The journalist described how changes in China have played out in the lives of the students he taught there in the mid-1990s as a Peace Corps volunteer
On Nov. 26, braving the frenzy of traffic only a few days before Thanksgiving, a large crowd attended the 21st Century China Center’s So Kwan Lok Distinguished Lecture, named after Kwan So, a longtime supporter of the center and the School of Global Policy and Strategy. This year, Peter Hessler, the author of multiple bestselling books on China and a staff writer at The New Yorker, delivered a talk on his experiences working in Chongqing municipality and Sichuan province, which form the basis for his latest book, “Other Rivers: A Chinese Education.”
The account he provided to attendees of his extensive time in China was a portrait-in-miniature of the profound changes that have occurred in the country in just the last 30 years.
Beginning in 1996, Hessler taught English in the rural town of Fuling, now part of Chongqing, as a Peace Corps volunteer. His students were training to become English teachers themselves, in order to meet the new demand for the language, as the government encouraged its people to learn it as the country was beginning its foray into the world market economy.
He talked about how his students back then came from rural villages, and their poverty followed them into the city as they went to university. Hessler shared class photos that showed him and his fellow Peace Corps volunteers standing several inches higher than the students, whose growth had been stymied by lack of nutrition.
Hessler recalled a note that one student wrote him several years later, apologizing for not being a good student: “For three years, I did not eat and sleep well,” the student wrote to him. “I remember in 1996, for half a year, I just had one meal a day.”
But his students — and China as a whole — managed to escape that level of poverty relatively quickly. Hessler has kept in touch with his former students, and through his correspondence, he said that he has learned that his students earned a median income of $500 after graduating in the late 1990s; by 2014, that amount had grown to $18,000, and by 2024, to over $37,000.
At reunions, he met with his former pupils, now with children who are taller even than Hessler, serving as a testament to the better nutrition available in the newly robust economy.
He noted too that education and material prosperity in China have not led to a more critical stance toward the Chinese government’s increasingly strict controls — contrary to the demands for political change people in the West might expect to see.
This surprised him, but he said that such unpredictability is only going to grow more pronounced as a new generation of Chinese students comes of age, a vastly larger percentage of whom are attending institutions of higher education compared to their parents’ generation.
“What will this generation be like in 20 years? What kind of China are they going to contribute to?” Hessler said. “I find that harder to predict than in the past.”
Regardless of what the future holds, Barry Naughton, who holds the So Kwan Lok chair in Chinese international affairs, said that the talk illuminated the ways how personal interaction helps Americans and Chinese understand each other more deeply.
“Peter did a remarkable job of using his own story to illustrate the changes that have taken place in Chinese society,” Naughton said. “His talk fit perfectly with the aims of So Kwan Lok, who was a passionate advocate for mutual understanding between the United States and China, and who was so instrumental in getting the China center off the ground.”
Referencing Peter Hessler’s earlier work on China, 21st Century China Center Director Victor Shih said he was pleased that Hessler could speak to the community.
“Peter is a writer with a sociologist’s mind,” Shih said. “He is uniquely gifted in transforming his close-up observations of China into compelling narratives about tradition and societal change. Few writers bridge the gap between our two societies as effectively as him.”
