Let me begin with a banal observation: China is a large and complex country with good and bad aspects. Yet somehow it seems difficult to convey this message in view of the steady drumbeat of negative news about the country in Anglophone media outlets. 

A few years ago, a leading American journalist with extensive experience in China suggested an effective way to engage with the Anglophone reading public. Even if they have nothing to do with the subject matter, the author should start by mentioning China’s bad parts: repression in Xinjiang and Tibet, increased censorship and the lack of a succession plan at the top. They should also remind the reader about the most shameful and tragic episodes of China’s recent past: the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward, the chaos and violence of the Cultural Revolution, the killings on 4 June 1989 in Beijing. Make the reader think you share their political intuitions and let them know that you’re not an apologist for the regime. Then you say what you really want to say.

Peter Hessler’s new book follows this script almost to the letter. Within the first five pages, we are told about worsening censorship, a system in which Xi could be leader for life, the limitation of political freedoms in Hong Kong and ‘a policy of forced internment camps for more than a million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities’. Then we get the obligatory references to the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and ‘the massacre around Tiananmen Square’ in 1989.

So far, so formulaic. The substance of the book, however, is fascinating. Hessler, an American journalist who has lived in China on and off over the last three decades, is a master storyteller. He conveys the humanity and humour of everyday life in China, all the while embedding the stories he tells in the wider social and political ecosystem. The secret of his success is accessible writing informed by extensive experience of living in some of China’s less well-known regions. Hessler has deep sympathy and curiosity about the lives of the people he encounters and his own views lie largely in the background.

The first part of the book details his teaching experience at Sichuan University in Chengdu. In 2019, Hessler began a full-time job as a teacher of journalism, and he tells moving stories about his students. The main message, which he supports with references to empirical studies in the endnotes, is that students today tend to be cold-eyed ‘old souls’ compared to the optimistic and somewhat naive students he taught more than two decades ago as a Peace Corps volunteer. But today’s students are not blind conformists. By means of extensive quotes from his students’ letters, emails and essays, he shows their subtle ways of criticising the social and political system.

Hessler includes a charming account of his twin daughters’ educational experience in an otherwise all-Chinese experimental primary school in Chengdu. He illustrates the creative methods of teaching mathematics through somewhat baffling maths problems. Students are taught to memorise dozens of classical poems, but they also riff on these for the purposes of amusement. As a parent who enrolled a son in a similar school in Beijing, I can attest that Hessler’s account rings true.

Hessler didn’t plan to write about his recent experiences in China, but Covid-19 changed that. As one of the few Western journalists who stayed in China during the first two years of the pandemic, he knew that he had a unique perspective on a world-shattering event. Part two of the book is set in Covid times.

Westerners tend to think of China’s experience of the pandemic as a cover-up at the start and a disastrous exit at the end. But Hessler shows that the middle part – which lasted almost two years – was characterised by policies that allowed people in China to lead semi-normal lives without fear of catching the disease. My own experience of those two years was similarly positive: I travelled extensively in China just as the virus was spiralling out of control elsewhere. If the rest of the world had followed China’s approach, the virus could have been contained before it became more contagious and impossible to put down.

Hessler gets perhaps closer to the ‘real’ China than any foreigner writing about the country today. With an eye for telling details that shed light on larger social and political trends, he both informs and amuses the reader. Ironically, or perhaps predictably, he mentions being attacked by both ‘sides’. Leftists in China accused him of being an ‘American fascist’ on social media. Those hostile to the Chinese government accused him of being too sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Most egregiously, the anti-communist Sinologist Geremie Barmé penned online an essay accusing Hessler of being insufficiently critical of the CCP and alleging that he was doing ‘unaccredited reporting, something that, strictly speaking, is illegal in China’. This piece, Hessler claims, ‘may have put subtle pressure’ on the university where he was teaching. As it turned out, the university elected not to renew Hessler’s contract. His departure is a great loss for China and for those who want to learn about the country.

As much as I admired Hessler’s book, I need to express two reservations. First, he seems a bit too quick on occasion to draw generalities from anecdotes. He says that in China ‘abuse rolls off the backs of kids like water from a duck’. This would come as a surprise to the increasing number of Chinese undergoing therapy to deal with childhood trauma caused by abusive parents and teachers. Elsewhere, he writes of a perfunctory graduation ceremony, ‘this was also the Chinese way: the point was the process, not the achievement, and people weren’t inclined to ceremony.’ As someone who survived many graduation ceremonies heavy on ritual that lasted more than three hours, I can say that his experiences were unusual. If Hessler had confined his generalisations to laid-back Chengdu, he might have been on safer ground.

Second, Hessler could be more open about his own moral and political commitments. He has a Daoist-style soft spot for outliers and eccentrics and hardly any interest in public officials and influential intellectuals. His Daoist sensibilities may explain why he was attracted to Chengdu, a city that prides itself on its Daoist heritage. Chengdu, in other words, is not very representative of China as a whole. Had Hessler spent several years in, say, Shandong province, the home of Confucian culture, he would have written a different book.

Hessler’s Daoist sensibilities lead to some distortions when he discusses what may be termed the dominant yang side of China. He presents a crude ‘democracy–authoritarian’ dichotomy and references to ‘the Party’ abound, as though an organisation with nearly 100 million members were a monolithic and homogenous entity (I tend to see it as a bafflingly complex bureaucracy with different factions and tendencies). He says that ‘today’s students … seemed less inclined to join the Party’ than those he encountered twenty-five years ago. This is the opposite of my own experiences. I served as dean of the school of political science and public administration at Shandong University and found that there was intense competition among high-performing students to become CCP members.

So, yes, please read Hessler’s book if you want to learn about China’s education system, everyday life during the Covid pandemic and the marginalised yin side of China. But for a fuller picture of the ‘real’ China, we need reports of China’s ‘other rivers’ as well. Assuming, of course, that writers have the freedom to report what they experience in China.