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For more than a quarter of a century, Peter Hessler has been a staff writer for the New Yorker. In 1996, he joined the Peace Corps and taught English language and literature to college students in Fuling, a small city on the Yangtze River. In 2019, Hessler returned to China, teaching at Sichuan University during the pandemic. His most recent book, Other Rivers (2024), is about his time in Sichuan.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Peter Hessler discuss Peter’s experiences as a teacher in China in the 1990s and in recent years, how his students have changed, and what he thinks the United States could learn from China.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: So you lived for long stretches in China at two moments, once very much in the heart of the reform era when China was developing very fast economically, just opening up to the world and to markets; and once more recently, including during the period of COVID. I find that in the policy debate about China in the United States and in Europe as well, it's striking how little people actually know about what life in China is like. And it's hard to get at that in a conversation. Your book tells very beautifully your experiences in the country and the way in which the lives of your former students have changed, and how a new generation of students is making their way in the world. But to start off with a more simplistic question: I know that many Chinese people who are in conversation with the West and many Westerners who are living in China really take exception to this idea of China being a kind of totalitarian state, that it feels like it might have been in the Soviet Union. And yet it obviously is an authoritarian country that restricts in many ways the freedoms that people have. What does that look like to an 18, 19, 20 year old student in China today? In what ways are they free to engage with the world and curious about the world? In what ways are they shaped by the political circumstance?
Peter Hessler: Yeah, it’s a very hard place to describe in that sense because our models, I think, are not appropriate or useful. We often talk about having a new Cold War with China, but I think what we're doing is something very different. It doesn't really match what we would think of as a Cold War. For many years, we've had about 300,000 young Chinese studying in the United States and even more, of course, in Europe and in other parts of the world. And you can't imagine in the Soviet Union that you would have had 300,000 Russians studying in the U.S. and then willingly going back home. Most of the Chinese who study in the U.S., at least until this point, have returned home. So it is a really different situation, and it is hard to convey that to people, because at the same time, it is without question a one-party state, and it's become more authoritarian in many ways, which is something that was unexpected.
I lived there, first, in 1996 to 2007. And at the end of that time, if you had asked me, what would this place be like in 20 or 25 year, I would have assumed that it would be more open, that maybe they would have instituted some form of democracy or some democratic measures. Yet we have Xi Jinping, who is a much more authoritarian leader than Jiang Zemin, who was in power when I lived there in the Peace Corps in 1996, 1998. It's very hard to convey this to people. But young Chinese are much better connected with the outside world. They do have a lot of restrictions in terms of what their media shows and what they can see on the internet. But most educated young Chinese find ways around this, and large numbers also go overseas for trips or for education. So I find them to be much more worldly than we would expect. And they're processing all this. I'm not sure what direction they're going to take it in. But I think it's a key question for us.
Mounk: One of the interesting things about that, for example, is that there is the famous Great Firewall. It is somewhat cumbersome to get around it. You have to get a VPN, and it's easier to get a VPN if you're already abroad. So if you're traveling to China, you're going to set up a VPN before you get there. It's a little harder to do once you're in the country. But it's perfectly possible. A lot of your students, you say in the book, purchase a VPN. In fact, one of the most useful parts of being at college may be getting instructions from your peers and sometimes from the institution itself about how you get a VPN so that you can engage with the outside world. And yet most people choose not to do that. Most people are comfortable within the Great Firewall and don't seek out that information. How is the regime thinking about the utility to them of people being able to climb the firewall and use those VPNs? Because clearly they could disable all the VPNs if they wanted to.
Hessler: It is a really interesting issue. As I said, I taught from 1996 to 1998. I was at a teacher's college in a rural part of Sichuan province. And I've stayed in touch with many of those students I taught for almost 30 years now. I periodically give them surveys. Because we have a high level of trust and they've read everything that I've written, and so I can really trust their answers. And a number of years ago, I asked them, do you use a VPN? Of more than 30 who responded to that survey, only one of them used a VPN, the rest of them didn't. So I think it is pretty uncommon, especially amongst—these are people in their 40s and 50s—they don't really care enough to, and these are educated people. Whereas when I was teaching from 2019 to 2021 at Sichuan University, teaching undergraduates, I think the majority of them were using VPNs. I could see a difference. I taught freshmen, first year students, and they often didn't know, they would come to me and ask for help, and I'd say, well, I don't know really, because I set up my system before I came to China, I used an American credit card, it's not going to be useful for you, you should just talk to other students. That's what I would tell them. And they usually figured that out on their own, so you would learn from other students. And sometimes even their departments would kind of give them a quiet suggestion—it was very much just like an open secret that pretty much everybody at that university was learning how to use a VPN.
