Loading summary
Transcript65 lines
- [00:00]
Pharmaceutical Advertiser
Chronic migraine 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more, can make me feel like a spectator in my own life. Botox Onobotulinum toxin a prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine preventive treatment prescription. Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injecting are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions including als, Lou Gehrig's disease, Myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome and medications including botulinum toxins as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait?
- [00:55]
Peter Hessler
Ask your doctor.
- [00:56]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-844botox to learn more.
- [01:01]
Peter Hessler
China's unusual because it's been, first of all, it's been successful in the last 30 years, pretty much. But it's also, it's been there for so long. The party's been in power since 1949, right? And so you have, you know, even the leader of China, Xi Jinping, was born in that system. I mean, he doesn't remember anything before 1949. Right? There's so everybody is just, it just becomes part of who you are. Your expectation is that you deal with it. You find your, you know, your way to cope. Your expectation is not that you should have something different. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
- [01:41]
Podcast Host or Co-host
The conflicts in American politics are going into overdrive and at the same time we see a dangerous war between Israel and Iran that is showing signs of escalating further with a possible entry into this war by the United States. Persuasion, I think, is doing a really good job covering this conflict. So if you don't yet get those emails, please go to persuasion.community in order to keep up to date and we hope to have an episode of this podcast with Francis Fukuyama about the current situation in the world for you this coming week. In the meanwhile, I'm sharing with you slightly less timely but I think just as important conversation. I am currently in China and one of the things that I'm struck by here is the extent to which Americans really don't understand this place. There are, according to some people, at least, fewer Americans in Shanghai today than there were a hundred years ago. And there are supposedly more American college students studying today in the city of Florence than in the country of China. Well, one writer who knows China very, very well and who has a significant following both in the United States, where he is a staff writer for the New Yorker, and in China, where his books are widely read, is Peter Hassler. Peter first taught at a teacher's college in Sichuan province in the 1990et, and he was back in China for a number of years teaching again earlier this decade. In his new book, Other Rivers, the follow up to the classic Rivertown, he recounts the evolution of the country through the lens of the evolution of the students he got to know nearly 30 years ago. It is a personal conversation that also, of course, has political elements. And it is, I think, a really good window into trying to understand understand this important and interesting country that so many well educated Americans don't know all that much about. We covered how Chinese politics and culture have changed over the last three decades. We discuss many aspects of everyday culture in China, including the gaokao, the high school leaving exam that students across China are actually taking right now, and the kind of work ethic that instills in Chinese people, perhaps also the tendency to overwork. And finally, in the part of this week's conversation reserved for paying subscribers, we talk about whether there are any aspects of Chinese society that Americans can and should learn from. To access that part of the conversation, please support this podcast. Please become a paying subscriber, please go to jasamung.substack.com.
- [04:58]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
Peter Hessler welcome to the podcast.
- [05:00]
Peter Hessler
Thanks so much.
- [05:01]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
You lived for long stretches in China at two moments once, you know, 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 growing 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 away in the world. But to start off with kind of the most 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 at this idea of China being a kind of totalitarian state that it feels like it might have done in the Soviet Union during the purges or something like that. And yet it always is an authoritarian country that restricts in many ways the freedoms that people have. What does that look like to 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? And in what ways are they shaped by the political circumstances?
- [06:25]
Peter Hessler
Yeah, I mean, I think it is, it is a very hard place to describe in this sense because our models, I think are not appropriate, not useful. Like, you know, we often talk about having a new Cold war with China, but I think what we're doing is something, it's very different. Right. It doesn't really match what we would think of as a Cold War. I mean, there's a, you know, for most years we've had about 300,000 young Chinese studying in the United States and even more, of course, in Europe and 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. right. And then willingly going back home. I mean, most of the Chinese who study in the US 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, of course, it's a one party state and it's become more authoritarian in many ways. I mean, which is something that was unexpected. I lived there first, 1996 to 2007, and at the end of that time, if you had asked me what would this place be like in 20, 25 years, I would have assumed that it would be more open, that it would be, you know, maybe they would have instituted some form of democracy or some democratic measures. And yet we have Xi Jinping, who is, you know, a much more authoritarian leader than Jiang Zemin, who was in power when I lived there in the Peace Corps, 1996, 1998. So it is a challenge. I think it's very hard to convey this to people. But young Chinese are, you know, they're 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, it's, you know, it's a key question for us.
- [08:11]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
And one of the interesting things on that, for example, is that there is the Great Firewall, 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. And a lot of your students, you say in the book, purchase a vpn. In fact, one of the most useful things of being at college, maybe getting instructions from your peers and sometimes from the institution itself about how you get a VPN so that you can engage 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. It feels to me that it's a lot of paradoxes, which is what said about the United States. Other moments when people chafe against this, why don't they chafe against it to a larger extent? How is the regime thinking about the utility to them of people being able to climb the firewall, use those VPNs, because clearly they could disable all the VPNs if they wanted to.
