrating the first year anniversary of China Books Review, which launched in October 2023. Since then we’ve published almost a hundred reviews, essays, excerpts, profiles, book lists and more, covering a smorgasbord of titles on or from China, ranging from weighty tomes on China’s maritime policy to children’s books about the Cultural Revolution.

Our guest this month is renowned writer Peter Hessler, a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of five books about China, most recently Other Rivers: A Chinese Education, published earlier this year by Penguin Press (and reviewed in these pages). In the book, Hessler details his most recent stint living in China, teaching writing at Sichuan University in Chengdu from 2019 to 2021. Hessler talked to us about how the new generation of Chinese students differ from those he taught in the late 1990s; his experiences of Covid in 2020; the circumstances in which he left China in 2021; and the uncertain future of China writing.

Watch the video interview, recorded at Asia Society in New York, or listen to the podcast:

[China writing] is narrowing. It’s becoming more political, more security focused. We’re losing the human element, and I really hope it changes.

Peter Hessler

Guest

Transcript

ALEC ASH: So Peter, congratulations on your book. It’s a terrific read, I burned right through it. You have such a unique style, it’s always a very recognizable quiver of writers’ tricks that you have, which makes it very readable. This book is being called, elsewhere, a bit of a sequel to River Town, your first book about your experiences in Fuling, Chongqing from ‘97 to ‘99. Do you think that term is fair? Do you think of it as a sequel? It has so much else in it, which has nothing to do with the students from Fuling. How do you feel about that? 

PETER HESSLER: Yeah, I think it’s fine to call it a sequel. I mean, I sort of conceived it as such in the sense that I, a few years after I finished River Town, I was already in touch with these students that I taught there, and I was returning to the place periodically, and I just had this idea it would be interesting to go back and teach and write about this area and about these people again. So that’s kind of the way I conceived it. It did expand. I ended up teaching in a different place, not in Fuling, I taught at Sichuan University instead. So I had a new generation of students that I was working with. And of course other things happen that you don’t plan on, like by the time I moved back, I had children who were in the school. So that’s something that wasn’t part of River Town. And of course the pandemic happened while we were there. And so some of the book describes those events as well. 

22 years have passed since that first book and this fifth one from China, and also there was that period of 12 years where you weren’t in China from 2007 to 2019. You used this refrain in the book, “everything has changed, nothing has changed.” Both personally as someone interested in China, who went back after this hiatus, and as a writer observing with that lens: What changed? What didn’t?

Yeah, I mean obviously there were incredible changes in terms of the material conditions and material situation. I mean, when I was in Fuling in 1996, you know, it was a pretty poor provincial city. It was on the Yangtze River, there were no highways, there were no railroads. It felt very isolated and if you went to Chongqing, Chongqing was the nearest big city, and that took eight hours on the boat if you went there, and most of us didn’t go there very much, you know. And people didn’t travel much. Almost all of my students in that generation were from the countryside. They were from farm families, very low-level subsistence farming, often family with half an acre of land, you know. And many of them had known pretty serious poverty, and generally from families that had no educational tradition or background, some parents who were illiterate. They were the first, often the first people from their villages to go to university. Probably more, 90% of my students were from the countryside. 

That was sort of the China we lived in from ‘96, ‘98. You could see that things were changing. And the fact that these kids were in my classroom was part of the change. China was in the process of expanding higher education. And there my students were being trained to teach English because they wanted them to go back to rural or semi-rural schools to teach the next generation of kids so they could expand English instruction. So you can get a sense that things were moving, but we didn’t really envision how quickly things would change. I mean, actually, even before River Town came out, before it was published, certain descriptions, even on page one were obsolete. Like I said, there’s no railroad, there’s no highway. By that time they had finished the first railroad and the highway was almost done. And there were others to follow. And eventually that eight hour trip got cut down to 38 minutes on a high speed train. And those kinds of changes are unbelievable, right? 

And that’s the trouble of writing any China book, that in between filing the manuscript and it coming out, China’s changed all over again, you know, let alone a gap of 20 years. 

Especially in that era, in some ways the biggest material change was that period, late ‘90s or 2000s, you know, was when things were really just accelerating. It changed on a scale that we hadn’t expected, but at the same time, like, so many qualities of the place and of the people are very recognizable. And those changes, of course, educational changes that I’m describing, expansion of higher education, improvements in education, and also the material change, people’s living standards improving, transportation improving. But, you know, the same Party’s in charge, the same political system, and in some ways it was even more restrictive in 2019 than it was when I left in 1998. So I think that kind of contrast is something you wrestle with as an outsider, is how is it possible to have all of this change in these aspects of society but not to have any sort of significant political change?

What was the aspect of society where change surprised you the most, or something materially in the nation? Is it the way things looked or people talked? 

