My Chinese censor is Zhang Jiren, an editor at the Shanghai Translation Publishing House, and last September he accompanied me on a publicity tour. It was the first time I’d gone on a book tour with my censor. When I rode the high-speed train from Shanghai to Beijing, Zhang sat beside me; at the hotel in Beijing, he stayed on the same floor. He sat in on my interviews with the Chinese media. He had even prepared the tour schedule on a spreadsheet, which was color-coded to represent five types of commitments, with days that lasted as long as thirteen hours. Other authors had warned me about such schedules, so before the tour I sent Zhang a request for more free time. His response was prompt: “In my experience, the tours in China are always tough and exhausting. Hope you understand it.”
And that was all—no adjustment, no apology. In China, there’s a tendency toward brutal honesty, and even the censored media may tell you things you don’t want to hear. During my tour, one major Shanghai newspaper, Wenhui Daily, ran a six-thousand-word profile that began with the sentence “Peter Hessler is now forty-five years old, and he’s gotten a lot fatter, and he has wrinkles around the corners of his eyes.” In Beijing, a television host finished his interview, shut off the camera, and said, “To be honest, I liked your wife’s book better than yours.”
There are a couple of things that I should clarify. The first is that I weigh a hundred and fifty pounds. The second is that it’s not really fair to describe Zhang Jiren as a censor. It’s true that he makes my books politically acceptable to the Chinese authorities, but censorship is only one of his duties. Zhang directs the nonfiction division at Shanghai Translation, where he also has to find translators, edit manuscripts, gauge political risks, and handle publicity. He’s thirty-seven years old but looks younger, a thin man with buzz-cut hair and owlish glasses. His background is in philosophy, and he wrote a master’s thesis on Herbert Marcuse, the neo-Marxist thinker. Once, Zhang told me that he had studied Marcuse because his ideas are “a powerful tool for Chinese to resist the long-term propaganda campaigns.”
On the tour, Zhang was omnipresent, not because he wanted to monitor me but because he was responsible for virtually everything that happened. And yet his presence was quiet: usually, he was off to the side, listening and observing but saying little. He always wore sneakers, an old T-shirt, and calf-length trousers, and this casual outfit, during thirteen-hour days, sometimes made me feel like I was being given a tour of Purgatory by a neo-Marxist grad student. But I appreciated the guidance. Recently, there have been a number of articles in the foreign press about Chinese censorship, with the tone highly critical of American authors who accept changes to their manuscripts in order to publish in mainland China. The articles tend to take a narrowly Western perspective: they rarely examine how such books are read by Chinese, and editors like Zhang are portrayed crudely, as Communist Party hacks. This was one reason I went on the tour—I figured that the best way to understand censorship is to spend a week with your censor.
Since Xi Jinping became President, in 2013, China has engaged in an increasingly repressive political crackdown. The authorities have also become more antagonistic toward the foreign press; it’s now harder for journalists to renew their visas, and many report being hassled by local authorities while on research trips. And yet the reading public has begun to discover nonfiction books about China by foreigners. More than any other editor, Zhang has tapped into this trend—all but one of his six best-selling titles in the past few years have been foreign books about China. In Zhang’s opinion, this reflects the new worldliness of readers, which he believes says more about the country’s long-term direction than the censorship or the propaganda does. “The Party turns left this year, and maybe it turns right this year,” Zhang wrote to me in 2014. “In my opinion, the only certain thing is that Chinese people are much more individualized and open-minded.”
In 1998, when I wrote “River Town,” my first book, it was inconceivable that a foreigner’s portrait of contemporary China would be published there, for reasons both political and commercial. There wasn’t much of a market for books about China in the United States, either. I had just spent two years as a Peace Corps teacher at a college in Fuling, a small, remote city on the Yangtze River, and I finished the first draft without a contract. On the opening page, I wrote, “There was no railroad in Fuling. It had always been a poor part of Sichuan Province and the roads were bad. To go anywhere you took the boat, but mostly you didn’t go anywhere.” The word “poor” appeared thirty-six times in the book; I used “dirty” more than two dozen times. I never thought seriously about such details until a publisher accepted the manuscript.
