In 1996, when Peter Hessler came to teach at a small university in Sichuan, 90% of his students came from rural areas. Hessler was 1.75 meters tall, about half a head taller than them. They usually had only one set of clothes: some were a blue suit, and some were fake Chicago Bulls jerseys. A student told him a few years later that he could only afford one meal a day.

In 2019, He Wei returned to China to teach at Sichuan University Pittsburgh College. This time, all the students in his non-fiction writing class were from cities, and some girls in the class were even taller than him. Several students wore replica Jordan shoes worth one or two thousand yuan.

His observations offer a glimpse into how China has changed in a generation. The country’s population has gone from 70 percent farmers to two-thirds city dwellers. Its per capita economic output has increased 20-fold, according to the World Bank. A 2020 study in the medical journal The Lancet reported that among 200 countries, China had the highest increase in height for boys and the third highest increase in height for girls from 1985 to 2019.

Yet the political system that defines society has not changed at all, Hessler writes in his new book, Other Rivers: A Chinese Education.

“I still teach next door to the Marxist college, and the university still holds the same old communist rallies,” he wrote. “How is it possible that a country has undergone so much change socially, economically, and educationally, while politics has stagnated or even regressed?”

This question also troubles many Chinese, foreign policy makers, scholars and journalists, including myself.

In Other Rivers, Hessler calls his students of the mid-1990s the “Reform Generation.” They believed in competition, and their efforts were largely rewarded. He calls his students of the 2020s the “Xi Jinping Generation.” After Xi Jinping came to power, he tightened control over Chinese society across the board. This generation of students is willing to study hard, just like their seniors, but has few illusions about the system or their own future.

The “Xi Jinping generation” seeks stability. This generation is more dissatisfied with the government, but is unwilling to rebel. He Wei asked students to read George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. The two characters they identified most with were the donkey, who was skeptical of the new farm but did not express his thoughts, and the hardworking but loyal horse.

In Other Rivers, He Wei does not give a clear answer to his question. But he believes that in his nearly three decades of writing about China, it is more necessary than ever to fundamentally change China’s political system. He said that young people are increasingly dissatisfied, but they are not ready to try to initiate change. They know the price of rebelling against the system, and they also know the benefits of obedience – even if the rewards are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain.

In addition to two teaching stints in China’s southwestern province of Sichuan, Hessler was a Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker in the first decade of this century. He has written five books about China, three of which have been translated into Chinese. Because of its criticism of the Chinese government, “Other Rivers” is unlikely to be published in China, and Hessler said his previous books would not be published in China today.

Despite this, Other Rivers remains one of the most anticipated new books in China.

Hessler is something of a celebrity in China, known for his sharp observations and empathetic portrayals of ordinary Chinese people, who he depicts as hardworking, resilient, pragmatic and largely apolitical. Chinese readers use the word “compassion” to describe his work. His work “transcends the binary of yes or no, like or dislike,” one prominent Chinese writer wrote of his debut novel, River Town, published in 2001, about his time as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in a small Chinese city.

But in an increasingly polarized world, Hessler and his writings have been criticized by many in China and abroad. Some think he is too political, while others think he always avoids politics, and he has been labeled as “pro-China” or “anti-China”.

Some radical nationalists, known in China as “little pinks,” said his article on the COVID-19 pandemic for the March 2020 issue of The New Yorker contained a knee-jerk criticism. Five months later, when he published another report discussing China’s effective control of the pandemic, some Western journalists and China experts again believed he was speaking for the Chinese government.

In 2021, because the school did not renew his contract, He Wei and his family moved back to the United States. He did not experience the brutal “zero-COVID” policy implemented by the Chinese government in 2022: frequent testing, blockades, quarantines, food shortages, and hospital refusal to treat patients.

Late last month, he responded to the criticism in a post on the China News Service website. He said he had been unfairly judged, especially by China experts who had left China. He was one of the few journalists who remained in China after many American journalists were expelled in March 2020. He told me in an interview on my podcast last month that he felt like he was still on the court and that “the other players had become sports commentators, nitpicking.”

Some of Mr. Hessler’s critics in China say his detailed portrayals of ordinary people in “River Town” and other early works captured the pulse of the era, when China was more open and people were struggling to adapt to rapid change. But in the era of Mr. Xi, they say, they wish he would talk more directly about politics, which is so closely tied to almost everyone in China today.

Hessler doesn’t see his role that way. As a writer trained in fiction, he told me, he’s more interested in people and places than events. “Politics is part of it,” he said. “But I almost never start with a question.”

I wonder whether Other Rivers would have been presented differently if he had stayed in China until the winter of 2022, when protesters took to the streets in cities across China, including Chengdu, where he once lived, demanding that the government end its “zero-COVID” policies. Some angry demonstrators called for Xi Jinping to step down.

In Other Rivers, Hessler writes that through emails and various surveys he kept in touch with his young students, who were angry about the lockdown and often said it had fundamentally changed their views.

One young man wrote to him from Europe: “Most importantly, this has changed my view on ‘resistance’ and ‘demonstration’. I think Chinese people should fight for their rights more through demonstrations, even though demonstrations are equated with ‘rebellion’ in China.”

In Other Rivers, Hessler writes that the young students he had previously taught were more concerned with personal issues, such as job opportunities, than with politics or climate change.

“You often hear a lot of people say: ‘We don’t need democracy. We just need a little more space, less pressure.’ But maybe that’s not the case,” he told me. “Once you break that and you don’t know what’s going to happen next, or when it’s going to happen, then you create instability.”