It's not in the government's interest to have everybody in China closed off. I mean, there's huge numbers of people who do business with the United States. One of the people I profiled in my book is an entrepreneur, and he's selling to the U.S. on Amazon, and he's checking Google Trends with incredible detail and all kinds of other American online tools. He can't access those without a VPN. So the government wants some holes in the firewall, and I think it's a constant balancing act for them. Now I'm not sure how the balancing act continues because I do feel like the younger people are more savvy and they're becoming more accustomed to getting around these controls, and they're also spending more time overseas where they can see what it's like to have an open internet. And so I'm not really sure where it goes from here but it's always been dynamic. The idea of a Great Wall is in some ways not a great image because the Great Wall is built of stone and it's there and it doesn't move, whereas what we're talking about is something that's always shifting, that's permeable and that the government wants people to go through certain passageways or around in certain manners.
Mounk: I was very struck when I was visiting China a year and a half ago. I had set up a VPN before I got there and that worked perfectly fine. The precise VPNs that work differ from moment to moment. I came back to China for a conference about half a year ago, and I assumed that the same VPN would work. I arrived and found that it didn't work. But there are people at the airport who just wanted to sell me a local SIM card and they were perfectly happy to set up the VPN for me, perfectly openly, in the arrivals hall of Shanghai International Airport. That shows a little bit of these paradoxes. Let's start with your experience when you were first living in China. You were in a very remote town of Fuling, teaching people who in many cases had grown up in villages, were the first of the families to go to college. You describe in the book that you used to tower above your students back then, whereas in the newest cohort that you teach many of the students are taller than you and it's not because you shrunk in the meanwhile. What was China like back in those glory days of a reform era when everything was changing at maximum speed?
Hessler: It didn't feel like glory days in Fuling. At that time, 1996 when I arrived in China, I was part of the third Peace Corps group sent to China. So it was a very new program, very small. Like I think we had 14 volunteers because the Chinese didn't want a ton of young Americans floating around. They weren't sure about whether they wanted us there at all. Cities like Shanghai and Beijing were already showing signs of growth and development. But in a place like Fuling, it felt poor and it felt remote. The closest big city was Chongqing and it took us eight hours on the boat to get there. We didn't have a railroad, we didn't have a highway. This was a city of about almost 200,000 people and there wasn't even a stoplight in the town. I think there was one escalator and if you went there it was kind of fun to watch the people trying to get on and off because they didn't know how to use it.
My students were almost all from the countryside. More than 90% had grown up in farm families and really low-level subsistence farming. Many of their parents were illiterate. Often they were the first kids from their villages to go to university. And a lot of them had known real poverty. Often I didn't know about it until years later. I had this correspondence later and they would tell me things. Like one kid wrote 20 years later, this boy named David, and he said, I'm really sorry I wasn't a very good student in your class, and I could remember, he wasn't a bad kid, but he was often kind of sleepy and a little sluggish. And he's like, for two years I only had one meal a day. I was a sad man, that's what he wrote. But now I'm happy with my life. So you could feel the poverty, you could feel it in the physicality. The students were smaller than me. I'm 5’9”, I'm not a particularly big person. They were very thin. In the winter they would get these chilblains, these sores on their hands and on their faces, which come from being in cold conditions and also from poor nutrition. So you really did have a sense of what poverty means.
Coming back, you got a sense of how it changed. You mentioned how these students now towered over me. One of the first things I noticed when I went back to teach in 2019 was that suddenly a lot of them, the boys I was teaching, the first year students, were taller, and even some of the girls. And The Lancet did a study of 200 countries in 2020, and they found that China had the largest increase in boys' height since 1985. The average 19 year old Chinese male was now more than three and a half inches taller. The average girl was the third largest increase in height among those 200 countries. We have this idea that China lifted 800 million people out of poverty, and it's just a meaningless number. When you say something like that, you just can't grasp it. But when you sit in a classroom and you feel this physical difference, it means something different.
It can also be seen in the travel. I mentioned, when I lived in Fuling, it took eight hours to go to Chongqing, which was kind of the nearest place that you're connected with the outside world. When I went back, it was 38 minutes. That eight hours had become 38 minutes on a high-speed train. They had rail lines. They had multiple highways. So all of those changes are just—it's unbelievable. In one generation. This kind of change would have been 50 years or 100 years in many parts of the world.
Mounk: What did that do to the lives of those people? I used the word glory days sort of unreflectively, I suppose. But I think you also say in the book that they were in some ways one of the luckiest generations. Many of them grew up in poverty and experienced real hardship, but they also went from these conditions of genuine poverty to being able to get an education, to being lucky to have you as their teacher, and then either to have relatively stable careers as teachers, in which the standard of living was presumably much higher than that of previous generations of Chinese teachers. And in some cases, to success as entrepreneurs and so on. Today, would they think of themselves as a lucky generation? What kind of personal transformation did they experience as the country changed so rapidly?
Hessler: I know that they would definitely see themselves as having been fortunate and they do talk about this and they do realize that they were born at a special time. Most of those students had been born right around the time that Mao Zedong died. They were born in ’74, ’75, Mao died in 1976. And so Deng Xiaoping started those changes in 1978. So this cohort of students basically grew up with the changes that are known as reform and opening, and so they witnessed all this as part of their life. Like when they first went to teach—1997, 1998, when they got their first jobs, most of them became teachers—their annual salary was usually around $500. And I did surveys with them over the years, and I would ask them what their income is. And Chinese tend to be very honest, very direct about responding to questions like this. In 2014, for example, that $500 had become $18,000. Seven years later in 2021 when I did my survey with those students, that $18,000 had become $35,000. Which is a good amount of money in China, it's a comfortable middle class life. So you really could see this in their own personal circumstances.