After that, I sent a draft to two friends from Fuling: Emily Yang, one of my former students, who was a native of the town, and Adam Meier, another Peace Corps volunteer. Their comments were almost completely contradictory. Emily wrote, “I think no one would like Fuling city after reading your story. But I can’t complain, as everything you write about is the fact. I wish the city would be more attractive with time.” Meanwhile, Adam thought I had softened the portrayal. He was particularly concerned that I had omitted an incident that occurred near the end of our two years, when we went downtown with a video camera to record places that we wanted to remember. A crowd gathered and accused us of being journalists filming images of poverty to show Americans, which was a common charge at that time. We explained that we were teachers, but the crowd turned violent, kicking and hitting us until we ran away.
This was my most disturbing experience in Fuling, and I left it out of the first draft. One of the book’s main themes was the slow, sometimes painful way in which we had been accepted by locals, and I worried about undermining this message with a description of the mob in the final chapter. But, after discussing it with Adam, I decided that the scene was necessary. And this set the tone for my editing: I corrected details that were wrong, but I didn’t touch anything that felt honest or raw. I left the word “poor” on page 1 and everywhere else that it appeared. I decided, effectively, that I would ignore a certain emotional side of the likely Chinese response.
I realized that I might not be welcome in Fuling after the book appeared. At the end of 2000, about a month before publication, I made a final trip to visit friends. I attended the wedding of one of my favorite former students, and then I gave a talk at a remote middle school where another former student was teaching. Shortly after I began my lecture, policemen arrived from Chongqing, the regional capital. They announced that the event was cancelled and escorted me off the stage. I returned to Beijing, and the following week almost everybody I had visited in Fuling was interrogated. The police detained the bride and groom to ask about our friendship, and another student telephoned me, sounding confused. “Is it possible for the police to listen to what you say on the telephone?” he asked. “They knew all the things that you and I have been talking about recently.”
After “River Town” came out in English, the government issued a command to the college in Fuling: Translate this book immediately. The project was assigned to Li Xueshun, a Communist Party member who was a teacher and a low-level administrator in the English department. He was the same age as me and during my first few weeks in the Peace Corps had seemed interested in friendship, inviting Adam and me to his home for lunch. But after that he became strangely evasive, and later I learned that older cadres had warned him against associating with the Americans. I described him in the book’s opening pages: “He had the best spoken English in the college, but he was an uneasy young man in a new position of authority.”
Li translated that sentence himself, along with the rest of the first two chapters. He served as editor for the book, with each of my former colleagues responsible for translating a section or two. The project was secret; nobody got in touch with me about it. The translators were never told which level of government had issued the command, or where the book would be sent. None of them ever saw a finished copy.
A few years after “River Town” appeared, Chinese publishers began to approach me about the possibility of a mainland edition. They acknowledged, though, that major changes would have to be made for political reasons, so I declined. I went on to write “Oracle Bones” and “Country Driving,” completing a trilogy about China, and, as time passed, I became less comfortable with the fact that my books weren’t available in the communities where I had lived and done research. Friends in Fuling sometimes complained that they had heard about a version available only to cadres, and parts of other books were posted online, in unapproved translations that were often hasty or inaccurate.
In 2010, Zhang Jiren contacted me on behalf of Shanghai Translation, and said that the political climate was right to publish “Country Driving,” a book that focussed on development in rural regions. In China, restrictions on publishing tend to ebb and flow, and 2010 was relatively quiet: Hu Jintao had been President for seven years, and the next transition was a couple of years away. I signed a contract, figuring that the window of opportunity might close. The initial print run was small, because the publisher believed that there would be limited interest in a foreigner’s book about China. But “Country Driving” became a surprise best-seller, and a year later Shanghai Translation followed up with “River Town,” which quickly sold more copies than it had in more than a decade in America.