Yeah I think, really all those things you mentioned. And you say the way people talk, it is true, like when we were there it was often hard to communicate because people were dialect speakers not and they used to have signs all over the campus “Qing shuo Putonghua” (请说普通话), you know, they were reminding people to speak Mandarin and actually the English department was notorious for having instructors who couldn’t speak Mandarin, even though they were teaching English. You know, because of all the travel, because of migration, because of television, nowadays anywhere you go in China, people basically speak pretty good Mandarin. Except for maybe some of the older people. Certainly in cities and especially young people, so, you know, even at that level, you’re seeing this kind of change. Where it hits you the most when you were with us is this cohort of people that I taught who had pretty marginal economic backgrounds when they arrived, and some of them had dealt with serious poverty. I have a student who wrote me 20 years later and said, “I’m sorry, I was such a bad student in your class,” and I remembered he wasn’t a bad kid, he was just, he was off, he was kind of sleepy, low energy. And he’s like, you know, “For two years, I couldn’t eat. I ate one meal a day.” And you realize that the kid was hungry, right? And he was malnourished and suffering. And so a lot of those details you actually didn’t learn until later because of course they weren’t going to tell you those sort of things.

But pretty much all of those people entered the middle class, they have apartments, they have cars, they live a very comfortable life in that regard. And now, I didn’t realize how much across the board that change would be when we talked and I wouldn’t have expected those sorts of change. Especially things like automobiles. I mean, when I was teaching there in the ‘90s, I didn’t know anybody who had a car, a private car. And then by the time I go back, I actually don’t know anybody who doesn’t. 

Yeah, I mean, from my early trips in China in ‘07 and ‘08 you’d go to these different cities and corners or Xinjiang and it would really feel, everywhere would feel very different. And I noticed in the last few years that I was there, that you would go to these cities, wherever you are, it felt the same. You would see the same sort of signs, even in the far west of the country and so on. And the city centers would have the same sort of shops and so on. With China becoming richer and richer, I feel like it’s become more standardized as well and some of that kind of local or rural flavor is hard to come by. 

Yeah, and same with language. Of course, the language becomes standardized. 

Education is the through line of this book. And you’ve often paired your writing work with teaching work — and we’ll get into the students in a second — but do you think that education and writing go together? Many teachers have been writers and vice versa, and why do you choose education as a lens through which to tell us about the China of today? 

Yeah, I think it happened to be the way I arrived, right? Actually, I first traveled through China just as a tourist in 1994 after finishing my graduate school at Oxford, and that was part of a long trip, and I went through China, but something about it captured my attention and my imagination, and I thought it would be a good place to live. And then when I looked into going back, teaching was a good way to do it, and the Peace Corps had just started a program there. In the nineties, if you didn’t have a China background and didn’t speak Chinese, teaching was one way to just go and you’re there. And I think it’s such a good window into Chinese society because it’s so important to Chinese culture. And their relation to education, I think, is somewhat unique. And so as a teacher, you’ve got a work unit, you’re part of the system, which in some ways is a good way to learn. And you’ve got a group of students and a clear task. So it was a really good way to arrive. And then that just became my foundation. 

And when I ended up writing about that experience, of course, I described the teaching, but I stayed close to education because almost everybody I taught, the overwhelming majority, became teachers, which is what they were being trained to do. There were some who went into private entrepreneurship, and I spent a lot of time with them as well, but most of them became teachers. And so over the years I would hear about their classes, I would visit their classes when I was traveling through their areas, so I maintained this contact with Chinese education, even though I never taught again until 2019. So it was always part of what I was interested in. And I liked the idea of going back and teaching again. I mean, as a journalist, there’s a lot of great things of being a journalist, and that the kind of distance you have is often very healthy, but there are some days there are points where I feel like I’d like to be a little more connected, or, like, I think you get a different perspective when you’re in and part of something, and there is, that separation can be problematic sometimes, and so I think after so many years of working as a journalist, I was ready to sort of be doing something a little different, and teaching is probably the only thing I can do that allows me to do that.

Participating instead of just observing, and you’re also working with young people, which is such a great way into where China is today and in the future. Just like archaeology has also been another in for you in observing the past. 

Yeah, as you get older, it’s harder to have contact with young people. If you’re a journalist, I mean, you can search them out in an interview, but it’s not always that natural. This was a natural way. And it’s interesting, you know, ‘cause when I first taught there, I was not much older than those students. I was 27 years old. A lot of them were 23 or so. They were a little older than a lot of Chinese university students. And then going back, I’m the age of their parents, basically, when I’m teaching at Sichuan University. So it’s a different relationship, I have a different stature as an older teacher, you know, and you’re feeling all of the ways in which this has changed. 

To talk about your peers who you were teaching in the late 90s in Fuling and Chongqing, as a Peace Corps teacher, Peace Corps volunteer, you go back in order to catch up with them, you’ve kept in touch with them over the years digitally and so on, presumably, had the intention in this book to tell their stories as well as your current students. Fuling is, as I understand it, partly underwater from the Three Gorges Dam, but the old campus was still there. You visited it and so on. And you meet up with your former students, as you say, many are teachers, some middle management, one runs an elevator company. What surprised you about their trajectories and what do you think that their journeys that they’ve been on over the last 22 years tells you about? 

Yeah, the ones, some of the ones that didn’t go into teaching, I think, have had the most surprising paths, right? So there is one I describe in this book named Youngsea, who started out as a teacher, and, like most of the others, he was from a very marginal background. He had no special, you know, advantages. He wasn’t actually a particularly great student, he was perfectly fine, but a nice kid, and very, very charismatic. He was very nice looking, very handsome kid, stood out by his looks, and he was fun to talk to and hang out with. 

