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Peter Hessler is a staff writer at the New Yorker and one of the best known non-fiction writers covering China today. After moving to China to teach English as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996, he wrote a book about his experience, River Town (2001). That book was followed by two others about China, Oracle Bones (2006), and Country Driving (2010), as well as a book about his stint in Egypt, The Buried (2019). In 2019, Hessler returned to China as a teacher at Sichuan University, and recently published a book, Other Rivers (2024), documenting his time there during the tumultuous outbreak of Covid-19 and the spiraling downwards of U.S.-China relations. In this interview, we spoke about the new book, what had and hadn’t changed from his initial teaching experience in China in the 1990s, why he thinks the lab leak theory is wrong, and why he was eventually forced to leave China.

Q: When did you first start thinking about and planning this book?

A: By the time the first book [River Town] came out, I was already in touch with many of the people I taught in Fuling, and we’d begun this correspondence that was very rich and interesting. In the back of my mind, I had an idea that it would be interesting to come back and teach again and see how things changed. As time passed, I settled on the idea of doing it after roughly 20 years, basically a generation later. It also fit well with our family plan, because Leslie [Chang, Hessler’s wife who is also a writer] and I had always wanted our daughters to learn Chinese and we thought the way to do that would be to have them in a Chinese school.

What were the differences you saw between your students in Fuling and the students at Sichuan University?

In some ways, it was night and day. First of all, these were quite different universities. Fuling was a three-year teacher’s college, whereas Sichuan University was what they would call a 985, which is among the top 40 or so institutions in China. Still, even in the 90s, it was so unusual for students to go to university of any sort, so that even for a lower-level place like Fuling, you had to be pretty remarkably good to get in.

In that earlier era, most Chinese grew up in the countryside, and my Fuling students were very much of that cohort. In my classrooms probably more than 90 percent of the students came from the countryside. Whereas when I went to Sichuan University, 21 years after leaving Fuling, that first semester I didn’t have one student who was from the countryside. 

Along with that change, you also have a different class. Many of the Fuling students had grown up in poverty. It was very common for their parents to have been illiterate and to have never had any formal education. Whereas most of the Sichuan University students were basically middle class, while more than 90 percent of them in that first semester were only children. In the Fuling days, most kids were from fairly large families. 

For a generation that is often depicted as full of ‘little pinks’ or nationalists, how did you observe your students’ approach to politics and how it had changed from when you were in Fuling?

In the Fuling days, the students were very naive about politics. They were not aware of things like the Tiananmen Square Massacre [in 1989], and had very few sources of information. This was pre-internet, none of them had phones, none of them had traveled, most of them had not even left Sichuan. 

You do have a lot of talent in Chinese schools, and the system also retains talent well… that’s something I wish Americans would learn from the Chinese example. 

They always seemed very patriotic to me. I had to be very careful with what I said in class. It was pretty easy to offend them, and if you did, you felt that immediately. A big classroom would become very quiet, and everybody would kind of drop their heads, and they had these awful moments of silence. It could be something like me mentioning the Opium War, or some other sensitive history. I became very aware of this in that first semester and I really tried to avoid those moments. 

It was totally different at Sichuan University, where the students were much more aware. I got the sense that a lot of my freshmen didn’t use VPNs initially, but they tended to pick up on that quite quickly, as other students would show them how to do it. So they had much broader access to information. 

I would describe them as patriotic, but it was a different kind of patriotism. It was more informed, less rigid. Those awkward moments in class were no longer part of what was going on, although sometimes I pushed the envelope a little bit and talked about things that I knew were sensitive. I could tell then that students were listening really closely, or they were processing what I was saying and maybe not all of them were agreeing, but they wouldn’t have that very visceral physical reaction. What a lot of them learned in these political classes was to kind of tune it out and not get too engaged. 

In the Fuling days, it seemed like a lot of the most talented and charismatic kids were recruited pretty early for [Communist] Party membership. You had a few exceptions, but a lot of the students that I really liked became party members very early. The Party was very good at identifying and taking them into the fold. That was not happening at Sichuan University. I wasn’t as aware of who were party members.

In Fuling, we knew who the Party members were. But when I talked to the better Sichuan students, the ones I knew quite well, they just shrugged it off and said, yeah, I’m not interested in that. The party had approached a couple of them, but they just said, ‘I don’t want to deal with it. It’s a hassle. You have to pay dues. You have to go to these meetings. I don’t really think it’s going to benefit me enough.’ In the 90s, especially if you were going to be a teacher, it was very much in your interest to join the party. But for a lot of these students at Sichuan, it was much less clear how it was going to benefit them. 

I also loved how you layered in your own daughters’ experience of Chinese education in public school in the book. What surprised you most about their experience?