The issue that once concerned me—the blunt portrayal of poverty—no longer seemed sensitive, because China had changed so quickly. “With the distance of time,” Emily wrote me, in 2011, “everything in the book turns out to be charming, even the dirty, tired flowers.” On the recent book tour, reporters often mentioned nostalgia, and they said that the relentless pace of life in China made it hard to document details. “Sometimes in China you have this feeling of suffocation, and it’s hard to notice all these things,” Zhang Lijiao, a Beijing reporter for China Youth Daily, told me. “Maybe because you’re a foreigner, you can be a little separate. Maybe it’s easier to be still. We have a phrase, yi bubian ying wanbian”—you cope with change by staying the same. “If you don’t move, then you notice everything moving around you.”
These interviews were intense to the point of exhaustion. The journalists read the books and searched through old material with incredible thoroughness; one reporter showed up with an anthropology paper that I had written as an undergraduate, in 1991. There’s new interest in nonfiction writing in China, and reporters asked highly technical questions: What’s a set piece? How do you structure a longitudinal project? Toward the end of interviews, the mood often changed, with questions becoming broader and more searching. Do you believe that Chinese lack creativity? Do they need some faith or religion? What will be the outcome of the current political campaign?
One afternoon, I was interviewed by Sun Xiaoning, a forty-something reporter at the Beijing Evening News, and I remarked that, during my past few trips to China, people had seemed more reflective. “People are thinking more,” she agreed. “It’s like the slogans that you quote in your book. ‘Development is the absolute principle!’ We’ve seen that slogan for years. But now many people read it and think, Development is the absolute principle? It’s a question, not a statement. Should we be going this way?”
She laughed when I began writing in my notebook. “On my way here, I thought, He’s going to be observing me very closely,” Sun said. “What’s he going to notice? I knew you would be recording it.”
In her article, she playfully described our encounter as jiaoshou—hand-to-hand combat. I mentioned to Zhang Jiren that people seemed more confident than I remembered, and he told me that this was part of the reason foreign books have become popular. Shanghai Translation had recently published “Two Forbidden Cities,” a book by a Japanese journalist who compares the institutional cultures of the Forbidden City museums in Beijing and Taipei. The book was well received, which seemed remarkable—in the past, the only thing worse than an American writing about an undeveloped city like Fuling would have been a Japanese touching on the China-Taiwan issue.
Such openness was even more striking in the light of the over-all political climate. Reporters said that they felt more pressure now that Xi had come to power, and after interviews they sometimes wrote me to check quotes and explain things that couldn’t be published. Occasionally, we negotiated. An editor at one magazine asked to reprint an article I had written, but I told him that it had to include a key section that might be too sensitive. The magazine held an editorial meeting and decided that it wasn’t possible, so we compromised: they published a Q. and A. that referred to the article, which I posted in translation on my personal Web site. Only once were my words twisted for propaganda purposes. Long after the tour, a reporter asked me to do an interview for China Daily. The paper then removed selected material from the interview, ran it under my byline, and made it appear that I had written an op-ed in support of the government. When I complained, the editors removed the article from the English-language Web site but refused to issue a retraction. In the end, I should have known better, because China Daily is notorious for pushing the regime’s agenda, but after dozens of interviews I had grown complacent. And it was hard to gauge risks in a climate with such contradictory trends—individuals seemed more curious and open-minded, but the system had entered a phase of increased restriction.
One morning on the tour, there was a spare half hour, and I signed books in Zhang’s office. On his desk sat a manuscript about the early environmental movement in the U.S. It was one of a number of books from the sixties and seventies that Zhang is publishing. “America in the sixties was a little like China is now,” Zhang told me. “We’re just starting to have an environmental consciousness here.”
China doesn’t have a strong tradition of literary nonfiction, and Zhang, who previously handled philosophy and other academic subjects for Shanghai Translation, founded the nonfiction division, in 2010. He told me that one reason was economic—at that time, the state-owned publisher was being converted into a for-profit enterprise, and editors were pressured to sell more books. But there remains a strong academic and idealistic trend in Zhang’s titles. Last year, his seven-book list included “The Children of Sanchez,” a 1961 study of poverty and urbanization in Mexico City; “Discours de la Servitude Volontaire,” a sixteenth-century essay by a Frenchman in opposition to tyranny; and “A Companion to Marx’s Capital: Volume I.” This year’s list features “Central Problems in Social Theory,” “The Working Poor: Invisible in America,” and “The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism.”
