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

The video of this interview was also published at Asia Society. A transcript of the podcast is available here.

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