People always talked to us about political issues and the idea that they’re going to be indoctrinated. Some people said, are you sure you want your kids doing this? Actually, Leslie and I never worried about that because we knew our kids. They are fairly precocious readers and had already read [George] Orwell very carefully before we went over. And so I felt they were not very susceptible. Also, I think it’s good for them to have different perspectives and to see different systems. 

I was very impressed and surprised with the school’s openness. They let us into the school, which we weren’t at all sure was going to happen. Even six months in, when Covid happened and things got really tense, I was somewhat afraid that they might decide that it was too risky to have the foreigners there, but they didn’t do that. They never made us feel unwelcome. 

There was obviously a lot of anti-American sentiment at this time. Some of the boys would sometimes say things like, dadao meiguo [down with America] in front of my daughters. The school was very aware of it and really protected them. They cut all of that off and made sure that kids didn’t target them. They were the only foreigners, and certainly the only Americans, in this school of about 2,000. They were very decent and handled this very complicated situation very well. They also never expressed any nervousness about my writing and my status there as an American journalist. 

You do have a lot of talent in Chinese schools, and the system also retains talent well. A lot of my really good students from Fuling have been teaching now for 20 plus years. In America, equivalent individuals who were very talented and motivated, and who had gone into teaching in the late 1990s, may have become disillusioned or found better opportunities. That doesn’t happen as much in China. It’s one thing I respect about that educational system: it’s capable of retaining talent and that’s something I wish Americans would learn from the Chinese example. 

You weren’t there to report for the New Yorker, but when Covid broke out, you started reporting. Why did you decide to do that?

My plan had been to transition back to journalism after two or three years. But once Covid happened, the New Yorker couldn’t send people to China anymore. A lot of the most experienced American journalists were expelled, at The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. The press corps had been decimated, but Covid just seemed like a really important event. 

China was the place where it started and was very interesting, because they did some things differently than other countries, and while they had some huge failures, they also had some huge successes. I felt like it needed to be written about in detail. I had a good perspective on it and I was also in the interior when very few journalists were there. 

I think if you’re an experienced writer, you have an obligation to try to cover something like that. I did know there was a risk to it and that it might end up with us losing our visas and so on. But I felt like it was worth it and that I was probably less likely to have serious problems than other people might because I’d written in China in the past and had Chinese readers. I think that did protect me to some degree.

There is this terrible atmosphere right now around anything involving China — black and white thinking, there’s a lot of anger, people feel frustrated, and they’re looking for targets. 

My first article [in that period] appeared on March 30th, 2020. The U.S. was just starting to hit lockdown and we [in China] had come out of it: My first restaurant meal with the family was March 8th. The last locally transmitted case in Chengdu was recorded on February 20th. So it was a fascinating moment because we’d been through it all, and now the U.S. was starting to go into it, along with lots of other places. The New Yorker really wanted something and actually I’ve never written a story as fast as I wrote that one. 

That story includes some details like the problems with remote schooling that I thought were important for people to think about. I had the sense that people didn’t quite understand the potential damage to kids from being isolated, having watched my daughters, even for what in retrospect was a really short period. You could really see the damage and the stress that it created for young people. I felt like this was important and went beyond the China-U.S. thing. It was a human story and we needed as much information as we could get from all over the world.

In the book, you argue that Covid was unlikely to have been started by a lab leak. Can you explain why you think that is the case? 

The main reason is that there’s no evidence. There is no evidence that they were studying anything that could have created this kind of pandemic. Maybe they were doing this secretly but until you have evidence it really limits what you can say. This theory has been pushed a lot, there was even a long piece in the New York Times in the opinion section recently about it. I thought that was somewhat inappropriate because it wasn’t based on any new material and the author of that piece [Alina Chan], some of her main ideas have not passed peer-reviewed journals because they’re speculative. 

There is this idea about China that it’s a black box, that everything is hidden, you can’t know what goes on, everything’s covered up. And it’s true, a lot of things are covered up, but there are enormous amounts of information that come out. If you’re on the ground, you understand this, because the system has all kinds of holes. People are indiscreet in all kinds of ways that are kind of shocking, like the things that people write on WeChat. We saw all kinds of evidence of this, such as the case of Li Wenliang [the whistleblower who eventually died in Wuhan], who was among the early whistleblowers. 

I have trouble understanding how people at that lab — who would have been studying this thing that they knew was dangerous — could [then] have seen it leak out and people starting to get sick and it starting to spread; and then seen it blow up in their town, with hundreds, then thousands of people dying, and not say a word? Nobody gives a warning to some friends who then screenshot it? 

It happened at every other stage: you had people in the Chinese CDC who leaked out very important material about the Huanan Market [a market in Wuhan which some think is the origin of Covid], the genome was leaked out, stuff was going out all the time. So why would that have been the only place that was hermetically sealed? To me, it doesn’t really fit with what I know about China. 