While signing books in Zhang’s office, I chatted with him and two other young editors, and the conversation turned to translation. Somebody mentioned Sun Zhongxu, a translator who had committed suicide two weeks before. Sun had translated two novels by Richard Yates for the publisher, among other books, and his name often came up on my tour—people said that his work was brilliant. Mo Xiaomin, one of the young editors in Zhang’s office, said that Sun had suffered from depression, which she believed was connected to his translation work. “You don’t get paid well, and there isn’t much credit,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to do it.”
I mentioned that I had known more people who killed themselves in China than anywhere else. “That’s common,” Zhang said. There was a pause and he continued, “My grandfather killed himself when I was a child.” He explained that his grandfather, a high-school teacher, had been attacked for his political ideas during the Cultural Revolution. At the time, he tried to drown himself in a lake, but he lost heart at the last minute.
“Then many years later he tried again,” Zhang said. “We were living on the third floor of an apartment building here in Shanghai, and he climbed up to the fourth floor and jumped out a window.”
The room grew quiet. This was the kind of detail that I couldn’t help but notice in China—the old man methodically making his way to the higher floor to make sure that this time he did it right. Zhang continued, “He was a math teacher. I was ten years old when this happened. I was very close to him.”
The two other editors were friends of Zhang, but they didn’t say anything, and nobody asked a question. In China, such a silence could mean that he had often talked about the suicide, or it could mean that this was the first time he had ever mentioned it. Finally, the conversation moved on to something else, and the room seemed to warm up. I kept signing books.
At Shanghai Translation, each manuscript passes through three levels of political review: the editor, his supervisor, and the head of the company. Occasionally, the higher levels make a change, but the vast majority of censorship is handled by editors like Zhang. In 2013, when the Times ran an article about foreign authors publishing in China, it noted that “publishing houses are required to employ in-house censors, most of them faithful party members.” But this isn’t accurate. At Shanghai Translation, there’s no employee whose primary job is to monitor political content. Such a distinction may seem academic, but it matters greatly in a country with many types of political control. In China, newspapers and magazines are censored much more heavily than books, and state-run papers like China Daily actively promote the Party line. On the Internet, censors excise all references to certain taboo topics. But for an editor like Zhang, who is not a Party member, there is no ideology and no absolute list of banned subjects. His censorship is defensive: rather than promoting an agenda or covering up some specific truth, he tries to avoid catching the eye of a higher authority. In fact, his goal—to have a book translated and published as accurately as possible—may run counter to the goals of the Party.
The result is a strangely unenthusiastic form of censorship. In one section of “Country Driving,” I describe in detail the Party’s manipulation of a village election, but none of this material was removed or changed. Probably the most negative thing that I have ever written about China is the final section of that book, which describes a small industrial city called Lishui. In the factory town, I observed bosses hiring underage workers, violating safety laws, damaging the environment, and encountering official corruption; in one scene, I describe witnessing government tax officials shake down two entrepreneurs for a bribe. All of that was left intact in the mainland version. Of the section’s hundred and forty-five pages, only nine words were removed, a background reference to opposition to the Party. The rest of the book was cut in three places: two references to Falun Gong and a long scene in which a drunk Mongolian tour guide tells me that Genghis Khan, like Hitler and Osama bin Laden, was a great man, and that the Chinese have no right to claim him for their history.
The censorship of “River Town” seems even more capricious. The attack by the mob, a discussion of the flawed Three Gorges Dam, scenes that show the ignorance of college Party officials—none of that was altered or removed. The longest cut in the book consists of a conversation between me and one of my Chinese tutors, in which we mention Li Peng, the former Premier, who was orphaned as a child. In the scene, I offend my tutor by mistakenly using the word “bastard” instead of “orphan.”
Zhang told me that he had wanted to leave the scene alone, but it was too risky for the name Li Peng to be connected to “bastard,” even if the point was to show a foreigner’s clumsiness with Chinese. This is one trend of the censorship: criticism of local officials and Party activities is fine, but certain high-profile national figures are off limits. References to Falun Gong are almost always removed. The Tiananmen Square massacre is usually called “an incident” or “a revolt.” Material about Tibet or Xinjiang tends to get cut. Zhang explained that he hadn’t censored the description of the Mongolian tour guide, but the head of the publishing company removed it as a precaution. “Country Driving” was the publisher’s first foreign book about China, and it didn’t want somebody in the government to read the words of the drunk Mongolian and think about Tibet.
