‘Other Rivers’ and ‘Private Revolutions’: Lessons From China
The economic transformations in China’s recent decades have meant big changes for students. Conformity is still a paramount value.
By Maura Elizabeth Cunningham July 12, 2024
When Peter Hessler arrived in Fuling as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996, he traveled via boat: The town, deep in the Sichuan region of south-central China, had no railroad station. Fuling Teachers College, where Mr. Hessler taught composition, was not a prestigious institution. Nevertheless, acceptance to the school offered its students, who had mostly spent their lives in the countryside, the opportunity to jump into a new and growing class of urbanites. That switch would not take place overnight: Mr. Hessler’s students owned few articles of clothing, often scraped by on insufficient nutrition and developed chilblains on their hands during winters spent in frigid dormitories. China was changing rapidly in the 1990s, but in Fuling amenities were few and memories of even tougher times still fresh.
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Other Rivers: A Chinese Education
Mr. Hessler’s memoir of those Fuling years, 2001’s “River Town,” captured a moment when China was growing by leaps and bounds, but unevenly. In the two decades since, he has built a reputation for writing insightful long-form articles as a staff writer at the New Yorker, for which he has reported from various parts of the U.S., Egypt, China and elsewhere. With the publication of “Other Rivers: A Chinese Education,” Mr. Hessler comes full circle and brings his blend of memoir and perceptive observation back to a classroom in Sichuan.
In 2019 Mr. Hessler joined the Sichuan University faculty, both to teach writing and to see for himself how today’s college students compared to those of the past. His two years at the school proved more eventful than anticipated, as Mr. Hessler experienced firsthand the unfolding story of the Covid-19 pandemic and the continued deterioration of U.S.-China relations.
Nearly a quarter-century after Mr. Hessler’s first visit to Fuling, China had delivered on the economic and social transformations that the author saw hints of back then. He finds his new cohort of students to be more comfortably urban and middle class than their predecessors: wealthier, taller, more worldly, less connected to the countryside. On the surface, these young men and women seemed to have landed the jump that their parents’ generation initiated.
Yet, as Mr. Hessler learned over his two years in Sichuan, certain elements of Chinese university life had remained startlingly constant. For all the outward changes in the country, the Chinese Communist Party was still in charge—and, in fact, had grown even more controlling and repressive since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. Though much else had changed between 1996 to 2019, the party’s rhetoric and rituals were virtually identical, Mr. Hessler writes: “Same rallies, same images, same songs—‘The Motherland Will Not Forget.’ Of course it won’t forget, not with the same things happening over and over. Even the cadres of the same Party wore the same expressions while giving the same speeches with the same words.” In the 21st century, students have far more resources and opportunities than their predecessors, but the party and the institutions it oversees continue to structure, and limit, their choices.
Mr. Hessler’s book thoroughly conveys the overwhelming rigidity of China’s education system, which he absorbed through exchanges with his students, both past and present, as well as his experience as the father of twins who attended a public elementary school there. “Even in third grade,” he writes of the girls’ end-of-year finals, “these exams were grueling: one hundred minutes for language, and ninety minutes each for math, science, and English. The children were trained like endurance athletes.”
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Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China's New Social Order
The ways in which the competitive, repetitive, test-focused nature of education determines who stays in school and who is cast out also comes through in “Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China’s New Social Order,” by Yuan Yang, a journalist who recently became Britain’s first Chinese-born member of parliament. The author follows a quartet of women born in the 1980s and ’90s as they wrestle first with schooling then with the working world.
Two of Ms. Yang’s subjects, Siyue and Leiya, leave school as teenagers to enter the workforce. Siyue, who struggled to conform herself to the Chinese education system, is forgetful and prone to daydreaming; she lacks the intense powers of focus needed to succeed in a test-driven environment. Instead, she teaches herself English and proves adept at developing innovative, student-driven education programs that cater to youngsters like the one she had been—smart and curious, but not cut out for China’s brand of formal schooling.
As a child in 1990s rural China, Leiya had watched her village’s older women and despaired at their narrow, burden-filled lives, dreading the future that they seemed to portend for her. She joins the ranks of migrant workers in Shenzhen, on China’s southeast coast, and soon finds her calling as a labor activist and community organizer. When women seek Leiya’s advice to deal with a difficult boss, she encourages them to break free of their constrained upbringings: “We’ve all been trained to be good, obedient children. But what do you want, what do you think?”
Ms. Yang’s other two subjects, Sam and June, are younger and more direct in their trajectories than Siyue and Leiya, and her profiles of them are less developed. Bookish Sam has grown up in Shenzhen’s middle class, paying full attention to schoolwork. The opportunity to conduct household survey research for a college course radicalizes Sam, who embarks on a mission to improve the lives of factory workers. Bouts of depression and a government crackdown on labor activism, however, eventually lead Sam away from the movement and into a foreign doctoral program.
June, too, remains within the education system, inspired by a primary-school teacher to dream big. June prepares herself for China’s all-important college entrance exam, hoping to use it as her springboard out of the countryside. After earning her degree, she joins an online startup in Beijing that capitalizes on anxious parents who fear their children will end up without a seat in the education game—“injecting kids with chicken blood,” in slang terms.
These Chinese ed-tech companies have built an industry of extra classes and after-school tutoring that ensnare families in a prisoner’s dilemma: If they don’t devote as many resources as possible to their children’s success, a precious university spot might go to the child of a family that did. Like so many areas of business during China’s decades of economic growth, the for-profit education sector grew too big and overheated. In 2021 Xi Jinping’s government cracked down on ed-tech companies. This sent June into a different job and parents on a fresh search for ways to ensure that their offspring would succeed within the system.
Mr. Hessler frequently recites his personal China mantra, “Nothing has changed; everything has changed.” Both these books speak to this confusing truth of China’s last three decades: The economy has grown, people have reinvented themselves, the country is flush with infrastructure that seemed unimaginable only a generation ago. At the same time, the Communist Party remains firmly in charge and the education system continues to require focus, dedication and conformity.
The opportunities for students like Siyue and Leiya to opt out and forge new paths are less certain than they were in the recent past. With the economy cooled and manufacturing jobs moving elsewhere, demand for low-skilled migrant laborers will no longer absorb those who forgo study for employment. The tightening political environment poses risks for anyone in a field that could be construed as activism. Launching oneself as an entrepreneur is, as always, a risky and uncertain endeavor.
Remaining within the system, however, is far from a guarantee of stability. While not all of Mr. Hessler’s Fuling students stuck with the teaching careers that they studied for, everyone took their university degree and built a life very different from those of their parents. That sense of expansiveness and opportunity seems to have dissipated, and his Sichuan students instead spoke of China’s problem with involution, “a point at which intense competition produces diminishing returns.” Peter Hessler came away from his sojourn this time with great faith in the young people of China, but also a sober conclusion: “Something fundamental about the system needs to change.”
Ms. Cunningham is a writer and historian of modern China in Ann Arbor, Mich.