And so he was a teacher, and then while he, in his early years teaching, and he just had an entrepreneurial spirit, he had this idea, let’s start a private class for typing, because kids are hearing about computers. And he said he bought two little, very inexpensive keyboards, and the kids would line up, he’d do this after hours, using his classroom in the school, and kids would pay two kuai, I think it was, about 25 cents, and they’d line up and he had a little alarm and they’d type for two minutes practicing with him giving instruction, then he’d hit the alarm and the next kid would come in and they’d just do it on a cycle when he set up this course, which is what became known as buxi (补习).

But this is before, you know, the supplemental courses that became such a big part of Chinese childhood nowadays. This is when it was pretty early. But parents were starting to have some disposable income, they were starting to think about ways to give their kid an advantage. And they subscribed to the class, it became popular. And pretty soon he was making more money from that than he was from his teaching. The school didn’t know what to do about that initially, and they shut it down. But then somebody said, actually, this is what Deng Xiaoping wants us to do, like, we’re supposed to be encouraging it. And so they let him do it.

And he made some money, he was able to transfer jobs to go to Fuling, which was the nearest big city. He borrowed some money from somebody, and he set up a little cell phone shop. Along with the cell phones, some supplier stocked him with some walkie talkies, which he wasn’t very interested in because he thought if people would want cell phones, people were just starting to get them now, this would have been like ‘98, ‘99. But he realized pretty quickly that the walkie talkies were selling like crazy, and it was because construction companies would use them on site because construction workers in those days didn’t have phones. You want your workers to have walkie talkies. And as you expand, you buy more walkie talkies.You got to get the same frequency, you’re going to go to the same shop. And so he had this niche that he stumbled onto. He ended up opening another shop and then another one, and he just dominated this market. And he became fabulously wealthy. 

One thing led to another and he became a tycoon here with real estate companies, he built parking garages and alarm systems and security systems, all the things that you need in a new urban landscape, and none of which he had been trained for. I mean, this was a kid who was trained to be a teacher. So when I went back to Fuling with him, he was driving around in a S class Mercedes that was $150,000, wealth that I would never have imagined. And that kid who wasn’t like one of my top students… I wouldn’t say, yeah, that guy’s going to be fabulously wealthy in 20 years. So some of these stories are just unbelievable and they’re right place, right time, but they didn’t have any advantages. I mean, nobody was, he didn’t have any family that was helping him do this. His parents couldn’t read.

I mean, like you say in the book, it’s emblematic of that generation born in the seventies who were there when the pie was still being divided up in China. And there were these opportunities to be an entrepreneur and to corner a new market.

I also love the story of North, the elevator company guy, because it’s such a perfect symbolism for China’s upwards ambitions. I love that they play a Kenny G going home to welcome people back to their apartments. I remember that, that’s also how they’d get you out of a supermarket closing. But it strikes me that the next generation has come along, like my generation born into the eighties, the balinghou (八零后) as they were called, and even more so the generation of kids that you were teaching at Sichuan University, for them, the pie had already been divided up and there’s more discussion of social inequity, lack of opportunity. These movements that you get into of involution and lying flat and so on. So can you tell us a little bit about the contrast with your students at Sichuan University and how they were different in their ambitions and opportunities and personalities?

Yeah, I mean, completely different. Starting from the numbers in their families, right? They were almost all only children. More than 90% of them were only children. Whereas the Fuling generation, those are from pretty big farm families. It was not uncommon for people to have come from a family of four kids. When it was very rare, actually, I think my last semester I did a survey and only one kid in a class out of about 17 or 18 was an only child. So that was a big difference. Also almost nobody from the countryside. The first semester I taught at Sichuan University, I didn’t have one student from a rural area.A couple of them had lived in rural areas when they were young, like with grandparents briefly, but not really, wasn’t really their hometown. They’d gone to high schools in the cities. In my other semesters, I occasionally had one or two students from the countryside, but almost nobody. So these were generally urban residents, and almost all of them were middle class. Some of them were quite well off, their parents had been successful as entrepreneurs, but they were generally middle class. 

The sense of promise was very different, in that the world was not nearly as open. One of the things that I, even in River Town, when I described that cohort of students in the ‘90s, I talked about how they often seemed young. They seemed childlike and naive. And the other teacher, Adam, and I always had to remind ourselves, like, don’t condescend to them. Don’t look down on them. Like, they’ve seen stuff that we’ve never seen. They’ve experienced challenges that would intimidate us. But they seemed young partly because, you know, they were coming into a new world. This was a new environment. They had no background in their villages or their families for college and living in a city. 

By the time I was teaching at Sichuan University, the students struck me in the exact opposite way, in that they seemed old. They seemed, kind of, I’d describe them as old souls. In the sense that, not particularly idealistic, very realistic, very practical, understanding how the system worked, understanding the benefits, but also the flaws, you know, because their parents were already city people and their parents were already in the middle class.

And so they were quite aware and they were pretty well informed as well. Whereas the students in the ‘90s, many basic things they didn’t know about, like none of them would have known anything about what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The kids in Sichuan University, they knew stuff. They had access to VPNs. They would fanqiang (翻墙), you know, go over the wall, the internet restrictions. 

At the same time. I wouldn’t describe them as jaded or, you know, they were very likable. I had a great deal of sympathy for them. But it’s not the same — they did not have the feeling of entering the same wide open world that those kids were entering in the ‘90s.