Zhang said that he had been particularly anxious while preparing that first book—he compared it to walking a tightrope. But, after the book appeared, it established a baseline. “Thanks to the initial success, now I am more confident and skillful in dealing with the sensitive material,” Zhang wrote to me. And the cuts grew fewer with each book. In “Country Driving,” the publisher removed a total of five pages of material out of four hundred; a year later, only two pages were taken out of “River Town.” The following year, the publisher cut just twenty sentences from “Strange Stones,” a collection of magazine articles.
On the train from Shanghai to Beijing, Zhang and I discussed the censorship, and at one point he said, “You know that I’ve never asked you to publish ‘Oracle Bones.’ ” That book includes reporting on Uighurs and Falun Gong, and it would be treated differently from the others, which focus mostly on the lives of average Chinese in the countryside and in small cities. All of my books are also published in uncensored translations in Taiwan; at signings on the mainland, it was common for readers to arrive with imported copies of “Oracle Bones.” Like many other supposedly banned books, the Taiwanese version of “Oracle Bones” is easy to buy in China—Taobao, among other major online retailers, sells it. But readers struggle with the way in which Taiwanese books are still printed, in traditional characters with vertical text. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to publish something in which the heart of my reporting was censored, and Zhang told me that he had no interest in doing that job.
But where should the line be drawn? Evan Osnos, my colleague at The New Yorker, wrote an Op-Ed in the Times last year about his decision not to sign a Chinese contract for his book “Age of Ambition.” He warned against writers justifying censorship by the percentage of a book that is left alone, explaining, “It is tempting to accept censorship as a matter of the margins—a pruning that leaves the core of the story intact—but altering the proportions of a portrait of China gives a false reflection of how China appears to the world.” Most articles in the Western press have been critical of the practice; the Times described foreign authors engaging “in an Orwellian embrace with a censorship apparatus.” But the same quality that makes Chinese censorship so obvious—the fact that there’s an extensive apparatus whose work is crude—might actually make it less insidious than foreigners imagine. Even George Orwell would probably agree with this. In the original preface to “Animal Farm,” he warned against the complacency of assuming that censorship is the primary threat to freedom of information. “The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary,” he wrote. His book had been rejected by four publishers. “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.”
Any writer knows that a story or a book can be affected by many extra-literary factors: a reporter’s preconceptions, an editor’s expectations, an imbalance of research, a demand for marketing. The journalist’s responsibility is to evaluate all the factors that can negatively affect his work and decide which ones he can control or minimize. Censorship, despite the knee-jerk revulsion toward the word, in some cases poses less of a threat to the foreign writer than these other issues. For one thing, Chinese censorship is easy to document, as opposed to the more subtle pressures that can shape publications in the United States. For my Chinese books, I added an introductory page explaining that some material had been deleted and directing readers to my Web site. On the site, which has not been blocked by the Chinese firewall, I’ve listed everything that has been removed or changed.
With “Strange Stones,” I was preparing to post the censored material online when a Chinese reader e-mailed me asking for a list of the cuts. We corresponded for a while, and eventually he admitted that he’s a police officer who likes the new foreign books. He had avoided telling me his occupation, because, as a reader, he was familiar with negative experiences I’d had with the police in China. When I asked for his opinion of censorship, he described it as “an affront to an author.” But he also wrote, “The Chinese people have the Chinese people’s ability to adapt to this situation in clever ways.”
Such resourcefulness is hard for outsiders to grasp. And Western commentary about censorship often turns inward, portraying limitations in other countries in a way that celebrates our own values. One of the most striking qualities of foreign portrayals of censorship in China is the apparent lack of interest in Chinese readers and editors. Two of the most prominent recent feature stories about the censorship of foreign books—long pieces in the Times and in the South China Morning Post—fail to include a single comment by a reader in China. Neither quotes a Chinese editor by name. The articles have not been censored, of course, but nevertheless each has a gaping hole at its center. As long as Chinese readers remain unknown, and editors appear shadowy and symbolic, it’s difficult to understand them or to feel much sympathy.