At the same time, one thing that was really fascinating to me was I asked them in one of those surveys, I think the one where they said their income was $35,000, and I asked if they had an apartment or a car, all of them had an apartment or a car. Actually last year when I asked them if they had an apartment, the average number of apartments was almost two and a half. Most people in China who are middle class have multiple apartments. But I asked them on my survey, how would you describe your social class? I didn't give them choices because I wanted them to define it themselves. And less than a quarter described themselves as middle class. The vast majority still describe themselves as poor, as coming from a lower class, which is kind of interesting to me because I think by any definition these are middle class people.
But in China there is not a tradition of seeing yourself as middle class, so people are less likely to use that kind of terminology. But also it reminded me that people, even when their circumstances change, the mindset doesn't always change in the same way. And I mention in my book, there are so many things about this cohort of people. When I talk with them, when I go back and visit them, their characteristics are still often very much like that of rural Chinese. That they look like urban people, they have the lifestyle of urban people, they're driving nice cars, they dress well, they look completely different. Their kids tower over them, because the kids, of course, have been fed better. But when you ask them about religion, or when you ask them about money, all kinds of things, their responses are still recognizable to me as to what they would have been in the 1990s. So that experience doesn't go away.
Mounk: That's interesting at the individual level and perhaps at the collective level as well. You were saying that China has undergone one of the fastest transformations from a very poor and predominantly rural society to a middle income country with stretches of a country that are high income and that is much, much more urban. But of course, that means that a lot of sort of cultural inheritance and traditions and so on persist, and are presumably much slower to change than those external changes. Give us some examples of how that mentality still shapes some of your very thoughtful and winning former students, at least as you describe them in the book, and how that might help us to understand the country and its society and politics as a whole.
Hessler: I was surprised when I asked them about religion in one of my surveys. My memory of them in the 1990s was, of course, they had all been indoctrinated with Marxism in the class. Because I was teaching English and American literature, and if you mentioned God or Christianity or religion, they would kind of laugh about it, they were very disrespectful. They'd all been taught that religion was nonsense, of course, in the Marxist sense. But when I gave them a survey 20 years later, in 2016, I asked them, do you believe in God? And it shocked me that 82% of the people who responded said they did. And even more, 85% believed in Baoying, which is the Buddhist concept of karmic retribution. I would never have expected it in the 1990s, but these ideas had come back. These rural inheritances that they had were still there.
I think there's also a lot of political inheritance. Like when I asked them, should China become a multi-party democracy? Overwhelmingly they said no. And some of them said, we've done pretty well the way we've been going. We don't need to change this. We've improved our lives. Others said, you have a multi-party democracy and you just elected the worst president ever. We don't want to do that. And some of them said, we already have one corrupt party. We don't want any more. So they could be very cynical about that. But I think those viewpoints are reflective of people who've grown up in this system. I think if you come from an American perspective and you say, okay, you people have done this great job with your economy, you've risen to middle class, now it's time to create a more equitable society or a more democratic system, this would be our perspective. This is what's naturally next. That's not necessarily their perspective if you're coming from where they're coming from. Many of them would take the perspective that this has worked. Why would we change it? And it's been so disorienting to change all these other things, if we're changing the political system, it's going to be too much. The stability in the political system is what's allowed us to improve in material terms. I think many people would have that perspective. And to be honest, having lived in both places, I understand both. Like, I understand why Americans look at this place and would be frustrated and think, well, why don't you make these changes? And I also understand why Chinese people would say, hey, you know, we've changed enough. We don't need to poke about with politics.
Mounk: I think one of the ways which complicates the outside perception of China, and I think a very helpful way, is that when people who grow up in democratic societies think about authoritarian countries, it's tempting to imagine either the kind of idealized conscientious objector who is chafing against the society in every way, who sees very clearly the ways in which autocracy misshapes social institutions and individual lives, and who therefore wants some form of democracy, who therefore wants to import from the American political system some kind of democratic system. And then we imagine on the other side the kind of unthinking, brainwashed, propagandized subject of the authoritarian regime who, you know, lacks the education or the intelligence or the moral courage to see what's in front of their eyes.
I think what you're describing is what's probably much more common in China and perhaps in other authoritarian regimes as well, particularly authoritarian regimes that are relatively successful, which is perhaps more rare, which is that they see all of those things. To describe in many ways people, both in the generation of the students you first taught and the younger generation who are very aware of how they're subject to bureaucracy, how there are rules that everybody has to obey that they chafe against—they sometimes believe that even the people enforcing the rules may themselves do so reluctantly and not particularly want to and yet with some reason they look at the development of a country as a whole. They say, it used to take us what is it seven or eight hours to get to the next city and now it takes us 43 minutes, and say, something seems to be working and we don't want to risk the chaos of what would happen if we if we have those changes, which I think is an interesting way to think about it.