The other reason for me is: why would it have started in the lab and then blown up in the Huanan seafood market? If you go to Wuhan, it’s a massive city, there’s almost a million college students alone. There’s no natural overlap between the Institute of Virology and that market.

Part of this lab leak theory is that people say, well, the only reason that it looks like it came out of the market is because that’s where everybody was looking. That, to me, is just totally ignorant about how things work in China. The reason that they started looking at the market is because people from the market were dying and getting sick. All the hospitals around there were getting overwhelmed. Anybody who lives in China knows that they’re not controlling information at that level. If something blows up, people notice. They talk about it. They post it on social media. It gets around. And we know that it blew up around that market. 

This is not to say that it’s impossible that it came from a lab leak. Until we know for sure, we can’t rule out that possibility. But it seems very unlikely. And the virologists, the people who really understand the science, are in general not supportive of the lab-leak theory.

It seems that the Jon Stewart theory of, ‘what are the odds that the institute is in the same city where the disease broke out and is not involved?’, has really broken through in the U.S. narrative of the pandemic.

It’s total nonsense. It’s just like saying, what are the odds that the pandemic would happen in the same place that the revolution started that overthrew the Qing dynasty? Well, there has to be a connection. It’s just like, you don’t know anything about China. That’s all that’s saying. Both of those things may happen in this city because a lot of shit happens in the city. Wuhan’s an important place. It’s a major crossroads. It’s not a shock to me. 

You got some criticism for your reporting on Covid-19, for example from [China scholar] Geremie Barmé, saying you were not critical enough of the Communist Party. How do you respond to critics like that of your work?

At the time I didn’t respond because it was not in my interest to do so and it was a risk, especially because Barmé highlighted my visa status and said that I was reporting illegally. He was putting me at risk when he did that and if I had started to fight against him it would just have amplified his argument. I made a decision that the only thing I would do publicly is my stories, but I probably should have written something earlier.

There’s a high degree of dishonesty in a lot of these attacks. Barmé accused me of being afraid to write about China’s cover-up and all the things they did wrong at the beginning, but he didn’t link to the first story I’d written about the pandemic. I was working on a series of stories. The first one was about that early phase in the lockdown in Chengdu and I described Li Wenliang and the other things that went wrong in Wuhan, and quoted a pharmacist who was incredibly critical of the government. But then my second piece was about the next phase, which is where the policies were really working. By the time I did that piece I was already working on the third one, which was about Wuhan itself, and reporting there, and so I knew that I was going to cover that stuff again in the third piece. So I wasn’t avoiding anything. 

There is this terrible atmosphere right now around anything involving China — black and white thinking, there’s a lot of anger, people feel frustrated, and they’re looking for targets. 

Have you ever reached out to Barmé about the criticism? 

I don’t have any responsibility to reach out. He had a responsibility to reach out to me. If he’s going to write about my visa status, and about my motivations and supposed fears, he needs to get on the phone and talk to me. If he had talked to me, he couldn’t have lied about my first story, saying that I was afraid, he couldn’t have written a 3,800 word attack on me that didn’t link to half of my coverage about the pandemic. 

But of course, he’s editing himself, he doesn’t have an editor, [China Heritage] is not a real journal. You couldn’t get that thing past the fact checker anywhere. So it’s just an ad hominem attack. He didn’t reach out to me, one of the many things that he did that’s unethical. You’re a journalist — if you’re going after somebody like that, you have to give them a chance to speak for themselves. Your editor is not going to let you do that. [Since our interview, Hessler wrote a response to Barmé in ChinaFile, see here.]

At the same time, you also got into trouble with people with very different views in China. You had an incident where people were posting online about an interaction in your classroom where you supposedly berated students. You deduced that it was a very manipulated version of comments you made on a student’s paper. After you left China, you reached out to the student, who said he knew nothing about it. Can you describe this incident?

I was completely shocked. And to be honest, it tells you how paranoid you get, because I taught that class after this had happened and I was so nervous about teaching: in fact I was supposed to teach them Orwell. It was a completely bizarre series of events, as I really had a feeling that everybody in the classroom knew what had happened, they were all aware of it, they were nervous, they were hiding it, and I thought he was probably feeling guilty or angry. Then later, after I talked to him [the student] and other kids in that class, I realized they were just completely oblivious. I believe that’s true.

So some of the students were vaguely aware of it but they were not aware of it in the way that I would have thought. This also reflects that tendency to disengage. I feel like as an American, if I had something like this going on in my college, I would want to know what’s going on, as this is about my teacher. Their reaction was often, stay out of it, don’t think about it, don’t talk about it, certainly don’t investigate it. Just move on. 