That’s a way you could describe Gen Z anywhere in the world, sort of plugged in a material basis of comfort, but also quite jaded.

It is useful to remember that, I mean, whereas China is quite unique, some of these things are universal. And the same thing with the, you know, it’s kind of seeing the system trend toward authoritarianism. We’ve seen this in a lot of other places during this moment, right? So China is not just off on its own doing something different, right? I think that’s true. A lot of people in many countries around the world, young people, they feel more pressure than they did in the past. They feel less promise, less opportunity. And, you know, the Chinese students also, I think, shared that quality, but for their own reasons and in their own way. 

Let’s talk about the politics you alluded to, because it is a different political situation in China that you were going back to, it’s difficult to compare really the kind of late ‘90s to the early 2020s in terms of where China is politically. You mentioned this, you talk about how you were denied a teaching position in Chongqing because of the Bo Xilai affair, and sensitivities there. You talk of this feeling in the air that Xi Jinping is “a new type of God” after Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. You also talk about how you saw a little evidence of increased nationalism among your students, and sometimes I feel like politics just sucks up all the space in conversations about China or perceptions about China in the West. What was your most clearheaded view of how politics have changed and what we get out in proportion? 

Yeah, I mean, the nature of the leader had obviously changed, right? In that when I was in Fuling, people talked about the leaders a lot. They talked about Mao and Deng a lot. Deng was still alive when I started teaching in Fuling, he died toward the end of my first year. He was from Sichuan, and he had initiated the changes that were already starting to change places like Fuling, and that would really shape the lives of my students. So he was a topic of conversation and of essays, and they would mention him, refer to him constantly, Mao as well. The leader at that time was Jiang Zemin, who was not somebody they talked about all the time. And he wasn’t one of these kind of god-like figures. I think in many ways he was a good leader. And he did, he actually gave a lot of support to education. Something that he ended up having a real impact on is, he was critical to this expansion of higher education. But he wasn’t one of these people, he wasn’t at all like a Mao figure or a Deng figure. And he served two terms and left. And Hu Jintao came in and served two terms. 

So that, you know, you kind of felt like at that time, you’re no longer in this authoritarian system with the charismatic leader. And even if these guys were the premiers, there was always a feeling that decision making was much more collaborative under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. It wasn’t so much like one guy just calling the shots. And we don’t know for sure, but it’s pretty good information. It’s probably the way it was.

They called them technocrats.

Yeah. So anyway, that was the climate then and Xi Jinping is totally different, right? And so he’s somebody who comes in 2012, eventually has the constitution changed so that he can stay in power indefinitely. That’s a big major change. And also just the level of power, level of influence. I mean, of course, the first thing he did that people really noticed was the anti corruption campaigns. And that was something that really appealed to people in these areas. And so my students initially were incredibly, I mean, my Fuling students were very positive about him when I would do surveys with them, like in 2015, 2016, because I felt like he had solved some of these local corruption problems or ended some of these blatant misuse of funds that they would see all the time. And they felt like the government was functioning better because people were afraid.

But I noticed as a teacher, the name never came up in class. Like I couldn’t actually remember, students did not refer to him, wasn’t like the old days when they referred to leaders. Students sometimes would still refer to Deng and to Mao, but not very often. 

So Xi Jinping was a presence? 

Xi Jinping was a presence through absence. They didn’t want to talk about it. They were hearing enough. And it’s a risk. If you bring up his name and it’s brought up in the wrong way, somebody could report you. I mean, this happens in Chinese universities, and I could tell they just wanted to avoid it. They wanted to avoid this subject. Some of the ones I got to know when we would talk in private about this, they’re just like, I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to think about him, you know? And I could, so I could tell that figure didn’t grab them. Actually, there wasn’t much of a connection with the young. I think there’s fear, but not affection, certainly not worship.

And I had a strong feeling of generally a desire to be disengaged from politics. Whereas in Fuling, the other thing that you really noticed was the kids that you really liked, the ones who stood out who were very charismatic and outgoing and you connected with early, you quickly realized they were already in the Party. The Party had targeted them early. You realize this kid’s smart, he’s got talent, some of them were good students, but often they were just really charismatic. Like North, that kid you mentioned, who started the elevator company, the Party had grabbed him. He’s very responsible, he was well liked, just a real solid kid and he became a Party member. He really didn’t care very much about politics. But whereas at Sichuan University, that type of kid almost never was a Party member when I got to know them. And I was less aware of the Party members at Sichuan University, interestingly enough. I knew a lot more about other aspects of students’ lives. Whereas in Fuling, you knew who all the Party members were, because kids talked about it. It was a big deal, like it was an honor, and people wanted to do it, at Sichuan University, they just didn’t want to deal with it, and the best student didn’t tend to join. Obviously, this is what I’m observing in a very small subset, but it’s, it’s been observed in national surveys, like if you look at Li Chunling, who’s done a lot, you know, sociologists… 

China’s Youth, right?

Yeah, so she’s done a lot of surveys and she has tracked that among elite highly educated young Chinese there was reduced interest in joining the Party.

But still the numbers have gone up on average every year and year. And at an elite university, it would be assumed that the best students would be Party members, even if it’s just for their CV. I’m surprised that they weren’t. 