How did these students—to stay with the first cohort—make their way in life? How did they maneuver between the expanding opportunities they had on one side and the constraints that the system imposes on them on the other side? What's the range of ways in which they responded to that? And what have their lives looked like after they came to this provincial teaching college to get an education and become teachers from the villages—how did the story continue from there for most of them?
Hessler: I think for them politics and the things that we would think of as sort of more intellectual freedom, those were never the main priorities. If you looked at that generation, these young people born in the ’70s who were in college in 1996 to 1998, what were the things that they needed to do? One was to get out of the countryside, become an urban person, two, become an educated person, and three, improve their material circumstances. Those are really the three things that they wanted to do. I think very few of them would have said, I want more freedom at that time. And those three things are all huge challenges. If you've grown up and you have generations of family in this village and you're going to be the first to go to school, to go to the city, that is a huge undertaking. And it's also very striking to me that these people had no guidance from their elders. They could not go to their parents for advice. As I mentioned before, many of their parents were illiterate. None of them had made the kind of transition that my students were making.
And actually, every single one that I've stayed in touch with succeeded in this endeavor. They became urban people, they became educated people, they became middle class people. So I think from their perspective, they did everything that they hoped for really. They were very optimistic. Even nowadays when China's kind of in a tough phase, and when I write to them, they write about tough circumstances that they notice with their kids and so on, I always ask them, what are your feelings about the future on a scale of one to 10, one being pessimistic, 10 being optimistic? This last year, it was still close to eight, they were still very optimistic. Intellectual freedom was never a huge priority for them and of course it wasn't something they had known or really expected to know.
This is part of the challenge when you're looking at it, you talk about authoritarian states. China's unusual. First of all, it's been pretty successful in the last 30 years. But it's also been there for so long. The party's been in power since 1949. Even the leader of China, Xi Jinping, was born in that system. It just becomes part of who you are. Your expectation is that you deal with it. You find your way to cope. Your expectation is not that you should have something different.
Mounk: All of the students at the time were training to be teachers. How many of them became teachers? How do they reflect on their satisfaction in the teaching professions? Which of them didn't become teachers and why? Tell us a little bit about what fate had in store for this very small subsection of that generation.
Hessler: They were becoming teachers to teach in middle schools and high schools. This was because China was expanding education. As I mentioned, the students’ parents had often been illiterate. China was not a very well-educated country when it came out of the Mao years. And they wanted to change that as quickly as possible. And so if you're going to expand education, you need more teachers. And so that's why they were training these people. They picked kids out who scored well on the standardized tests in rural schools, put them into colleges like the one I was teaching. They were being trained to become teachers to send back.
Mounk: A brief side note, because I just realized that something I've always wondered about, when you talk about standardized tests in the Chinese context, and they're very important, what do those look like? Are they like the SATs?
Hessler: It's much tougher. It's a two-day exam. If you're entering college in China, that is all that matters. There are no recommendations. There are no high school grades. There's no activities. It is just the score that you get on this two-day exam..
Mounk: I guess what I'm trying to get at is that standardized tests in the United States nearly always means it’s a multiple choice test, but effectively the SAT is very similar to an IQ test. The Gaokao, as I understand it, is a test you have to study for. The SAT you can study for and it makes a little bit of a difference in SAT tutors and so on, but it doesn't actually make much of a difference. Is it standardized just because it's national or is it standardized in any kind of sense in which Americans would understand the word standardized? You have to write essays and other kinds of things. It's a much more traditional exam, isn't it?
Hessler: It has the longest history of any standardized test in the world basically, because it's the descendant of what they call the Keju, which is the imperial examination system. So that's a system that in China has been around for centuries. It's from the 700s, 600s, they chose their civil service based on this exam. And it's an incredible tradition in China that later was picked up by many other countries in the region. As you say, it’s an exam, you prepare for it. It's not an IQ test. If you're highly intelligent and you sit down at that test without preparation, you're going to do terribly. So the students, like their last year of high school, they are at the school usually from about 7 a.m. until 7 or 8 at night, sometimes later, studying, and they're there every day on the weekend and just grinding it out, preparing for whatever they're going to ask you on this test. You talk to Chinese people in their 40s and they still have dreams about this exam. They will all remember not only their score, but they will tell you what their rank was in the province. I just talked to somebody the other day and he's like, yeah, I was 1,290th in Sichuan province. It's unbelievable how intense this is. So we don't really have any equivalent in America. The SAT is nothing close.