That was the college’s approach, too. They didn’t reassure me in the sense of saying, we’ve talked to him, we know how your editing comments were later posted on Weibo. They just wanted it to go away. It was really fascinating to me, and it surprised me. He may not have been telling me the truth, but I believe him because he responded so quickly when I contacted him. We talked on video chat. He also said, I wasn’t happy about your editing comments, they made me feel uncomfortable as a Chinese person. This was in response to a paper where he had defended a level of censorship and I was playing devil’s advocate. I wasn’t being cruel or anything, but I was pushing against his argument, and it made him a little bit uncomfortable. He was a freshman, his first semester. I probably could have been a little more tactful. 

There is this idea about China that it’s a black box, that everything is hidden, you can’t know what goes on, everything’s covered up. And it’s true, a lot of things are covered up, but there are enormous amounts of information that come out.

And then it blew up on Twitter. And there was all this stuff saying that ‘Hessler has been reported’ and people were like, ‘oh, he’s going to be kicked out’. And it was all kind of getting blown out of proportion. I was never reported at the university. It was also completely taken out of context. I had made these private comments on a paper. It wasn’t like I embarrassed this kid in front of his peers. I was just making personal comments on the essay and then somehow that got turned into a scene where I was in a classroom berating my students, which had never happened. 

That’s what scared me. When it first happened I wondered whether this meant that somebody was targeting me, and at some point I wondered, is this somebody from the security state who’s trying to start problems and then get a foothold so that then they can get rid of me? But in retrospect I think it was just like the telephone game — it got exaggerated and then somebody with bad intentions put it out there and it blew up.

Later, you didn’t get approval to stay at the university. Your description of this incident implies that an American administrator for the joint University of Pittsburgh-Sichuan University program, where you were teaching, thought that the Chinese administrators wanted you to leave. But he was actually wrong, is that right?

I’m pretty certain that there was no top-down command to ‘get rid’ of this guy. The American administrator was not in China from the start of Covid onwards. He really should have been on campus and talking to people and then he probably could have done a better job of handling that situation. I think he was preempting problems which is part of what you have in this kind of situation in China, where there’s just a high level of fear that runs throughout the bureaucracy, and people want to head off problems before they happen. 

I’m pretty sure that when that happened, higher level officials were not happy that there were media reports about me leaving. I’ve been told this from several different people, that it made the university look bad and there were higher level people who said: This is a problem, you should fix that. I think that’s why the Waiban [Foreign Affairs official] guy at the end reached out to me and set up a meeting and sort of said, ‘hey, is there any way you can stay?’ But at that point, we had already moved out of the apartment, we had tickets going home and I also felt like there had been so much trust damage through this process that I wasn’t going to just turn around.

Do you think you will teach or live in China again? 

I think I will. It won’t be soon. There’s lots of reasons for that. In this climate, at this particular moment and on the heels of that incident, I decided that it wouldn’t work for me to teach. There’s too much negative attention and it can come from both sides: from people who hate the CCP and from people who love the party. Either way, you’re going to have trouble and I think it would be hard on the institution, hard on me, and hard on my students as well. My daughters are entering high school in the fall and we had always planned on them doing that in the United States.

But in the future, I certainly want to live in China again. It may be first as a journalist again, if it becomes easier to get a visa. I would love to teach there again at some point, I just think I would like it to be at a slightly different moment.

In the very end of the book, you talk about how you have the sense that for your students in Sichuan, their future is more complicated in many ways than the Fuling students. What do you mean by complicated? 

It’s a hard thing to compare because, of course, in some ways, the Fuling students had a tough road. A lot of them had known real poverty. And they had basically no family resources. There’s a section in the book where I quote them and one student says, my parents raised us like they raised pigs and chickens. They did not get much useful parental guidance. But in other ways, their road was really straightforward. You’re trying to get educated, you’re trying to move to the city, you’re trying to improve your material circumstances, and all of those things were quite possible at that time. If you were hardworking and had some native intelligence, you could do it. And they did it, pretty much all of them. I don’t know of any of them who didn’t become a city person, who didn’t become an educated person, and basically middle class. 

Whereas now, for young people, the goal is not as clear. Their parents were in this moment when in China, you could make a fortune: that’s not going to be their situation. But for the Sichuan University kids, it’s more unclear. Do I want to focus on having a life that’s more balanced than my parents had, or am I going to really have to fight just to maintain my position in the middle class? 

I think they don’t know, and they’re going to have to try to decide what matters to them. I can see them struggling with this in all kinds of ways. Some of them right now are struggling with the question of, do I really want to go back to China or do I want to try to carve out a life in the United States or in Great Britain or in the EU? I have a few students overseas who have pretty much made the decision not to go back. This is a tougher climate economically, but also just politically and socially. And maybe [they think] I don’t want to be in that environment anymore.

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