- [09:13]
Peter Hessler
Yeah, no, I mean, it is a really interesting issue. But, you know, I, 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 now it's almost 30 years. And I give them surveys periodically and because we have a high level of trust and they've read everything that I that I've written, and so I can really trust their answers. And a number of years ago, a few years ago, I asked them, do you use a VPN? And there were more than 30 who responded to that survey, and only one of them used a VPN. The rest of them weren't, you know, so it is, I think it is pretty uncommon, especially amongst sort of, you know, these are people in their 40s and 50s. They don't really care enough to. And these are educated people. These are teachers, you know, so they weren't getting around. Whereas when I was teaching from 2019 to 2021 at Sichuan University, teaching undergraduates, huge numbers. I think the majority of them were using VPNs. But I could see a difference. Like my friend, 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, you know, I don't 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 figure that out on their own. So you would learn from other students and sometimes even their departments would kind of give them a, you know, a quiet suggestion or say it was very much just like an open secret that pretty much everybody at that university was learning how to use a vpn. And, you know, 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. I mean, I. One of the people I profiled my book was an entrepreneur and he's selling to the US on Amazon and he's checking Google trends, like 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, I'm not sure how the balancing act continues because I do feel like the younger people are more, they're 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, you know, an open Internet. And so I'm not really sure where it goes from here. But again, this is part of the thing. It's always been dynamic. It's always, it's, you know, 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. And 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, you know, in certain manners.
- [11:35]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
Yeah. 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, three or four months ago, I suppose. And I assumed that the same VPN would work. I arrived and found that it didn't work. And, you know, there's people at the airport who just wanted to sell me a local SIM card, and they were perfectly happy to set up VPN for me, you know, perfectly openly, you know, in the arrivals hall of Shanghai International Airport. So that shows sort of a little bit of these paradoxes. Let's start with your experience. When you were first living in China. You were part, I believe, of the first Peace Corps cohort to come to China. You were in a very remote town of Fuling, teaching people who in many cases had grown up in villages where 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've shrunk in the meanwhile, what was China like back in those glory days of a reform era when everything was changing sort of at maximum speed?
- [12:50]
Peter Hessler
Yeah, I mean, it didn't feel like glory days in Fuling. I mean, that was definitely part of it. I mean, 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. And, you know, 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. I mean, the closest big city was Chongqing, and it took us eight hours on the boat to get there. And, you know, we didn't have a railroad, we didn't have a highway. This was a city of about, you know, almost 200,000 people. And we didn't even. There wasn't even a stoplight in the town. You know, 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, but 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. I mean, I got, you know, often I didn't know about it till years later. You know, 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, you know, I'm really sorry I wasn't a very good student in your, you know, in your class. And, and he said, 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, for two years I only had one meal a day. You know, I was a sad man. That's what he wrote, you know. But now I'm happy with my life. So this sort of, it really did. You did. You could feel the poverty. You could feel it in the physicality. Like as you mentioned, they were small. The students were very, you know, they were smaller than me. I'm five nine, I'm not, 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, 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. And coming back you got a sense of how it changed. You mentioned how these students now towered over me. It was one of the first things I noticed when I went back to teach in 2019 was that suddenly a lot of the boys I was teaching the first year students were taller and even some of the girls and you know, the Lancet did a study of 200 countries in 2020 and they found the charge 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. And the average girl was the, it was the third hard, third largest increase in height among those 200 countries. So again, you know, this sense of nutritional improvement, I mean, right, we have this idea of, you know, trying to lifted 800 million people out of poverty and it's just a meaningless number at some, you know, when you say something like that, you just can't grasp it. But when you see you sit in a classroom and you feel this physical difference, it means something different. It also means, like 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 know, 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. You know, they had rail lines, they had multiple highways. So all of those changes are just, you know, it's unbelievable. I mean, sort of in one generation, this kind of change that would have been 50 years or 100 years in many parts of the world, what did
- [16:05]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
that do to the lives of those people? I use 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, you know, 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. But, you know, today, would they think of themselves as a, as a lucky generation? What kind of personal transformation did they experience as the country changed so rapidly around them?
- [16:51]
Peter Hessler
Yeah, I mean, 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 actually that Mao Zedong died. They were born 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, that are known as reform and opening. And so they witness all this. It's 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 and, you know, 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. 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 comfortable middle class life. So you really could see this in their, in their own personal circumstances. At the same time, one thing that was, that really fascinated me was I asked them in one of those surveys, I think the one that where they said their income was 35,000, and I asked if they had apartment or a car. All of them had an apartment, 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. You know, these, most people in China who are middle class have multiple apartments. But I asked them one of those years 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 describe themselves as middle class, and 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, you know, people, even when their circumstances change, the mindset doesn't always change in the same way. And I mentioned in my book, like, there are so many things about this cohort of people when I talk with them, when I go back and visit them, that still reminds me 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 or all kinds of things, their responses are still recognizable to me as to what they would have been in the 1990s. So, you know, that, that sort of, that experience doesn't, doesn't go away.
- [19:27]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
And that's interesting at the individual level and perhaps at the collective level as well. Right. I mean, 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 high income and that is much, much more urban. But of course that means that a lot of cultural inheritance and traditions and so on persist. They are presumably much slower to change than those external changes. So 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.