Yeah, there weren’t as many. Because I checked with a lot of the best students and they weren’t. Some of them had been approached and had explained that they weren’t interested. You know, which didn’t happen in Fuling. There were a couple of them in Fuling that I knew, but that was rare to have the Party interested in you and you weren’t interested in the Party. 

So you talk about this dampening effect and a lack of interest in politics, people being more clued into international news, less nationalistic perhaps than you might expect, but you also had encounters with politics and nationalism yourself.

You talk about the jubao (举报) incident where someone reported you for comments that you’d written editing one of their essays, and presumably some of the content of the class as well. How did that experience…did you expect it? How did it change your feelings about the college and the students and the work? Do you think it was an outlier? How did you come to process that? 

Yeah, in general, the politics was less apparent in the classroom than I remembered from the ‘90s. Like, in the ‘90s, you definitely felt lines that you weren’t supposed to cross. And it wasn’t because anybody told you the lines. It’s because if you talked about certain things in certain ways, the students would react immediately, and they would get very quiet, and their heads would drop. And you’d look out and it was a terrible feeling. 

And I describe in the book, my heart would race. You’d get hot, you just know you’ve screwed up somehow. It could be any kind of cultural faux pas, but politically it could be something like just referring to the Opium Wars in a certain way, or Hong Kong, or just certain small things could trigger this kind of reaction, especially that first semester, ‘cause I didn’t really know a lot of the lines and that was not happening at Sichuan University, and it’s partly because the students were savvier. 

Like I described in the book, there was a time when Leslie came in and talked. My wife, Leslie, who’s Chinese-American, was born in the United States, but her family had fled the mainland to Taiwan after the revolution in 1949. And at one point in her talk, she said, China and Taiwan. And it’s probably because she was using English, because if you were, in Chinese, you’d say dalu (大陆), that’s what you would do. You could say Taiwan and the mainland. But if you say Taiwan and China, then it assumes that they’re separate countries. And this was such a small thing that neither of us noticed. But one of the students was about to raise her hand and say something, and then another student later told me, she communicated, “just don’t do it.” So there was all this stuff went on in the classroom, and neither Leslie nor I noticed it and we’re pretty attuned, right? And this was a group I’d been teaching at that point for maybe five, six weeks, so I kind of knew them. We’d both been in China a long time, but we didn’t notice that, right? So they were hiding their reactions more than the earlier cohort was. The politics were still there, but I think they were trying to suppress it to some degree. And the student later told me, she said, “I didn’t want to see that thing interrupted,” like it wasn’t important. So it was there, but their relationship to it, I thought, was different. 

The incident you were talking about with the jubao was a very strange one because I made some editing comments on a student’s paper. His paper was about how it’s necessary to have some level of censorship, which to me was not a very promising topic. And so I was probably a little blunter in some of my comments. But he made comments like, “In any civilized country, you can’t call for some part of it to become independent” or whatever. And I said, “No, you can’t make that statement. Because this happens. They voted on it in Scotland. They voted on it in Canada. And you can talk about it in many places, so you have to change the way you’re doing this,” right? Just very reasonable comments, but very direct. And then all of these things that were on, just on his paper, somehow were posted on a bulletin board and online at Sichuan University as a description of an argument in class, that I had been saying these things and browbeating the students. And a lot of it was totally, the whole scene was fabricated, and some of the details were fabricated, but I could tell it came from the student’s paper. So, then it went up on Weibo and other places and so on. 

Yeah, the way that netizens run with these things really, I find, isn’t representative of the whole national mood because it really is a minority online.

Yeah, no, I think that’s true, but it’s scary. Because things do happen, right? You know, and I was nervous because we had not been there that long. We had just been settling in and I didn’t want to get kicked out. The university was nervous. When I talked to the administrators in my department, they were nervous and they didn’t seem to want to pursue it. From what I could tell, nobody talked to that student, to see, how did this go from here to there. And I didn’t talk to him either until much later, because I just felt, let’s get past this. 

That’s the tightened mood that you were alluding to as well. Hearing you talk, it strikes me that maybe in the late ‘90s, there was more of a sense of open possibility. China was still finding its feet as a modern nation and kind of figuring out what you can talk about what you can’t, where which direction it was going to go in. And now it feels like China has figured that out, and people know what you can’t talk about and, especially in this political climate, there’s almost a feeling of foreclosed possibilities and a sense of figuring out what you could do and what you can’t. What do you think? 

Yeah, they’re definitely, as I said, they were savvier, they knew the system. They also knew that there were times when you don’t need to push it, just like I talk about that student who said, “No, don’t, don’t bring up this China and Taiwan thing, just let it go.” So I think they were capable of making those decisions.

At the same time, I talked about stuff in the classroom at Sichuan University that I never would have touched in Fuling, a lot of things that would have been sensitive in the old days, like when I talked about the American election, that was not sensitive to talk about in Sichuan University, so I didn’t have to be as careful, basically. And like, debates were also very different. I wrote about, in River Town, like, it was very hard to have a debate because everybody had the same opinions, right? So the best thing to do in those days would be to debate about the United States. Like, I’d say, should America have a one child policy? And then the kids could argue. You’d have to trick them in some way or manipulate it a bit so that they would feel safe and talk. At Sichuan University, we talked about like, you know, should the system be radically reformed, or, and they would have a really active good debate about that. And we talked about other issues that would, in the old days, would have been hard to argue about. And students felt comfortable with that. So, you know, that kind of reflected this increased education level, I think increased awareness, better information. So in that sense, the classroom felt freer, actually, than it had. So there is a combination. You’ve got both things going on. 

