‘Other Rivers: A Chinese Education’ by Peter Hessler

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Other Rivers by Peter Hessler

“As a student of Chinese literature, I have a hard time writing what I want to write because I am afraid what I write will probably be deleted.” So said a student to Peter Hessler. He’s a New Yorker staff writer who served two stints teaching English in mainland Chinese colleges. He compares notes from the ‘90s and now, and reflects, in Other Rivers.

On his first visit in 1996, the students were threadbare, malnourished and had never met an American before. But they were already benefitting from Deng Xiaping’s economic reforms. Material conditions steadily improved by the time Hessler returned, but the mood was different. The sayings of Mao and Deng were quoted by students “as casually as if remembering a conversation from last week.” While professing admiration for their country’s current thought leader, Xi Jinping, affection seemed lacking. Xi is a bureaucrat wielding enormous power. Freedom of expression peaked in the early ‘00s and receded before Hessler returned, and the “frontier equality” of Deng’s economy had tamed.

Hessler collects many stories from students he encountered. He was teaching in China in 2020 when the country shut down during Covid. To enter the campus, he passed through automatic turnstyles with infrared facial recognition scanners. Students were confined to their dorms. Rumors circulated that the virus was an American plot. Hessler found that unlike his naively hopeful students of the ‘90s, the “Generation of Xi” were “brutally honest about themselves, and they entertained few illusions about the Chinese system.” They live in a censored, authoritarian society where social mobility is driven by intense competition. “Most young Chinese I knew were too numbed and too distracted by the struggle for success to think hard about the big picture.”

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