Peter Hessler joined the Peace Corps and taught at Fuling College in central China between 1996 and 1998. A few years later, he wrote of his experience in a book entitled River Town, which demonstrated his deep empathy for the Chinese people (but not their government.) This was followed by several other books including Oracle Bones and Country Driving.
All of his books are excellent, but his new book Other Rivers: A Chinese Education is especially good. Although the events being described are a bit less exotic than in his previous three books, the new book shows an even more wide-ranging understanding of modern China. Our media is full of half-truths about China. Hessler provides a more complete picture.
Back in 1996, China was a mostly rural country where only a small share of students went to college. Now it’s a mostly urban society where most young people attend college. (AI Overview says the college enrollment rate has gone from 3.4% in 1990 to over 60% today.) In 2019, Hessler returned to China to teach at Sichuan University, a highly respected school in roughly the same southwestern region where he had taught 23 years earlier (and home to the panda). Early in the book (p. 22), he discusses how the students had changed:
In the old days, on crowded buses, I had been half a head taller than most people around me; now in a packed Chengdu subway I often found myself looking into some kid’s armpit. In 2020, a study in the Lancet reported that out of two hundred countries, China had seen the largest increase in boys’ height, and the third largest increase in girls, since 1985.
Notice he alludes to the shift from buses to subways. Chengdu finally got its first subway line in September 2010; here’s the system today:
In roughly the time LA would spend on an environmental impact statement, Chengdu built the world’s third longest subway system—about the combined size of London and Paris’s metros. In terms of quality, China’s subway systems make the NYC system seem like a sewer. I visited Chengdu in 2006, which means I’ve never really been to “Chengdu”, in the modern sense of the term. Almost anything you might have read about China 20 years ago is now out of date.
Back in the late 1990s, China had a move fast and break things attitude. There was a sort of ruthless pragmatism in China’s education policy (p. 56):
In some of the poorest places, the rush to accredit instructors went all the way to middle school. One of my best students, Linda, had been the middle school tongzhou, or desk mate, of a quick-minded boy who tested higher than she did at the end of ninth grade. Because of his scores, the boy was sent immediately to a three-year institute that specialized in training teachers for primary schools in poor areas. Linda went on to high school , after which she was selected to enter the Fuling college. Back then, nobody spoke of algorithms, but clearly there had been some kind of large-scale calculation. By identifying bright rural kids and providing them with training that was both narrowed and accelerated, the government produced primary-schoolteachers who were fully licensed by the age of eighteen.
Of course, these teachers were also bright enough to realize that they were essentially being sacrificed for the sake of the larger system.
In the old days, most of the Chinese students who came to America were poor and studied under scholarships. They generally preferred to stay in America after graduation. Today, the vast majority of overseas Chinese students pay full tuition, and about 80% return to China after graduation. Here’s Hessler (p. 75):
There had never been another authoritarian nation in which so many prosperous and educated young people left to study in democratic societies and then willingly came back.
Hessler (p. 93) reports that Chinese students have an amazing work ethic:
Chinese students also tend to carry more courses: my first-years spent nearly forty hours in the classroom every week. And yet out of my two sections, for three periods a week, over seventeen weeks of term, there wasn’t a single student who missed a single hour.
At Bentley College, I recall being told that attendance was generally poor on Friday morning because Thursday night was party night.
The book is full of interesting tidbits:
Despite the famous “firewall”, most Chinese students accessed foreign internet sites like Google through VPNs. But many students watch Fox News, as it’s one of the few news sites that are not blocked, and thus “they didn’t have to go through the hassle of using a VPN.” I suspect the Chinese government wants its citizens to believe that American news is both dumb and anti-China.
The most “conservative” (i.e., anti-American) element of the CCP resented the Peace Corps program that Hessler had participated in during the 1990s. Florida senators Scott and Rubio played into their hands by successfully demanding the program be ended, despite the fact that it gave the US government a valuable perspective on Chinese life. Hessler says that 27 former China-stationed Peace Corps volunteers later joined the State Department.
China’s lockdown policy really was effective in 2020 and 2021, until it failed spectacularly in 2022. Even though he was teaching in central China, and his students came from all over China, in the fall of 2020 not a single one of his students knew anyone that had been infected with Covid. Hessler says the first person he actually knew to get Covid was his editor back in New York. He provides a fascinating (and often amusing) description of life in China as a Westerner during the Covid pandemic, “There were few places in the world where life felt as normal is it did in China that summer.”