- [20:13]
Peter Hessler
Yeah, I mean, I, I was surprised, you know, when I asked them about religion in one of my surveys that most, because I, my memory of them in the 1990s was, you know, of course, they had all been indoctrinated with Marxism in the class and, you know, they would, if you mentioned, if you, because I was teaching English in American literature and if you mentioned, if anything mentioned God or Christianity or religion, they would Kind of laugh about. 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, you know, 20 years later, 2016, I asked them, you know, 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 Bao ying, which is the Buddhist concept of karmic retribution. So these ideas, which I, you know, I would never have expected that in the 1990s, but these ideas had come back, you know, these rural inheritances that they had were still there. I think there's also a lot of political inheritance. Like when I asked them, you know, should China become a multi party democracy overwhelmingly, they said no. And some of them said, you know, we've done pretty well the way we've been going, you know, we don't need to change this, you know, we've improved our lives. And others said, you know, you have a multi party democracy and you just elected the worst president ever. You know, we don't want to do that. And some of them said, we already have one corrupt party, we don't want anymore. You know, so they could be very cynical about that. But I think those viewpoints are reflective of people who've grown up in the system. Now I think if you come from our, if you come from an American perspective and you say, okay, you people have done this great job with your economy, you've, you've risen to middle class, now it's time to create a more equitable society or, you know, a more democratic system. This would be our perspective. What this is what's naturally next. That's not necessarily the perspective. If you're coming from where they're coming from, many of them would take the perspective that, hey, this has worked, why would we change it in some? And they would also, I think, say 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. And 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 isn't it that you don't 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 with politics.
- [22:35]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
Yeah, I mean, I Think one of the ways in which that complicates the outside perception of China in I think a very helpful way, is that when people who grow up in democratic societies think about authoritarian countries, I think 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, individual lives, and who therefore, you know, wants some form of democracy, who therefore wants to import, not 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 your Fortarian regime who, you know, lacks the education or the intelligence or the moral courage to see what's in front of their eyes. And I think what you're describing is what's probably much more common in China, and perhaps naval, for Italian 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 from 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's 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 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? Sort of 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?
- [24:59]
Peter Hessler
Yeah, I mean, I think for them, you know, politics and the things that we would think of as sort of more intellectual freedom, those were never the main priorities. So if you looked at that generation, these young people born in the 70s who were in college in 1996-1998, what were the things that they needed to do, one was 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 like, they see they're huge challenges, right? I mean, 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 also was very striking to me that these people had no guidance from their elders. You know, like they could not go to their parents for advice. Many of their parents were, as I mentioned before, were illiterate. None of them had made the kind of transition that, that my students were making. And they often wrote about this years later when I did surveys and they would say, you know, our parents raised us. One of them wrote, my parents raised us like they raised pigs and chickens. They didn't know how to show us love, but I show love to my child. You know, these sort of things that we would take for granted as urban people with, you know, sort of middle class people was not part of their background. So their challenge, you know, it was very impressive. 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, and they were very optimistic. Like when I. Even nowadays, when China is kind of in a tough phase, definitely, and when I write them, they write about tough, tough circumstances that they notice with their kids and so on. I always ask them, you know, what are your feelings about the future? On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being pessimistic, 10 being optimistic. This last year, I mean, it was still close to eight, you know, like they were still very optimistic this generation because of their experiences. But, you know, it was never intellectual. Freedom was never a huge priority for them. And of course it wasn't something they had known or really expected to know. And this is part of the challenge when you're looking at it. You know, you talk about authoritarian states. I mean, China is unusual because it's been there for, first of all, it's been successful in the last, you know, 30 years pretty much. But it's also, it's been there for so long. The party's been in power since 1949. Right. And so you have, you know, even the Leader of China, Xi Jinping was born in that system. I mean, he doesn't remember anything before 1949. Right. There's. So everybody is just, it, it just becomes part of who you are. Your expectation is that you deal with it. You find your, you know, your way to cope. Your expectation is not that you should have something different.
- [27:41]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
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.
- [28:03]
Peter Hessler
Yeah, so they were becoming teachers to teach in middle schools and high schools. And so this was because China was expanding education. Right. As I mentioned, the people's 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 teachers and to send back.
- [28:32]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
And 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, I hear about them. What do those look like? I mean, they're not like the SATs or something like that. Right. Different kind of standardized test or similarity to.
- [28:47]
Peter Hessler
It's much tougher. I mean every, you know, it's like a, it's, it's a long two day exam. And if you're entering college in China, that is all that matters. There are no recommendations, there are no high school grades, there is no activities. It is just the score that you get on this two day exam.
- [29:03]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
The GAO call.
- [29:04]
Peter Hessler
The GAO call. Yeah.
- [29:05]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
I guess what I'm trying to get at is standardized test in the United States nearly always means it is a multiple choice test and it's a multiple choice test. But effectively VSAT is very similar to an IQ test. Effectively. Right. The gaoco, as I understand, is a test you have to study for. VSAT you can study for. And it makes a little bit of a difference with 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, it's a much more traditional exam, isn't it?