So you arrived in September 2019, and then just a little less than five months later COVID hit, the first kind of lockdowns happening at the end of January. And this is a COVID memoir in some ways. I remember those early days of COVID, just the sense of panic. And you describe the city lockdowns, you also go on a reporting trip to Wuhan. Can you tell us a little bit about living through those early days of COVID and how you felt that the nation’s response and people’s response, how was that indicative? What did that reveal about this new China?

I think the bottom line is that it varied wildly, basically. And I just said in the book, there’s basically, like three phases of China’s COVID experience and each of them with completely different outcomes. And your assessment of them, totally. I mean, the first one, obviously in Wuhan, and, you know, the whistleblowers who got arrested or threatened or they had to sign statements and they were silenced. All of those things that went on in Wuhan that were awful in the first phase. It showed the lack of a free press, it showed the problems with authority and with officials just blatantly lying to people. 

And then they entered another phase, where after all those initial missteps, it was handled quite well. I think it was appropriate to China basically, you know, in the sense that, a lot of it was a matter of public health investment. They were willing to invest a lot in things like contact tracing, testing, you know, trying to make tests available, um, and, you know, quarantine facilities and things like that. And that worked. And so that was a long second phase when life felt quite normal. And that’s when I went to Wuhan, for example, like August of 2020, most parts of the world was risky to travel or in some places you couldn’t travel. But, you know, I was going there, nobody’s wearing masks, we’re interviewing face to face, the disease wasn’t moving. And at that point, I still didn’t know anybody who had gotten it in China and none of my students who were, you know, those first two semesters, it was more than a hundred students, none of them knew anybody — I would do surveys. 

And then the third phase was when they kept to this strategy too long. Post Omicron, post vaccine, you’ve got to change, obviously, and they didn’t. And so each of those tells us something about both China’s strengths and its weaknesses. So I think it’s a really fascinating case study. Also because it’s unusual, like most, like the U. S. didn’t do very well at the start. And didn’t do very well after that. The only thing we did well was the vaccines, basically, but in terms of public health policy, it was basically a failure, but it was pretty consistent. And most countries were like that. And something about China made it totally different, right? That you’ve got this huge failure. And then really what I’d say was a big success and then a huge failure again. I think the first failure is more understandable because at the beginning of something like this, I think probably, and when I talked to the disease specialists, they would say everybody was probably gonna screw this up. But you’re gonna screw it up in your own way, right? So it tells us important things about China, because the way they screwed up is different from the way we would have if it had started in New Orleans or something, like this kind of disease, but that each of them tells you something important about it. But there wasn’t any other example I could think of, a large country that had such radically different, like, scorecards on different parts of the pandemic. 

Yeah. Although other Asian nations followed the model of zero COVID like Taiwan and Singapore and, you know, successfully. Certainly that, that third phase in 2022 in China, it was very apparent, to me at least, that this was an overreaction and excessive and not good for the nation’s health or economy or anything. But people do forget, for the majority of the pandemic, life was great in China. It was probably better than being in the States. 

Yeah, that second section has been elided in the memory, basically. You can see it in surveys. I surveyed my students, both from Fuling and from Chuanda. And I asked them to rate in 2023, I asked them, how would you rate China’s government’s performance in the pandemic, and the Fuling cohort, more than 30 students, it was quite high. It was over eight. On average, 8 out of 10. Whereas the students from Sichuan University was just a bit over six for more than 40 respondents, and strikingly different. And again, the Fuling students are not in the biggest cities. A lot of those, the Sichuan University students are in Chengdu, some in Shanghai, you know, these bigger cities that had worse lockdowns. The Fuling students were mostly in, you know, like xiancheng (县城), like smaller cities where the lockdowns weren’t as bad. They had government jobs, which they maintained. And so they didn’t suffer the way that the young people who are worried about their job prospects. So that’s interesting too, to me, is that the assessment of it feels quite, I think it’s probably wildly different depending on who you were in China and where you were in China. I mean, you were in Dali, right? And in a place like that, the third phase wasn’t disastrous. 

I missed the whole pandemic. It was, you know, a rural place like that. We had, you know, there was some QR code and facemask theater, but otherwise, it was pretty idyllic.

Yeah, but if you had been in Shanghai, you’d have a very different feeling. And so I think there is this wildly different assessment, probably. And it’d be interesting to see how it settles on people over time. Like what does it mean toward their view of their country?

I mean, a lot of people suffered in the pandemic. So there was an article, which came out, I think it was 2021, and I think it was partially in response to one of your New Yorker articles about China’s positively framed response to the pandemic from Geremie Barmé, in which he essentially, I think what he’s essentially accusing you is soft-pedaling atrocities that are happening in China, human rights abuses and so on, Xinjiang, and by only focus on, on the society. What’s your response to that? 