But when I was teaching, they were trying to expand this whole thing and trying to make university accessible. When I was teaching in 1996, one out of every 12 went to college. That's 8%. It's incredibly low. The college I was at had 2,000 students. I left in 1998. By 2004, those 2,000 students at that college had become 20,000. They expanded tenfold in six years. They did this all across China. By 2019, when I went back, that figure had gone from 8% to 51.6%. So more than half, and it became expected for young Chinese to enter college. My students were kind of in the middle of this expansion. Because they were preparing kids, they were teaching them English so they could do the Gaokao and then go to college. So you really could get a sense of what it means to try to expand education on this scale. Which I think is unprecedented. I don't think there's any other parallel, certainly not with a large population, to improve education so quickly.
Mounk: Thanks for indulging that digression. I think it's important for contemporary China—both for understanding the incredible pressure that young people are under to study, which would be different if it was a standardized test in the American sense. And some questions about meritocracy that perhaps we can get back to later because, since it is a test that very much asks also about acquired skills and knowledge, what kind of preparation you have for it is very important. And so there was obviously a huge private industry of preparation that Xi Jinping tried to quash and shut down. There's also incredible pressure to get into the right middle and high schools because those are the schools that best prepare you for the Gaokao. But to go back to that moment we departed from, these kids are not in good schools. They're in rural schools where presumably they don't have that sort of exceptional preparation, but because there's expanding opportunity at the time, they somehow score highly on it despite quite limited instruction, I imagine, at the time. So they get this opportunity to go off to a provincial town that is quite remote from Beijing and Shanghai but is presumably the metropolis relative to the village they come from. They are training to become teachers. The teachers you taught, I believe, were trained to become English teachers. What is the college experience and what happens to them after college?
Hessler: In college you could see that they were trying to learn to be city people. They still tended to look pretty rural. As I mentioned in my book, I would memorize students' names in the early days just by their clothes because they wore the same thing every day, and you would associate certain students with certain outfits because they had so little money and also they had to wash everything by hand. So, you know, they weren't washing their clothes very often. So they had very limited means. I can give you an example. There was one boy, he chose the English name Mo. He was a Communist Party member and the class monitor, so he's kind of the one who helps, he collects assignments from the kids and he kind of serves as an interface between the students and the administration. They would choose students who were politically reliable but also good with people to do this sort of position. Chinese classrooms all have little bureaucracies just like the government. He was a good student and a really dynamic kid.
He had a very poor background. Parents were illiterate. He's the oldest kid in the family, and goes to college. He went, then the government assigned him to teach at a rural school in his region, so he went back to a high school there. And while he's teaching, he taught both of his younger brothers who were in his classes as a teacher when he was a young teacher. And both of those kids, he successfully prepared and they entered college.
It's very much bootstraps education. You could see how it was working. They take the oldest kid in the family, they educate him, send him back to the village and he's educating the others. And it really did work. And so that family now, all three of those boys are educated middle-class kids. Not kids now—they're in their forties and fifties. You could see Mo in the process. And when I go back and visit him, he's done very well. I mean, he's still a Communist Party member. became an administrator at a school after teaching for many years. He lives in Chongqing, in the big city. He's very much an urban person. And so most of the people I taught had that path. They stayed in the system, they stayed as teachers, but there were a few who went off on their own and became entrepreneurs.
Those guys, it's unbelievable the things that they did. If you became an entrepreneur in the late ‘90s in China, really the sky was the limit. And one of the kids I taught was a boy, his English name was Young C, which he had chosen based on his Chinese poet name. It didn't make much sense in English, but Young C was his name. Not a great student, went back to his village, but a very dynamic kid and a nice looking kid. He had a lot of energy, so he went back and he was teaching. He had this idea, everybody's talking about computers and nobody knows how to type. Maybe I'll set up a typing class in my after school hours. So he got two cheap little keyboards and the kids would pay two kuai, which at the time was like 25 cents to take an hour-long class. And they would line up behind the keyboards and he'd have a little alarm and the kid would have two minutes to practice and he rings the alarm and then the next one goes up. And at first the school didn't know what to do about this. This was at a time when people were just starting to have some disposable income. In China, when they have disposable income, they're going to spend it on education as one of their first priorities. So people were signing up their kids, and he was soon making more money from that course than he was from his real teaching job. The college's reaction was really fascinating, because first they're like, he's making this money at our facility, he shouldn't be doing this, so they canceled the class. And then the parents complained, we want our kids to learn, this is a good opportunity. And then the other administrator said, yeah, isn't this what Deng Xiaoping wanted us to do? He always said we're supposed to jump into the sea and do business, and so then they let him do it.
He made money, and then he made a stake from that. He opened a cell phone shop, and then he opened this little cell phone shop in Fuling. And he realized that the cell phones were selling well, but what really sold well was walkie talkies. And it surprised him. He'd stock these things. He didn't even know why he was stocking them initially. But he realized that construction crews needed these, because the workers at that time didn't have cell phones. You have to pay for every cell phone call. It makes more sense to have a walkie talkie. You expand your construction crew, so you’ve got to buy more walkie-talkies, you want them on the same frequency, you're going to go back to the same shop. So he cornered this market, and construction's just booming in this region. It's also in the Three Gorges Dam region, so they're rebuilding entire cities. And he had this entire niche that he dominated. The last time I saw him in Fuling, 25 years later, he went from there to real estate, he went to doing big billboards, to doing alarm systems, parking garages, everything associated with development.