- [29:39]
Peter Hessler
Yeah, and it's, it has, you know, the longest history of any standardized test in America. I mean, in the world, basically, because it's based, you know, it's an. It, it is sort of the descendant of what they call the kudji, which is the imperial examination system. So that's a system that in China, you know, for centuries, you know, for 2000 years, this is how they chose, I guess not 2000s from the 700s, 600. They, they chose their silver service based on this exam. And it's incredible tradition in China that later was picked up by, I think, South Korea, something similar, and many other countries did in, in the region. So there is, you know, the Gaul call inherits this tradition and as you say, it is exam. You prepare for it. It's not an IQ test. You know, if you're highly intelligent and you sit down at that test without preparation, you're going to do terribly. So. So the students like their last year of high school, they're at the school usually from about 7am until 7 or 8 at night, sometimes later studying, and they're there every day in the weekend. And you just, you're just grinding it out, preparing for whatever they're going to ask you on this test. And I mean, you ask, you talk to Chinese people in their 40s and they will, they still have dreams about this exam, and they will all remember not only their score, but they will tell you what their rank was in the province. You know, like, I just talked to somebody the other day and he's like, yeah, I was 1 290th, you know, in Sichuan, in Sichuan Province. You know, like, they, it's unbelievable how intense this is. So we don't really have any equivalent in America that the, the SAT is nothing close. So, you know, but when I was teaching, they were trying to, you know, they were trying to expand this whole thing and trying to make university accessible. Right. So when I was teaching 1996, one out of every 12 went to college. That's 8%, right. It's incredibly low. The college I was at had 2,000 students. I left in 1998. By 2004, that 2,000 students at that college had become 20,000. They expanded tenfold in six years. And they did this all across China. And by the time I went back to teach, you know, I mentioned 8% of students entered college in 1996. By 2019, when I went back, that figure was now 51.6%. So more than half, you know, it became, you know, accepted, you know, expected for young Chinese to enter college. So that, that was. So my students were kind of in the middle of this expansion, right, because they were preparing kids, they were teaching them English so they could do the Gao call and then go to college. So you really could, you could get a sense of what it means to try to expand education on the scale, which I think it's unprecedented. I don't think there's any other, certainly not at this, you know, if with a large populous nation to improve education so quickly.
- [32:13]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
Thanks for indulging that digression. I think it's important for understanding contemporary China, both for understanding the incredible pressure that young people are on 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 gaoko. But to go back to that moment we departed from, so these kids are not in good schools, they're in rural schools where presumably they don't have 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. And so we get this opportunity to go off to a provincial town that is quite remote from Beijing and Shanghai, that is presumably the metropolis and you know, relative to the village they come from, you know, they are training to become teachers. The teachers U taught, I believe, were trained to become English teachers. What is their college experience and what happens to them after college?
- [33:27]
Peter Hessler
Yeah, I mean, so they, you know, in college you could see that they were trying to learn to be city people. I mean, they still tended to look pretty rural. I mean, they dressed, I, I mentioned in my book I would, it was, I would memorize students names in the early days just by their clothes because they wore the same thing every day, you know, 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. And you know, I can give you an example. There was one Boy, he chose English named Mo. He was a Communist party member and the class monitor. So he's kind of the one who helps, you know, if he collects assignments from the kids. And he kind of serves as interface between the students and the administration. They would choose students who were politically reliable but also kind of good with people to do this sort of position. Chinese classrooms all have little bureaucracies, just like, like the government. So this boy named Mo was a good student and a really dynamic kid. A lot of my students chose last names as, as, you know, they had English names that they had chosen themselves. His was Mo, but they, they also, they often chose last names. And by his last year, he had chosen the name Money. So his name was Mo Money. That, that was his English name. So he had a good sense of humor. He was a funny kid.
- [34:38]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
And it says something about, I mean, he may have been a member of a Communist party, but his ambitions may have gone in a financial direction.
- [34:44]
Peter Hessler
Yeah, I know. Everybody knew that's what they wanted, right? And I mean, I had another student named Marx in, you know, in the same, same core. But anyway, so first or last name that was. He didn't choose a last name yet. It was just one name. You know, it was like Beyonce or something.
- [34:59]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
Real missed opportunity for going off Mark's money here.
- [35:02]
Peter Hessler
But yeah, no, he should. There's all kinds of kind of things he could have done. Ye Mo Money to give him as an example, this very poor background. Parents were illiterate. He's the oldest kid in the family, goes to college and he went. So they. Then the government assigned him to teach at a rural school in his region. So he goes back to a high school there. And while he's teaching, he taught. Both of his younger brothers 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. So I mean this kind of is almost like a, you know, it's very much bootstraps education. You could see how it's working, right? 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 40s and 50s. But it's. Yeah. So you could see, you know, 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, you know, a Communist party member. He became a An administrator at a school. After teaching for many years, he lives in Chongqing, the big city. He's very much an urban person. And so most of my, 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. And those guys, it's unbelievable the things that they went. If you became an entrepreneur in the late 90s in China, that really the sky was the limit. And you know, one of the kids I taught was a boy. His English name was Yung Si, which he had chosen based. He kind of translated his Chinese poet name literally. It didn't make much sense in English, but Yung Si was his name. Not a great student, went back to his village, but a very kind of dynamic kid and a nice looking kid, had a lot of energy. So he went back and he was teaching and he had this idea, you know, everybody's talking about computers and nobody knows how to type. Maybe I'll set up a typing class in my, you know, in my, in my school after hours. So he got two cheap little keyboards and he would have, the kids would pay, you know, two kuai, which was 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. And at first the school didn't know what to do about this. They're like, you know, they're like, all these people are signing up their kids because this was at a time when people were just starting to have some disposable income. And Chinese, when they have disposable income, they're going to spend it on education. That's one of their first priorities. And so people were signing up their kids and he was. Soon he was making more money from that course than he was from his real teaching job. And 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. You know, they're like, we want our kids to learn. This is a good opportunity. Then the other administrator said, yeah, isn't this what Deng Xiaoping wanted us to do? He always said, we're supposed to be jump into the sea and do business. And so then they let him do it. And, you know, 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 need 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. And you expand your construction crew and you 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 is 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, you know, that he dominated. And you know, the last time I saw him in fooling, 25 years later, I mean, he went from there to real estate. He went to doing big billboards, to doing alarm systems, parking garages, everything associated with development. You know, he drives me around fooling in a, you know, in a Mercedes Benz, it's $150,000. You know, he's just made more money than any than he could ever have imagined. And there's a number of these guys. So the entrepreneur stories are just stunning because these were. And they had no connections. Like this is a kid, nobody helped him. You know, he didn't have any family, was not. Nobody was giving. I mean, some teacher took an interest in him and invested in his, gave him a short term loan to start his cell phone company. Because she's like, I like your energy. You're, you know, you seem like you're going places and. But that was it. I mean, otherwise he was just figuring this out on his own. So it is really stunning to see this and you think about how does that shape this person's worldview, right? I mean, these are people, they believe deeply in competition. They're very tough minded and very resourceful, very flexible. So it is a special generation. You know, I've always really felt fortunate that I was there at that time because I sort of witnessed it and got to know these people. And then you watch them over time and you see them change.
