Book review: Some Chinese university students last year marked their graduations not by posing with their degree certificates but by lying face down, zombie-style, on college steps and lawns. The phenomenon, posted across Chinese social media, embodied the idea of “lying flat”, used by the generation born after 2000 to express the widespread feeling that they won’t be able to get ahead so why even try?
How did China change, in a generation, from a country where kids born in the boondocks could grow up to be big-city slickers to one where 20-somethings feel so dejected about their prospects they are literally lying down?
Fortunately for us, esteemed New Yorker journalist Peter Hessler has a new book to tackle that question. And with it, he poses a bigger and even more perplexing question: how can China have gone through such enormous economic and social change but remained politically stagnant? Or worse: regressed?
Hessler moved to Fuling, a town in southwestern China where the Wu and Yangtze rivers meet, in 1996 to teach at a teachers’ college. In his first memoir, River Town, he describes how most students were the first from their extended families to attend university and in many cases their parents were illiterate.
In 2019, he returned to China as a teacher, this time to Sichuan University in Chengdu, also in the southwest and also on the banks of a river, the Fu. There, he taught a nonfiction class, with texts including George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which the increasingly dystopian system didn’t seem to mind.
At the same time, Hessler and his wife put their daughters into third grade, where the entire family got an education in Chinese ways of schooling. He recounts it all in beautiful prose in Other Rivers.
Hessler characterises his Fuling students as being part of the “Reform Generation”. They were toddlers when Deng Xiaoping opened up the economy in 1978, bringing about tremendous social changes. More than a quarter of a billion rural Chinese have since moved to the cities and even more – almost 800 million – lifted themselves out of poverty.
In Fuling in 1996, many students had only one set of clothes and some ate only one meal a day. Many of his students found wealth and status by going into business, from opening cellphone stores to retrofitting old buildings with elevators.
“They were in many ways a blessed generation. The Reform years had taught them how to be pragmatic, resourceful and fearless, and even the ones who had been dealt a difficult hand seemed to make the best of the situation,” Hessler writes.
Compare them to the students he encounters in 2019, whom he calls “Generation Xi” because they grew up entirely under the authority of Xi Jinping, who became China’s top leader in 2013.
At Sichuan, Hessler was teaching kids in US$450 sneakers. The parking lot under the university’s College of Marxism contained a BMW and five Mercedes. Yet for all the social and economic change, he wondered, how had the political environment not become more open, too?
Under Xi, China has become steadily more restrictive and repressive. Public servants must study “Xi Jinping Thought”, civil society has been greatly diminished, and China has established an entirely separate and heavily censored internet.
This restricted climate is palpable to Hessler, even as a university teacher. There were cameras in every classroom, potentially recording his every word. Positively Orwellian. But who needs cameras when students reported professors for perceived political transgressions?
Yet most young Chinese Hessler encountered on his return to China were not particularly nationalistic or worried about state control. “The students feared one another – they worried about all the other talented young people who were also striving for grades and jobs,” he writes.
Indeed, life has become less clear cut. For the Reform Generation, the path was obvious, if formidable: get educated, move to the city, escape poverty.
Generation Xi still believe in education but feel a sense of hopelessness, especially in the economic malaise that has lingered after the Covid pandemic. The competition is too great, the prospect of the hamster wheel too depressing. May as well lie flat.
Today, the problem is much more fundamental, Hessler writes – something about the Chinese system needs to change.
Yet his students, old and new, are hardly burning with desire for change. When he asked his former students in 2017 if China should become a multiparty democracy, 73% said no.
“We have seen America with multiparty, but you have elected the worst president in human’s history,” one respondent wrote in the first year of Donald Trump’s tenure.
This bigger question about the lack of political change is one that continues to confound. There are no easy answers, but Hessler’s great gift is in bringing humanity to coverage of a country that is increasingly viewed only as an economic bully and military aggressor.
This is in large part Xi’s doing. There are far fewer foreign correspondents allowed in the country now – Hessler’s visa was not renewed after he resumed writing for the New Yorker during Covid – but through his longstanding relationships and clear affection for his students, he paints a portrait of two generations that is nuanced and complicated. Some of them are funny, others cynical. Some ambitious hustlers, others dreamers. They are three-dimensional humans, all just trying to get by. That is a view of China we don’t get to see as often any more, making us all the worse off as we try to understand a country that is a part of our everyday life.
Other Rivers: A Chinese Education, by Peter Hessler (Allen & Unwin, $39.99). is out now.
Anna Fifield is the Asia-Pacific editor and a former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post.