He drives me around Fuling in a Mercedes-Benz, it's $150,000. He's just made more money than he could ever have imagined. And there's a number of these guys. So the entrepreneur stories are just stunning. And they had no connections. This is a kid, nobody helped him. He didn't have any family. Nobody was giving him anything. Some teacher took an interest in him and gave him a short-term loan to start his cell phone company, because she's like, I like your energy, you seem like you're going places. But that was it. Otherwise, he was just figuring this out on his own. So it is really stunning to see this. And you think about how that shapes this person's worldview.
Mounk: In this generation, what do you think is the split between the people who went on this entrepreneurial path and ones that ended up becoming teachers? It sounds like the teachers are reasonably content with their lives as well, even though presumably they've materially succeeded at a much smaller scale. And some of them seem to feel that the system works, the education system works well, and they get a lot of respect and they get a decent salary. There's at least one character, I believe Emily, who chafes a little bit, not so much at politics and the CCP, but at what's expected in Chinese education.
Hessler: Emily went to Shenzhen, which was a place where you went if you were from the interior of China, you went to those coastal areas that were booming. And she caught some of that early boom. She worked in factories. She did very well. But she made the decision to step out of that world and to return to teaching, which was interesting. If she hadn't, I'm sure she would be hugely wealthy today. And she told me that it turned her off after a certain point. She felt like there was an emptiness and that she couldn't really figure out what people wanted, which is something that more and more you see young Chinese thinking about. This material success for our parents' generation, I can understand why it was everything that mattered to them. They were poor, but I'm not growing up poor and I'm middle class and do I really just need to drive, drive, drive, drive for more money and study like crazy for the Gaokao and work like crazy? You work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. That's what the young people talk about. Many of these jobs expect you to do this. So now you have more people wondering, is there something else in life? And Emily was one of the few from that generation who really stepped back. And part of that was because her younger brother killed himself. He was in some ways I think a victim of this intensely competitive school system. He was very intelligent and naturally a good student but wasn't really cut out for this sort of cut-throat competitive atmosphere of this period. So she had this experience and it really informed her and she's become a very thoughtful person and has deliberately stepped back and she avoids a lot of the highly competitive elements. I think it's got to be the most competitive society on earth.
Mounk: So in a way, you set up a perfect experiment where you were in China in the ‘90s and then you returned, I believe, in 2019. Roughly speaking, the people you taught when you were first in China could be the parents of the people who you taught when you returned to China. Now, you returned to a bigger city and a more prestigious university. But there is a very interesting comparison between these two generations. To ask the classic historian's question, what has changed and what has remained the same?
Hessler: As I said, they were all bigger. They're smaller families. I mean, that first cohort of kids were almost all from rural families. They often had three or four kids. They all had siblings. When I went back in 2019, that first semester, I didn't have one student from the countryside. I wasn’t at the same university. I was at Sichuan University, which is in the same region. So it is a higher level university. But it was so hard to get into the lower level university in the old days, in the ‘90s, that it's kind of similar in terms of the percentage of kids who are getting into these places. So when I went back to teach, I had no students from the countryside. More than 90% of them are only children. So almost nobody has siblings. Those were huge changes. Almost all of them were middle class or higher. The way they dressed, of course, was totally different.
Mounk: Would they call themselves middle class? Because earlier when you were saying that that entrepreneur that succeeded with the walkie talkies, you might not call him middle class. So that's not just a political ideal. It's not just that in America, from the billionaire to the person working at McDonald's, says they're middle class because that's their ideal. And perhaps in China, everybody somehow still says, I'm working class, because in some remnant of Marxist ideology that's preferable, you think that actually their self-conception has changed?
Hessler: I did survey those young people and they would mostly say that they're middle class. They would recognize themselves as such. Yeah, so those things are unbelievable changes. A lot of the attitudes were changed. I would often ask them questions to see if we could do a debate in class because that was a way to practice English. And one of questions I asked at one point was, should gay marriage be legal in China, which has never really been discussed publicly. It's legal in Taiwan, but in the mainland of China, it's not like the parties ever propose this. It's a pretty sensitive topic. I thought it was probably too sensitive for a debate, but I figured I'd ask in a survey first. And like 80% of them said yes, it should be legal. So it ended up that I didn't do that debate because it wasn't close. All these kids had that view. Around the same time, I asked my Fuling students from the ’90s the same question—should gay marriage be legal in China—and it was pretty much the exact opposite, 80% said no.
So you can see these huge differences in opinions like that. That was probably one of the biggest. My students often said, my parents don't understand this. If they talk about homosexuality, their ideas are very crude and very ignorant. But some things that hadn't changed, like I was really shocked that they were not spoiled. You'd kind of think, these are only children. They're growing up in better circumstances. You're not going to have that edge that you used to have. And that was totally not true. They were just as hardworking, just as determined, and they didn't complain, which reminded me of the ’90s. So that really impressed me that they were like that. But there's all kinds of other things.