- [39:27]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
And in the generation, what do you think is a split between the people who went on this entrepreneurial path and ones that ended up becoming teachers? I mean, one interesting story you tell is of somebody who got into some kind of political trouble at their school and probably could have eked it out as a teacher even after that, but decided, screw that, I don't like this, and then was forced to go into private business and ended up doing very well for themselves as well. So there's sort of interesting fades where small things can really set you on one path or another. But 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 educational 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 in the ccp, but at what's. What's expected in Chinese education.
- [40:22]
Peter Hessler
Yeah, I mean, I think you mentioned Emily. So she's somebody who went to Shenzhen, which was a place where you went. If you were a migrant, if you were somebody 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's told me that. But she. It turned her off after a certain point, you know, she felt like there was an emptiness and there was, you know, she couldn't really figure out what people wanted, like, what are they trying to, you know, which is something that more and more you see young Chinese thinking about, like, okay, this material success for the. 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, you know, I'm middle class and do I really just need to drive for more money and study like crazy for the gal call and work like crazy. You know, they call JoJo Liu996. You work from 9am to 9pm six days a week. That's what the young people talk about. These. Many of these jobs expect you to do this. And they were all. So now you have more people wondering, like, 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 committed suicide. And 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 cutthroat, competitive atmosphere. Of this period. And so she had this experience and it really informed her, you know, and she's become a very thoughtful person and has deliberately kind of stepped into back. And she does, she, she kind of avoids a lot of the highly competitive elements. I mean, it is, I think it's, it's the, it's got to be the most competitive society on earth. I can't imagine. I mean, you just see from school on, I mean, like my daughters, you know, I had my daughters in a public school and in third grade, they started out in third grade in Chengdu when we were there in 2019. And it is just, even at that age, unbelievable the sense of competition and the sense of, of just, just how much people have to be driven. And so a lot of Chinese, young Chinese are wondering about this and thinking, you know, is there something else that we need to value?
- [42:32]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
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. I know that it's exactly a generation, but roughly speaking, 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. You know, to ask the classic historians question, what has changed and what has remained the same?
- [43:02]
Peter Hessler
Yeah, I mean, you know, yeah, it was, you know, as I said, they were all bigger, they're smaller families. Right? 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. Again, I'm not at the same university. I was at Sichuan University. It's 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 have no students from the countryside. More than 90% of them are only children. So almost nobody has siblings. And actually, I would survey those students that I was teaching, and I learned that if I asked them, do you have any siblings? I had to make it very clear that I'm talking about brothers and sisters, because often they would include their cousins as siblings because they call their cousin brother or sister, because that's kind of the, that's become the substitute because for their generation, it's very unusual to have another family, you know, another sibling. So, yeah, so those were huge changes. Almost all of them were middle class or higher. You know, the way they dress, of course, was totally different.
- [44:11]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
Would they call themselves middle class? Because earlier when you were saying that, you know, that entrepreneur that succeeded with walkie talkies, he might not call himself 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, that we says the middle class, because that's a favorite ideal. And perhaps in China, as everybody somehow still says, I'm working class because in some remnant of Marxist ideology, that's preferable. You think that actually the self conception has changed?