Yeah, that was in 2020. I’d written two pandemic articles at that point. I’d written one about the first phase, and I wrote about Wuhan and about Li Wenliang, the doctor, and communicating with a pharmacist there who was kind of on the front lines and was furious about the government mistakes. And I also described things, like there had been a suicide of a kid in Fuling that I worried about, the, I was noticing that there were problems with remote schooling. And so I wrote about that. And then the second story was about this second phase that was successful. 

So Barmé criticized my pandemic coverage without ever mentioning the first story. If you’re going to write about what I’m writing about the pandemic, and I’ve written two 8,000 word stories, you can’t pretend that one doesn’t exist. And he accused me of writing this way because I was afraid of trouble. I had already been to Wuhan and talked to Fang Fang. Like if you were afraid of trouble, the last thing you want to do in August of 2020 is go to Wuhan and sit down across the table from Fang Fang, you know?

But as to the general criticism that in focusing on certain sort of social stories, in a country like China, you’re sort of ignoring larger things that are going on. What do you think of that?

But I wasn’t. I mean, he’s, he’s focusing on one story. I’m writing other stories. He’s pretending they don’t exist. If he had called me also, which is standard practice in journalism, ask the person for comment, ask the person what’s going on, “Are you avoiding these topics?” I would have said I was just in Wuhan. I just talked to Fang Fang. It’s a story I’m working on right now. 

I’ve written five books about China, dozens of stories in The New Yorker. If you’re going to pick one story, and, I mean, he accused me of being, like, a Stalinist-style apologist. If you’re going to pick one story and try to make that claim, I think it doesn’t hold up. You have to look at a person’s body of work. And to me, you know, it says more about the mood of China commentary at this time. There’s a lot of anger. There’s a lot of frustration. I understand that China has not turned out the way a lot of people wanted it to. And you can beat your head against the CCP, and you’re not going to get any reaction. But if you go after me, it may be more satisfying. 

You were informed in spring 2021 that Chuan Da (川大) wasn’t — Sichuan University wasn’t — going to renew your contract for a third year. That was delivered to you in these very kind of curt bureaucratic terms. You’ve written on this before and, and, as a lot of people, but you don’t really get into it too much in the book. Sort of how, how have you processed that now? And what’s your understanding of what happened? Or is this pure speculation? Does it tie into the political mood? Or was it just…

I have a pretty good idea what happened, but I don’t know for sure. But, I mean, my job was not renewed, and the reasons I was given kind of changed at different times. But the decision was made by a dean at the University of Pittsburgh, who was the dean of this program, a joint program in China. And he actually was not in China at the time, and had not been in China since the start of the pandemic. And my view is that he read this situation as problematic, that I was writing stories that were getting criticized. Because I was attacked by people on both sides. And some people like Barmé pointed out that I wasn’t on a journalist visa, which to me is not something you should ever do. When somebody is in China and working, it’s not your place, when you’re in New Zealand or Australia, to try to get somebody in trouble. 

My read is that, from what I can tell, the dean, I think, was worried about problems and preemptively decided that it would be easier if I was gone. I don’t think he did a very good job of checking with — and I’m sure it was not a top down decision, I’m really certain of that from people I’ve talked to, that it wasn’t like somebody in the top of the university or the province told him to do this. But you know, this is what happens in this kind of environment, is people are scared and they make preemptive decisions, right? It’s because, that’s why I didn’t teach in Fuling in the first place, was that when the Fuling College wanted to hire me, somebody in the bureaucracy in Chongqing, I was told, this is because of a general nervousness in the post-Bo Xilai stuff, that they just don’t want to take risks, and it’s totally natural, right, you understand how people do this. I was less sympathetic because it was an American who was doing this, and I don’t think he had to. And then there was a bit of a backlash, some number of students weren’t happy about it, a number of Chinese readers and people said, “why is this necessary?” So I think it was kind of an unfortunate thing, but there was nothing I could do about it.

And I know that the university kind of backtracked ‘cause toward the end of my time, somebody from the waiban (外办) set up a meeting with me and said — this is like days before my daughters and my wife were leaving and we’d already moved her stuff out and so on — and said, “Oh, by the way, we’d like to have you find a way to stay” or something, you know. But by that point, there had been so much lost trust through this that I wasn’t going to consider it, and you know in that situation when it’s gotten to that point, it feels pretty risky as a writer, like, what happens if these people change their mind or, you know, so if Xi Jinping says something about some random thing and that becomes a target, who knows?

Better to go.

So it was easy at that point. And I tried three times with the dean of my program and asked, including the last time I said, “I’m willing to sign a long term contract,” because one of the reasons he said is, “Oh, you’re not on a long term contract, and that might be a problem for the employment law.” And I said, “Let’s do a long term contract, then.” And never was I offered any chance to stay. 

So now we’re in this situation, you personally, but all of us as well, where there’s just fewer journalists there in China, especially after so many American journalists were expelled in 2020, and a lot of China watching is being done from outside. We compile these lists of all these China books and the majority of them are written from people outside of China in the English language. Do you think that you can watch and write about China from outside? What is lost? 