When I mentioned that the students from the ’90s, their parents couldn't teach them anything. That was not true for the new students. They learned a lot from their parents. And one of the things their parents taught them was how to deal with the system, how to deal with officials, and how to not get in trouble. They were learning those things from a very young age. They often wrote about it and the lessons their parents would give them. Don't push that. Stay away from that topic. So they were kind of worldly and savvy about the Chinese system and very aware of their limitations.
But both cohorts I found as a teacher to be extremely likeable. I wasn't sure about going back. I thought my first experience was so positive, there's no way it can match up. But I really felt a lot of affection for them and a lot of sympathy. I'm sympathetic to their perspective. I understand why they have this feeling. There's a lot of pressure. When you're the only child in the family, are you going to be the one that goes out and decides to try to change the Communist Party and risk a life in prison or something? You don't have any other siblings. Your parents have invested everything in you. You're their only hope. They feel this pressure.
Mounk: How has their perspective on opportunity changed and I guess how content are they likely to be in their lives? On the one hand, they lead much more comfortable and affluent lives in which they can pursue their interests much more than that earlier generation. At one level, it's obvious that they are the lucky generation. In another way, since this huge socioeconomic leap at this point predates them, and since at least at the moment the country is stuck in economic crisis, and they're competing with all these other people who also had these educational opportunities, the kind of sense of freedom that the parents might have had in terms of everything being up for the taking presumably they feel a lot less. Another paradox. Talk us through this tension.
Hessler: I think the level of competition—there's no comparison. You mentioned the Gaokao, which comes up throughout this book. And my daughters, by the time they were in fourth grade, their teachers were telling them what their Gakao scores would need to be if they're going to go to Peking University or Fudan. It's a huge part of life there. It's amazing. The first book I wrote about teaching in the Peace Corps, I never mentioned that test. It didn't come up in conversation. The students occasionally mentioned, yeah I was so happy when I tested in a school, but they were done with it. I never heard a score. I was very unaware of that test when I was a young teacher there. And it was totally different in 2019 to 2021. My students, they wrote about it all the time. One kid had been hospitalized for heart related problems while studying for the damn thing. They had been through serious trauma in this and it was a huge part of their mindset. I knew how many points you needed to get into this department and that department, amazing amounts of detail. My daughters were hearing this in the fourth grade already. So the level of competition in society has gotten so much more intense that I think there's no comparison.
I mentioned that earlier generation, okay, they wanted to escape poverty, to become urban people, to become educated. Those were very clear cut goals, but for this younger generation, what's the goal? They're trying to figure out what they want. One of the surveys I asked them a couple years ago was: do you want to have children eventually? These are people that are like 23, 24 years old, and the majority of respondents said no, especially the women. Of the women, there were 25 women who responded, and 19 out 25 did not want children, 76%. And this was a survey of people I taught, but this is true in every survey that's happening in China at this time. It's showing decreased interest in starting a family. That is a deep type of pessimism. So it's a very different moment from that last generation.
Mounk: How do you think that's going to affect people's contentment with society over time? One thing that I was struck by when I was visiting China was the urban landscape. Even when I was in Shanghai, which is obviously what's called a first-tier city in Chinese parlance and obviously one of the most affluent places in the country, the moment you got out of the center, there was just these blocks and blocks and blocks of pretty similar housing developments that certainly weren’t nearly as dreary or depressing as the famous Plattenbauten in East Germany, that provided amenities to the residents that if you grew up in a village with one meal a day would have been unbelievable to you, that as you describe in the book are being retrofitted for some modern demands whereas the residents are aging, they're having elevators installed and one of your former students is the one providing the elevators and making a good amount of money from it. But they also did strike me as places that were very devoid of individuality, that might not age that well, where the structures look nice enough today, but might not look so nice in 25 or 30 years.
I can see simultaneously how somebody growing up in a village would have had genuine gratitude to live in those circumstances and how somebody who grew up in those buildings might, if they haven't been able to upgrade the living environment in 25 or 30 years, start to resent some of those architectural choices. Now, that's just at the level of architecture, which is slightly highfalutin, but in the same way, of course, if you go from being the child of illiterate farmers eking out in existence under very tough circumstances to teaching middle school, you're likely to consider yourself very, very fortunate. If you grow up as the child of middle school teachers who has worked to the max all of their lives, depriving themselves of enjoyment in their childhood in order to sit the Gaokao, and what they succeed in doing is to maintain the social and professional standard of their parents, you might not feel quite as content. So how do you think that is likely to play out?
Hessler: When you talked about the competition and the pressure, that's the key thing. So in some ways, I think the urban landscape, their surroundings, that doesn't bother them as much. And actually, when you talk to Chinese who are middle-aged and younger, what are the things that attract you, the things that would make you want to live in China versus living overseas, for example, a lot of them will talk about convenience. And that really is true.