- [44:36]
Peter Hessler
Yeah. So those young people, I did survey them and they would mostly say that they're middle class, you know, they would recognize them as. Recognize themselves as such. Yeah, so. So those things are, you know, unbelievable changes. A lot of the attitudes were changed. Like, you know, at one point 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 the questions I asked at one point is, should gay marriage be legal in China? Which has never really been discussed publicly. I mean, it's legal in Taiwan, but in the mainland of China, it's not like the parties ever propose this. It's pretty sensitive topic. I thought it was probably too sensitive for 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. Like all these kids had that view. And around the same time, I asked my fooling students from the 90s the same question, should gay marriage be legal in China? And pretty much the exact opposite. 80% said no. Right. So you could see these huge differences in opinions. Like that was probably one of the biggest. And then my students often said, yeah, 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. I mean, I was really shocked that they were not spoiled. You know, 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. Like they were just as hard working, just as determined and, you know, not. They didn't complain, you know, like, which reminded me of the 90s. So that. That was. That really impressed me, you know, that they were like that. But there's all kinds of other things. Like I. In the book I mentioned, actually, when I wrote my first book about living in the Peace Corps in 1996, 1998, in that small town, I often talked about how the students seem very young. Like, they seem kind of childlike coming from the countryside. They're in the city. It's a little bit like the deer in the headlights, a little overwhelmed. And you always had to remind yourself, like, these are not children. You know, these. These guys have been through a lot of stuff that you don't know, that you have not experienced. It's just the way that they kind of present themselves and they're adjusting to this new world. I had the exact opposite impression of those students in 2019-2021. The newer cohort, they felt very old to me in a way. Like, they were kind of. I wouldn't say cynical, because that's a negative word, but they were very. They understood how the system worked. They were realistic.
- [46:47]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
They were worldly wise or something like that.
- [46:49]
Peter Hessler
They were worldly, yeah. And they understood their limits. You know, they didn't. They weren't sort of idealistic, like, we're going to change the world. They're just like, I got to deal with the system. That was a huge difference. And I think it sort of reflects just how deeply this system is, you know, is built in China and also just kind of how stable it's basically been. So for the last 20, 25 years, there have not been these kind of radical political changes that used to be part of the Chinese political landscape. And so this. 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. How do you not get in trouble? They were learning those things from a very young age. They often wrote about it and lessons their parents would give them. Yeah, don't push that. You know, don't stay away from that topic or, you know, so they were. They were worldly and savvy about the Chinese system and very aware of their limitations and, you know, in some ways, but both cohorts, I found as a teacher to be extremely likable. Like, I wasn't sure about going back. Like, 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. Like, I. I'm sympathetic with their perspective. Like, 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, you know, 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.
- [48:19]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
So you were teaching mainly or partially a nonfiction writing class. And so a lot of these students got a chance to choose research projects of themselves and write ambitious narrative nonfiction story. What kind of stories were they drawn to? What are some of the stories they wrote? And what kind of window does that give us both into them and their interests and into the country that they were reporting on?
- [48:42]
Peter Hessler
Yeah, no, that was fascinating. So I had never done that when I taught in the 90s. And you really couldn't have asked the students to go off campus. The college loved to control them. But I decided to try that in 2019, and it worked out great. And part of the fact that these students were hardworking meant that they were very good reporters. They would go out and they were willing to sit in a place for hours and hours and go back and talk to people, and they did great work. But it was really fascinating to see the things that they. That they chose. Like, one of the students, actually, when we did Profile, she's like, I want to profile my VPN dealer. You know, she's like, I've been paying money for this vpn, this virtual private network, to get around the firewall. I pay him every. You know, every year. I'm curious who this guy is. And the guy agreed to talk with her, and she. That was really fascinating for me to read. You know, who sets us up. And he's like, yeah, I was. He was a graduate student. He'd been in Europe and studying, and when he came back to China, he was kind of annoyed at how. At the firewall. So he started to look into VPNs and what he should do. And then he realized it's so easy to set this thing up. I should just go into business doing this. And so he went into the business doing it.
- [49:42]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
Well, which is funny because it's actually a similar origin story to the walkie talkie guy. You know, I mean, very different business, you know, sort of different cultural valence, but it's just, you stumble into a market opportunity, you realize, hey, I can do this. And people want this.
- [49:56]
Peter Hessler
Yeah. And she asked him, well, how much does it cost to do this? He's like, I don't really want to tell you because you're not going to want to pay me anymore. Because it was so easy, you know, like, it. It was just like free money, basically. So there were all these fascinating projects that they did. They were very good at, and they. They definitely had an eye toward the things that were corrupt or, you know, the things that were. That were off. Right.
- [50:15]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
And.
- [50:15]
Peter Hessler
But they also went to interest like. Like one student spent time with a, you know, with a group at a Catholic church, and it was fascinating to see that too, because this Catholic church was like doing. They were on this retreat and they were basically like doing faith healing, like things that you're not supposed to do in China. Really intense and.
- [50:31]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
Or I believe in the Catholic Church, but that's besides the point.
- [50:34]
Peter Hessler
I mean, you can be Catholic in China, but, you know, it's. It's the Chinese Catholic Church. It's not the, you know, not the same as the one in Rome, but yeah, you know, so. So students research things like this. It was really. It was really, really amazing. And I thought it was good for them. I. One of my goals was I want them to see their. Their own society. And it did give them a different. Different perspective, I think. But it certainly helped me understand things.
- [50:53]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
How has their perspective on opportunity changed and I guess how content are they likely to be in. In their lives? I mean, 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. They did not grow up with Chilblain's. You know, they did not have to restrict themselves to one meal a day. They likely got much better educational opportunities, as you're saying. Perhaps they had a similar percentage of ability. Right. I mean, but they presumably now are getting both a longer college education, are able to go into graduate school, might be able to, if they choose, go on to the United States or Europe for their education. So at one level, it's obvious that their lives. But 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, since at this point they're competing with all these other people who also had these educational opportunities, who are also competing with them in the job market, the kind of sense of freedom that their 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.
