In a geopolitical climate often defined by grand strategies and hardening borders, the most revealing stories are frequently found in the margins: in a rural classroom, a packing crate, or the quiet discipline of a track team. This was the prevailing sentiment during the recent dialogue with Peter Hessler, the celebrated writer and journalist whose work has chronicled the transformation of modern China from the ground up.
Speaking with a candor that comes from decades of immersion, Peter took the audience beyond the headlines, drawing on his recent return to teaching in Sichuan to explore the profound, and often contradictory, shifts in Chinese society. Moderated by Rhodes Scholars Zhixin Wan and Ryan Yan, the conversation was less a lecture on geopolitics than a meditation on the importance of “hanging around” – the writer’s commitment to witnessing the slow, complex unfolding of individual lives.
The Texture of Return and the Shock of the Ordinary
Ryan Yan opened the conversation by noting Peter’s recent unusual movement across borders. While Peter is famous for documenting China’s rural-to-urban migration, his own family recently undertook a “reverse migration”, moving from the megalopolis Chengdu, Sichuan, to Ridgway, Colorado, a town of merely 700 people. Ryan asked how this physical and mental oscillation impacted his perspective.
Peter admitted the move was partly serendipitous – a result of the pandemic and a non-renewed university contract cutting their planned five-year stay in China to two. But he underscored the cultural chasm between the two nations not through political theory, but through the logistics of their transnational move.
He recounted the experience of packing up his Beijing apartment in 2007, where a team of Chinese workers hand-cut cardboard boxes for every single piece of furniture, packing the shipping container with the precision of a jigsaw puzzle. When that same container arrived in the American West, it was met by a single, tired American driver who, upon opening the doors, stared in disbelief at the intricate packing job before him.
The anecdote is a microcosm of a profound cultural divergence: the systemic oversight and collective discipline of Chinese society contrasted with the looser, more individualistic American approach. This intensity, Peter noted, is what one misses most when leaving China. He recalled his days in Fuling in the 1990s, where his every action, even buying water at a convenience store, was narrated by a watching crowd. Returning to the anonymity of an American town, where “nobody knew who we were,” offered a necessary detox. Yet, it also brought a stark silence after years of living in a society where life is lived so publicly and collectively.
“Old Souls” vs “Wild Energy”: Time Travel in the Classroom
The dialogue shifted to the classroom, a space Peter inhabited in two vastly different eras: first as a Peace Corps volunteer in Fuling (1996–1998) and later as a professor at Sichuan University (2019–2021).
The students of the 1990s, in his words, possessed a raw, unpolished optimism. They were often the children of illiterate farmers, who had arrived in the city from the countryside with little guidance, like a “deer in the headlights”. That era was “wide open”; a young person could show up in Shanghai with five dollars in their pocket, sleep in a train station, and carve out a future.
In stark contrast, the students he encountered in 2019 were “old souls”. Mostly born into the middle class and raised by educated parents, these students were sophisticated but heavily burdened. Peter observed that while the 90s were defined by a clear, albeit difficult, upward trajectory driven by the goal to become educated, become urban, and become prosperous, today’s youth face a “systematic” and “limited” landscape.
This shift has bred a deep conservatism in career choices. Peter noted that many of his brilliant students now clamor for government jobs or teaching positions, seeking safety within the system even as they privately criticize its flaws. A pragmatic, anxious search for security has replaced the “wild energy” of the 90s.
The Paradox of the Gaokao and the Definition of Fairness
A significant portion of the conversation focused on the Chinese education system, a subject he observed intimately through his twin daughters’ experience in a public primary school in Chengdu. The transition for his daughters was brutal. Coming from an American fourth-grade curriculum, they were placed in Chinese third-grade to catch up on language, yet they still lagged behind in math.
Peter marveled at the sheer endurance required for Chinese children. His daughters faced a 90-minute math exam, a duration unheard of for that age group in the U.S., and navigated “word problems” filled with extraneous details designed to trick the student. He argued that while the American system often encourages students to showcase what they know, the Chinese system and exams often embed complex contexts and distractors that seem designed to make students get things wrong.
Zhixin raised the issue of fairness, noting the intense debates surrounding the Gaokao (college entrance exam). Peter recounted discussions with his students, who, despite being “traumatized” by the high school experience and the stress of Gaokao, overwhelmingly opposed changing the system. Their reasoning was rooted in a distinct conception of fairness: in a society rife with connections (guanxi), a brutal score-based exam is still fairer than a system based on recommendations or holistic review.
Peter contrasted this with the American educational ethos, where being a “good student” can sometimes carry a social stigma, and where success is often attributed to innate “giftedness” rather than the Chinese emphasis on “hard work” and self-improvement.
The Writer’s Lens: Patience, Rejection, and Distance
Zhixin engaged Peter on the craft of writing and the role of an observer. The writer’s life, Peter described, requires maturity above all else. He shared the humbling story of his own beginnings: applying for John McPhee’s creative writing class at Princeton and being rejected three times before finally being accepted on his fourth attempt. Some of these experiences, he suggested, will find their way into his next project: a memoir of his early life in Princeton and beyond.
He credited his growth not to the elite environment of Princeton or Oxford, but to the bold decision of joining the Peace Corps. At a time when his peers were entering law school or banking, he chose a position that paid $120 a month in a Chinese town few had heard of. It was this decision to step off the “narrow path” of achievement that allowed him to find his voice. “I wasn't very formed as a writer,” he admitted of his younger self, but the isolation and challenges of Fuling “forced me to grow up”.
He also spoke about the value of distance. While he wrote River Town and Oracle Bones shortly after the events occurred, he often prefers writing about a place after he has left it. The physical separation allows for an emotional “cooling down,” turning the chaotic intensity of daily life in China into a narrative that can be analyzed and understood.
When Zhixin asked about the “good life” and how young people define it, Hessler observed a shift. In the 90s, the definition was clear: get off the farm, get to the city, get rich. Today, the definition is murkier and more psychological, centered on finding meaning and security in a hyper-competitive environment.
The conversation concluded with a reflection on the unexpected bridge that literature can build. Peter confessed that when he wrote River Town, he expected Chinese readers to hate it, fearing they would find a foreigner’s perspective condescending. Instead, he found an audience that was remarkably open.
He described this reception as an act of “generosity” – a willingness by Chinese readers to let an outsider into their world, accepting that while his view might be imperfect, it was also useful. It is this spirit of generosity, he suggested, that is most at risk today. As the “black box” of geopolitical tension closes, the work of the scholar and the writer is to keep looking, to keep listening, and to refuse to let the political climate obscure the “landscape” of the people living within.