Timestamps:
0:00 Peter’s new book, Other Rivers: A Chinese Education
3:00 Have Chinese people become less hostile to America?
12:48 What Americans get wrong about China
17:14 Why Peter thinks Covid didn’t come from a lab
20:35 China’s transformative recent decades
30:46 Respect for authority in Chinese culture
40:02 Change in China between Peter’s two teaching stints there
54:17 Why the Chinese political system may change dramatically
From late in the conversation (1:01:48)(autogenerated):
yeah and I think you know sometimes we're looking in the mirror a little more than we might realize right I mean so we tend to see China through the lens
of the military right and we have a very militaristic view of China now um but the truth is like the United States is a very militaristic Society um you know and and China is really not right I mean
it's not a this is not a societ I mean it's kind of you know I I talk about those kids I taught in the '90s who became middle class Urban I think I know
one whose kid has something he went to a military college but he's not in the military like you don't Aspire in China
to send your kid into the military it's nothing no Elite for a person who's like Highly Educated whatever want their kid
to do that right but in America I mean I could go to Prince University I knew lots of kids in Princeton who were going to go to the military you know it's a
way to rise in America it's a way to become politically powerful it really isn't the same in China like it's a very different type of society so that's
always been my view also on sort of the Taiwan issue so is like this has not been a society that for the last 40
years the military has not been driving their policy now it often drives our policy in the United States but it has
not been the pattern in China
Publisher's blurb for Other Rivers:
An intimate and revelatory account of two generations of students in China’s heartland, by an author who has observed the country’s tumultuous changes over the past quarter century
More than two decades after teaching English during the early part of China’s economic boom, an experience chronicled in his book River Town, Peter Hessler returned to Sichuan Province to instruct students from the next generation. At the same time, Hessler and his wife enrolled their twin daughters in a local state-run elementary school, where they were the only Westerners. Over the years, Hessler had kept in close contact with many of the people he had taught in the 1990s. By reconnecting with these individuals—members of China’s “Reform generation,” now in their forties—while teaching current undergrads, Hessler gained a unique perspective on China’s incredible transformation.
In 1996, when Hessler arrived in China, almost all of the people in his classroom were first-generation college students. They typically came from large rural families, and their parents, subsistence farmers, could offer little guidance as their children entered a brand-new world. By 2019, when Hessler arrived at Sichuan University, he found a very different China, as well as a new kind of student—an only child whose schooling was the object of intense focus from a much more ambitious cohort of parents. At Sichuan University, many young people had a sense of irony about the regime but mostly navigated its restrictions with equanimity, embracing the opportunities of China’s rise. But the pressures of extreme competition at scale can be grueling, even for much younger children—including Hessler’s own daughters, who gave him an intimate view into the experience at their local school.
In Peter Hessler’s hands, China’s education system is the perfect vehicle for examining the country’s past, present, and future, and what we can learn from it, for good and ill. At a time when anti-Chinese rhetoric in America has grown blunt and ugly, Other Rivers is a tremendous, essential gift, a work of enormous empathy that rejects cheap stereotypes and shows us China from the inside out and the bottom up. As both a window onto China and a mirror onto America, Other Rivers is a classic from a master of the form.