- [52:10]
Peter Hessler
Yeah, I think, I mean the level of competition, there's no comparison, you know, even, you know, you mentioned the gal call which comes up throughout this book, right. And my daughters, by the time they were in fourth grade, their teachers were telling them what their gal call scores would need to be if they're going to go to Peking University or Fudan or, you know, it's just, it's a huge part of life there. It's amazing. But the first book I wrote about teaching in the Peace Corps, I never mentioned that test. It didn't come up in conversation like the students occasionally mentioned. Yeah, I was so happy when I tested in a school, but it was not something. They were done with it and it was in the past and they didn't write about it anymore. They didn't talk about it. I never heard a score. I was very unaware of that test when I was a young teacher there. And it's totally, it was totally different. 2019-21. My guys, my students, they wrote about it all the time. They clearly, I mean, one kid had been hospitalized for heart related problems while studying for the damn thing, you know, like they, they had been through serious trau in this and it was a huge part of their mindset and they, and so I knew all this, like I knew how many points you needed to get into this department and that department that, you know, amazing amounts of detail. My daughters were hearing this in the fourth grade already. So that the level of competition, 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. Like those were very clear cut goals. But for this younger generation, what's the goal? Right? It's hard, I think, I don't know if I can really, I can't really define that. And they can't either. I mean, I asked them to and it's. You get a huge range of responses and some of them, like, you know, I'm not sure, I'm trying to figure this out, you know, what is it that I want? So I think actually it's much harder for them to be honest. Even though they, they have better, much better educations, much better material circumstances. I, I feel like their challenge is so much greater than that earlier generation. The earlier generation had huge challenges. I mean, it's not, it's not a small thing to leave poverty, but they had the environment to do it, right? The opportunity was there. You could find your pathway. And today's young Chinese, it's very different. So I think they're trying to figure out what they want. And you can see this. I could, you know, because I've surveyed them as well. One of the surveys, I asked them a couple of years ago was, do you want to have children eventually? You know, these are people and they're like 23, 24 years old. And the majority of respondents said no. And especially the women. Of the women, there were 25 women who responded and 19 out of 25 did not want children. 76%. And you can see this. And you know, 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 a decreased interest in starting a family. I mean, that is a deep type of pessimism. Right. So it's a very different moment from that last generation.
- [54:51]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
How do you think that's going to affect, I guess, people's contentment with a society over time? One thing that I was struck at when I was visiting China was the urban landscape. Even in I was in Shanghai, which is obviously what's called a first tier city in Chinese parlance, and you know, obviously one of the most affluent places in the country. You know, 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 on the sort of eastern bloc that provided amenities to the residents that if you grew up in a village with chilblains and 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 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. And so 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, farmers, 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 an 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 with Gaoko. 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?
- [57:07]
Peter Hessler
Yeah, no, I mean, I think when you talked about the competition and the, and the pressure, that's the key thing. So in some ways I think the urban landscape, the things, their surroundings, that doesn't bother them as much. And actually when you talk to Chinese middle age and younger, what are the things that attract you about, you know what 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. Like if it is like, for example, ordering things online in China is so much easier than it is in the US or I think in pretty much any parts of the world. Services are really at a very high level and so things work very well. And people who live overseas, when I talk to, you know, my, I have a lot of students who've gone to the us that's often something they talk about. So much less convenient here. The 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's not even Shanghai, but you know, even in a third or fourth tier city, you know, it's so much easier to get things done.
- [58:04]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
Just a side note on this. So from my brief states 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 the 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. I mean, you know, when you're saying that your students, through their education, even though many of them are teachers, which is not the most lucrative job in China anymore than anywhere else now earn, what was it in 28, $30,000 a year on average, something like that. That is about three times GDP per capita in China still today. And part of the reason why everything is convenient is that you can call a car and you can have food delivered to you and so on all day long. If you are a middle class Chinese. Well, because there's a lot of people who are a lot poorer who are eking out an existence 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 and to what extent is it actually just a society that is much more unequal than the United States, let alone Europe?
- [59:24]
Peter Hessler
Yeah, I know it is partly that, but I think the other difference is that that competitiveness runs throughout the society. So even at those lower levels, lower levels of education, low levels of income, people feel the same intense pressure, the same competitive drive. It's different from the U.S. like in the U.S. you know, when I talk about the academic pressure, the Chinese feel like I went to an Ivy League school in the US 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 this competitiveness to stay where you are, but you go down to people that are just average Americans. Like my kids go to a public school here in Colorado. It doesn't function like that. Like we're not, 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. Like one of my, one of the fascinating profiles that one of my students is she went to kind of a, it was like a fourth tier Chinese city and kind of a bad high school and looked at a student who's just kind of middling student and how that student was preparing for the gaokao. And it was really amazing because that student didn't know how to study, wasn't getting good, she didn't get the good private tutorials, but she was every day at her desk, often studying inefficiently, but she was doing what she could. And that to me was really striking because the equivalent student in the US wouldn't be doing anything, you know, like they would be, maybe they're maybe on a sports team, maybe they're just on their phones all the time.