For example, ordering things online in China is so much easier than it is in the U.S. or I think in pretty much any parts of the world. Services are really at a very high level. I have a lot of students who've gone to the U.S., that's often something they talk about. It's so much less convenient here. Public transport's hard, it's harder to order things. You know, I kind of miss that when I live in Shanghai or when I live in whatever, not even Shanghai, even in a third or fourth tier city, it's so much easier to get things done. So that's something that attracts them.
Mounk: From my brief stays in China, I was torn in understanding why that is, which is to say that on one side it seems to be both that these are more recently developed cities, so they're more built around certain kinds of infrastructure. It is the fact that some digital platforms seem to be more advanced, but hard to get to work when you first come to the country. But once you've figured out Alipay or WeChat, it is incredible that they just contain every service you could possibly need within themselves in a very seamless and integrated way. But part of it is actually the ongoing socioeconomic disparity. Because there's a lot of people who are a lot poorer who are eking out a living at a much lower level. So where, just in terms of understanding this everyday structure of life, I mean, to what extent is that actually technological superiority or infrastructural superiority, to what extent is it actually just a society that is much more unequal than the United States, let alone Europe?
Hessler: Yeah, I know it is partly that, but I think the other difference is that competitiveness runs throughout the society. So even at those lower levels of education, lower levels of income, people feel the same intense pressure, the same competitive drive. It's different from the United States. I went to an Ivy League school in the United States. and a lot of the people I went to school with now, they have children and they're in private schools in New York or whatever and they're kind of almost in this Chinese environment in the sense that they feel this pressure for their kids. So the elite in America often feel this kind of competitiveness to stay where they are. But if you go down to people that are just average Americans—like my kids who go to a public school here in Colorado—it doesn't function like that. We're in a small town in Colorado. People are not worked up about college choices, it's not that competitive. But in China, you do that all the way down. One of the fascinating profiles of one of my students there, she went to a bad high school and was just kind of a middling student. She didn't know how to study, wasn't getting good grades, she didn't get the good private tutors, but she was every day at her desk, often studying inefficiently, but she was doing what she could. That to me was really striking because the equivalent student in the United States. wouldn't be doing anything.
Mounk: Another difference, which may change with economic development or it may not, it really depends on some complicated questions about just what kind of level of GDP per capita China will ultimately reach. I am struck, even as a European, by how affluent Americans doing typical jobs are. At the bottom of American society, life is much tougher than it is in Europe. But people in really very ordinary jobs do I think have a level of material comfort that is incredibly rare in the world. And so the question is, if in the United States you can go to your local college that you can get into without any problems because, frankly, a lot of colleges in the country are struggling to attract enough students and then you walk into some kind of office job or you're not going to make an exceptional salary that in an area of a country that's not super expensive, you have a nice house and you have a good life, that's a sustainable deal. If you're that student who is going in, working your ass off every day to succeed, but all that results in life is a mediocre job in which your material circumstances are much more circumscribed than they might be in the United States, it might lead to quite an unhappy society.
So you have twin girls who you enrolled in a state elementary school in Chengdu. And you describe the number of messages on the parents' WeChat about every piece of minutiae of a school day, but never complained about the teacher. What was your daughter's experience in this?
Hessler: It was very difficult for all of us. My daughters did not speak Chinese when we put them in the school. The school had 2,000 kids and no foreigners. It wasn’t a school that was accustomed to having outsiders. So the language adjustment was major. But it was really fascinating to be a part of that. It was exhausting. The parents are expected to monitor the homework. The kids I taught in the 1990s, every one of the girl students I taught became full-time teachers. Nobody took time off when they had kids. But it was very striking when we went back when our daughters were in the school—many of the mothers had actually quit their jobs just to monitor and manage the homework of the child, and only one child, like almost everybody's an only child in my daughter's class. That had never happened. 20 years ago, women didn't do that.
Mounk: Now that's an interesting development.
Hessler: That was because they had enough money. The father’s got a good job, the mother’s got a good job. You're going to take 10 years off and you're gonna be just focused on the Gaokao basically, right? So that was very dispiriting. Because I was really struck by the fact that in my earlier generation, all these women had a lot of status in their family. I didn't notice big differences between the girls and the boys in terms of their marriage and the control that they had. But that's changing, right, because of this academic pressure. So I could see it with my kids. You could also see the way the kids are being trained. Like my daughters were in third grade, and every semester they had a final exam. For Chinese it's 100 minutes. For math it's 90 minutes. For science it's 90 minutes. For English it's 90 minutes. So you've got third graders who are taking an exam for an hour and a half. And they're learning to focus.
You know, in my book, I'm a distance runner and I compare it to endurance training. You could see like they are teaching these kids how to do that, and I could see it with my daughters. Like they came back here and they are really good at focusing. Like they have a different level of attention than your typical American student has because they went through this system. So it's very impressive. But also again, kind of sobering. This is so intense that my kids are coming back in fourth grade talking about what it takes to get into, you know, Tsinghua University. That's not what they should be thinking about in fourth grade as far as I'm concerned.
In the rest of the conversation, Yascha and Peter discuss what Americans can learn from China, and the differences in work ethic between the two countries. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