Unlike in the US, the Chinese government granted almost no financial assistance to people adversely affected by the pandemic. American libertarians would hate the strict lockdowns, but love the fact that in China you’re on your own. And schools mostly remained in session, after a brief shutdown.
When he taught in Fuling in 1996, the air was almost always grey and drab from heavy pollution. When he returned in 2021, the air was clear and blue. (It was also grey when I passed through Fuling in 1994.) I’ve also noticed the air getting cleaner.
When he surveyed his former students on various topics in 2023, 75% of the female students (18 out of 24) indicated that they did not wish to have children.
Hessler learned that Chinese companies are surprisingly concerned with data privacy (p. 244):
By then, many other Chinese citizens were also coming back, because it was clear that the pandemic was being handled poorly in the United States and Europe. It would have been useful to know exactly where these returnees had been, so Jiang wrote a proposal requesting that Tencent, the publicly held company that owns WeChat, provide the IP log-in information for people who came back. “They reject me because of the data privacy,” Jiang said. He was told that Tencent was adamantly opposed to its data being used in this fashion.
China has a somewhat different view of privacy than the West. The Chinese people are strongly supportive of the widespread use of cameras in most public places, believing that this helps to explain the big drop in China’s crime rate in recent decades. And Hessler gives the impression that the Chinese people were far more worried than Westerners about the danger of catching Covid. (Too worried, in my view.) He points out that the Chinese government used some very “heavy-handed tactics” including “mass-surveillance equipment”. In the end, he has trouble understanding why the Chinese tolerate some privacy invasions but not others. I’d like to see a deeper analysis of how the Chinese view of privacy differs from that of Western countries.
In August 2020, Hessler decided to vacation in Wuhan, to get a sense of how things were actually going in that city. Everything seemed back to normal. He even visited the building containing the famous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and bought some sunglasses because he felt sorry for the merchant who had seen his business dry up. He spoke with people involved in building the Wuhan hospitals that were erected almost overnight. The workers were paid hundreds of dollars per day—a fortune in China—and yet they still had trouble finding volunteers because of the perceived danger.
The book is full of interesting anecdotes (p. 295):
The daijiaren was one of many brilliant innovations of the Reform era. China has a zero-tolerance policy for alcohol, and even a single drink can result in the suspension of a driver’s license. On DiDi, China’s most popular ride-share app, you could summon a man who showed up at your car on a folding bicycle. He folded the bike, put it in your trunk, drove you home, parked your vehicle, charged a fee of a few bucks, and then pedaled off to the next drinker.
I especially identified with this passage (p. 334):
After the pandemic began, I decided to research and publish stories. As the country whipsawed through the initial effects of the virus, my articles prompted anger from both sides. During the first phase of the pandemic, I described the mistakes in Wuhan, the death of Li Wenliang, and the problems of remote schooling, and some Chinese nationalists attacked me online. A couple months later, when I wrote about how subsequent policies had succeeded in eliminating the virus in most parts of China, criticism came from outside, with foreigners claiming that I served as a Party propagandist. After that, the pendulum swung again, and Little Pinks expressed outrage that I reported in Wuhan.
I feel his pain, as I’ve also been criticized from both sides.
Some of the best parts of the book focused on how the students of 2020 were radically different from the students of 1996, in all sorts of ways. For instance, Hessler suggests that the students of 1996 were far more nationalistic, whereas the modern students are more skeptical of the CCP. I’m not entirely convinced by that claim—I wonder if he’s conflating nationalism with patriotism.
I’ve focused on a few anecdotes, but the best parts of the book are the often heartbreaking vignettes on the life of some of his Chinese students, written with the eye of a great novelist. These are too hard to excerpt.
Highly recommended. If you do visit Chengdu, don’t miss Jiuzhaigou, the most beautiful national park I’ve ever seen. It’s like something out of a fantasy novel.
PS. The book reflects Hessler’s experiences during 2019-21. There is some evidence that academic freedom has declined during the past few years.
Whenever I get an issue of "The New Yorker" with an article by him, I read it right away. He's an amazing writer in multiple ways. I read the excerpt of "Other Rivers" when it came out but haven't gotten to reading the whole book yet.
(HL from Moneyillusion days here) I have come to learn about Hessler's work thanks to Robert Wright's podcast with him about three months ago. Hessler's New Yorker articles are indeed great, and I am now quite intrigued to read his latest book.
It is a bit sad that this kind of work is becoming increasingly rare in the US or elsewhere. But it still exists.