- [60:50]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
And you can have mixed feelings about that, because on the one hand, isn't it great that China knows how to motivate a huge percentage of its population to maximize their skills and to get as far as they can, and that's going to be a huge boon. On the other hand, it feels like that's an unsustainable deal. It's one thing to say, all right, look, you're not going to have an exceptional career, you're not going to be at the top of society, but you also get to enjoy your life. It's another thing. I mean, of course, the second difference, and that 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, 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 where you're not going to make exceptional salary, but, you know, in an area of a country that's not super expensive, you have a nice house and, and you have a good life, that's a sustainable deal. If you're that student who sounds like it makes for a touching profile, is going in, working your ass off every day to succeed. But if all that results in life is not just a mediocre job in the literal sense of being somewhat towards the middle of society, but also a job in which actually your material circumstances are much more circumscribed than they might be in the United States, that might. I'm not talking about. I'm not saying that these people are going to stage a revolution or something. The point is not that this leads to some kind of political upheaval, but it might lead to quite an unhappy society, as perhaps South Korea is an unhappy society.
- [62:47]
Peter Hessler
Right?
- [62:47]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
A society that you might say on some of those things, perhaps is one possible scenario for China's future.
- [62:54]
Peter Hessler
And that's a good point, because South Korea is similar. It's coming from education, some of it. In some ways, this is great, the intensely competitive education system. But you have this competition that goes. It ends up going throughout society. To give another example, like you talk about even at the lower levels. Like, I, you know, I bought a car when I was in Chengdu in 2020, and I would get the car, take it in for an oil change. And so you take in the car for the oil change. You drop it off. I go off to get lunch while the, While they're changing the oil. And almost immediately, I start to get WeChat messages, which are like updates on what the guy's doing with the oil change. Like, he's got a little. And he's sending a picture of, like, the bottle of oil that's being poured in the air that's being put in a tire. Like, they're updating at every stage. This is what they have to do. And in the. I record it because I thought it was so crazy. In 43 minutes, I got 21 messages about my oil change. It included eight photographs and two videos, right? And it's like, do I need this? Like this? But this. Imagine this person has been trained, like, he's got to do this while he's. Not only is he doing the oil change, but he's got to document it for the customer. And this is really true in China. Like, you look at the guy who's cleaning your, you know, the hallways of your apartment building and how hard that person is working is like the guy, you know, who's working at Alibaba as an executive. All it seems, you know, like. So, yeah, I often. That's one of the things I really wonder about is like, is this sustainable? I mean, that the place where the oil change that did shut down, actually that. That car dealership no longer exists. So you wonder, you know, how, you know, but also just at the mental health level, are people built to do this longer term? But I, you know, again, I don't think we have models for it. Like, we, you know, we're following this forward. We can't compare it to anything we've really seen in the past.
- [64:37]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
This reminds me a little bit of your description of your daughter's schooling. So you have twin girls who you enrolled in state elementary school in Chengdu. And you describe, you know, the number of messages on the parents, WeChat, you know, about every piece of minutiae of a school day, but never a complaint about the teacher. What was your daughter's experience in this? You know, I think very good school in a big urban era, but in some ways a typical Chinese school. And what was your experience of parenting children in that school?
- [65:10]
Peter Hessler
Yeah, I mean, it was very difficult for all of us. I mean, my Daughters did not speak Chinese when we put, put them in the school. And the school had 2,000 kids and no foreigners. Right. So it was not a school that was accustomed to having outsiders. You know, the language adjustment was major, but it was really fascinating to be a part of that. It was exhausting. Like, my wife and I spent so much time because it is, they do depend a lot on the parents. The parents are expected to monitor the homework. You know, the kids I taught in the 1990s, every one of the girl students I taught became a full time teacher. Nobody took time off when they had kids. Right. 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 their, in my daughter's class. And that, that had never happened. I. 20 years ago, women didn't do that. And that was because they, yeah, because they had enough money. You know, like the families were, you know, the father's got a good job, the mother's got a good job. Okay, you're, you're going to take 10 years off and you're going to be just focused on the alcohol basis. So that was very dispiriting because I was really struck by 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? And 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 daughter's okay, third grade at every semester they have a final examination. For English, I mean, I mean, for Chinese it's 100 minutes. For math, it's 90 minutes. For science, it's 90 minutes. For, you know, for, for English, it's 90 minutes. So you've got, you know, third graders who are taking an exam for an hour and a half and they're learning to focus. You know, like I, in my book, I, you know, I'm a distance runner and I compare it to like endurance training. You could see, like they are teaching these kids how to. And I can see with my daughters, like, they come back here, like 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, you know, kind of sobering, right? Because this intense, you know 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.
- [67:26]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. If you want to hear the rest of the conversation in which Peter and I talk about what America can learn from China, whether there's something in the reverence for learning, in the seriousness of hard work that we should emulate, or whether that might actually be the wrong thing, the wrong lesson to take from China's rise. If you want to talk about the fading links between the two countries and why it is a problem that more Americans now likely study in the city of Florence than in the country of China, please become a paying subscriber. Please go to yashamonk.substack.com and get access to the ad free version of this podcast feed that gives you all bonus materials and all bonus episodes and it would also help us to sustain and expand this podcast. Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be liked. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter, and finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to Good Fight Pod. And
- [68:48]
Podcast Host or Co-host
that's good.
- [68:48]
Podcast Host (possibly Yasha Monk)
Fightpodmail.com
- [68:53]
Peter Hessler
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.