Yeah, I mean, I think you, obviously, you can and you should, and we have to, right? I mean, we need people doing whatever they can. There’s China people like you and me who try to stay in touch with people there. There’s enormous numbers of Chinese, who in a perfect world would be journalists in China, who are now in America or Britain or other countries, doing what they can to follow what’s going on and to analyze and to write, and it’s important, like, we need it. But at the same time, you definitely miss a lot. And one problem is that, I think, that kind of reporting tends to skew elite — the farther you are away, the more likely your interlocutors are, I think, to be elite. That’s one reason why I really worked hard to stay in touch with the people I taught in Fuling, because they aren’t as elite, and they often are in places that are not as much driven by, you know, they’re not in Beijing or Chengdu, or they’re in smaller places, and so, I think it’s useful to hear from them. But generally speaking, it’s harder to be in touch with people in these smaller places when you’re from afar. And of course, the internet in China is not representative, it’s not representative of the United States either. So you really need people on the ground and it’s a crisis, because that texture of life, all the details and the things that also make it more human, you need to be on the ground.

I don’t know what the solution is, because, you know, it’s hard for journalists to get a visa there now, if you’re an American citizen. I think we need to find ways to get more students there, Americans studying Chinese, and those numbers are frighteningly low. But yeah, I mean, in terms of writing it, you know, it makes me sad because I talk about how things were wide open for my students and I, they were wide open for me. I was a beneficiary of this environment. When I showed up in 1996, it was possible to live in a town like Fuling and learn Chinese and make real connections with people. And then it was possible to go to Beijing and set up as a freelancer and make my way as a writer. And I was able to feel it out and find the type of stories and topics that interested me and, you know, carve out my niche. And if I were doing that now, I don’t think it’s really possible.

I also worry that China writing has become dehumanized a little bit. It’s become an abstraction and, very understandably the further away you are, the wider your lens is. But we’re missing that kind of depth: granular, human level story, which just remind us that it’s a country populated of individuals with funny, hilarious stories, and ambitions and struggles and so on, which your writing captures so well. 

And then just as a last question, as a sort of second half of this question, you were teaching nonfiction writing to Chinese students. You open the book with a quote from one of your students who writes on the topic of writing, “Nonfiction description has disappeared in China. I don’t know how to express facts in words now. I have a hard time writing what I want to write because I am afraid what I will write will probably be deleted.” And you mentioned some student publications. Just in general, what’s your feeling about how possible it is for Chinese citizens, whether in the diaspora or in Chinese media and other publications, to be telling these stories, which obviously would be the best scenario rather than having journalists.

Yeah, I taught amazing students in my journalism class, but very few of them planned to be journalists. Actually, very few of them were from the journalism department at Sichuan University. It was mostly English majors and some engineers, even, like, a kid in physics. It was people from other departments and they were doing it because they were interested, but in only a few exceptions, you know, do I have students from those classes who want to be journalists. And even the people in the J school there saw their prospects as very limited. And I have a few who have gone into the Chinese state media system and it’s hard. It’s not that satisfying. They’re trying to do their work they care about as much as they can on the side or whatever.

Simply because they can’t write what they want to?

Yeah, you can’t do — you know, it was much more open 10 years ago. I mean, there was a lot of dynamic journalism in China, actually, for a period. It was never like you could do in the West, but it was good. You could do some things and people were pushing. It’s not that way now. I have one very dynamic student who’s in Africa and just looking to write a book, you know, instead of being — she’s not with the news service and I encourage her that there might be a way to do it now. Just have an interesting experience, write about this place and when you’re away from China, maybe it’s also — she’s writing about Chinese people in Africa. But maybe that’s a nice way to not have this weight on you all the time. 

But yeah, it’s hard, you know, as I say, it’s depressing to think about what it’d be like for a young foreigner like me going there and trying to get established. Now it’s much, much harder to think about young Chinese who are talented and, you know, people would always say to me, “Oh, you write these books and people in China, we can’t do this.” Or people sometimes say that it’s like, there’s all the talent in the world is there, right? There’s highly literate people, highly observant people. They just don’t have the avenues. Like it’s, that’s not what creates, it’s not like my personality creates me as a writer. It’s the infrastructure, the education I received, the institutions like The New Yorker that supported me. And that’s what makes it happen. You know, it doesn’t come from me. You know, it comes from everything around me. And unfortunately that’s really hard to do in China. 

Right. The ambition and the talent is there, but not the structures. 

Yeah, I mean, it’s a great place in terms of a highly literate population. Like if you had, if you could write stuff and people care about it, they would read it. They would pay to read it. And you’ve got a big market, but it’s just not possible — political reasons. There are also economic issues, right? It’s hard for a young Chinese person to make a living at it. 

So what does this mean for the China book?

It’s hard. It’s a hard time. There was an amazing era, I feel, in the 2000s and early 2010s, when you just had all kinds of different books coming out around China, and I think that’s not the case right now. It’s hard. In those days, you had so many more people there on the ground, and they would find different angles, and different types of people were writing the books, different perspectives. That’s really what you need. And it’s narrowing, and it’s becoming more political, it’s more security focused. We’re losing the human element, and I really hope it changes, obviously. For me, it’s probably not in my near future, because my kids are entering high school, and we had always planned to be in the U. S. for this period, so I’ll be writing about other things I expect in the next few years.

Even if it’s one of the last ones, this is a great China book. Everyone should go out and buy it. Peter Hessler, thank you so much for your time today. 

Yeah. Thanks so much. I appreciate it. ∎

The video of this interview was also published at Asia Society.