In the West, there’s a tendency to approach censorship with a high-handedness that would seem inappropriate if applied to other issues of development, like poverty. There may in fact be more similarities than we realize. The drive for improved access to information, which includes education, contact with new ideas, and freedom of expression, is at least as complex as everything that it takes to improve living standards. A term like “self-censorship,” which is a favorite in the West, puts the blame on individuals in ways that may not be right. There’s no economic equivalent—we don’t have a neat two-word phrase that describes the things that poor people supposedly do to perpetuate their own poverty.
A figure like Zhang Jiren, who was born into a system of much greater restriction than today’s, is more likely to perceive himself in positive terms. From his perspective, the key dynamic isn’t self-censorship but the efforts that he makes to bring foreign books to Chinese readers. And he’s willing to take real risks to do this. The week before my tour, he got in trouble for publishing a book with a cover blurb by a scholar who is associated tangentially with the Tiananmen Square movement. Zhang hadn’t expected the blurb to cause trouble, but such unpredictability is key to the system. Individual books are handled differently, and what works one year may not work the next. If somebody crosses an invisible line and angers officials at the General Administration of Press and Publications, he can be fired. In the case of the blurb, Shanghai Translation was forced to recall all six thousand copies and replace their covers. This is a sad task at which Chinese publishers are skilled: sometimes they razor out a page or two that has offended some official. Zhang was punished with a reduction of his year-end bonus, and he had to write a self-criticism, but he shrugged it off. “The important thing is what you can do, not what you can’t do,” he said.
After the book tour, I made a trip back to Fuling. I flew to Chongqing, where I was picked up at the airport by Li Xueshun, my former colleague, and another teacher. We drove to Fuling on one of three new expressways that have been constructed since I left. There are also two new railways, including a high-speed line, and the college has relocated to a larger site, outside of town, as part of a national expansion of higher education that began in 1999. When I taught in Fuling, there were two thousand students; now there are more than twenty thousand.
The initial paranoia about my book had vanished after a year or two, and Li and I had begun corresponding regularly. Over time, we developed the friendship that hadn’t been possible when we were colleagues, and he talked to me openly about the unauthorized translation. He didn’t know what the government had done with the book, but he said that he had enjoyed the experience of translating a couple of chapters. At one point, he asked me to recommend him as a translator if I ever published on the mainland.
In 2010, when I contracted with Shanghai Translation, I mentioned Li Xueshun’s name. I did this mostly as a courtesy, assuming that the publisher would want somebody with formal experience. But, to my surprise, Zhang Jiren gave Li a trial and then hired him to translate “Country Driving.” After the book came out, I realized that there was something remarkable about Li’s work. The first sign was when my mother-in-law, who was educated in Taiwan and has high standards for literary Chinese, told me that the mainland version is exceptional. Reviewers praised it highly, and soon Li was flooded with requests from publishers; he also translated my two other books. One editor at a Beijing publishing house wrote me, “Many of our generation (born after 1980) are not sensitive to the beauty of classic Chinese language. We grew up with politicized language education.” He continued, “The translation of ‘River Town’ is one of the best in China, I have learned a lot from it and really appreciate Mr. Li Xueshun.”
One day in Fuling, I visited Li in his office, and he took a key out of his pocket and unlocked a big cabinet. Inside were the original drafts of the government-ordered translation. I had never seen it before, and the chapters looked like artifacts from another era: handwritten on cheap, thin paper, with a letterhead so obsolete that it featured the college’s four-digit telegraph code.
Li and I talked about the nineteen-nineties, and I mentioned how hard it had been to figure out the politics of being a foreigner. “We also didn’t understand,” he said. “The school didn’t understand. Nobody knew how to interact with the foreigners.” He said that recently he had been thinking about the past, because he had translated “The Children of Sanchez,” the account of poverty in Mexico City, which was commissioned by Zhang Jiren. “Some things in that book reminded me of my childhood,” Li said. “We were very poor, and we didn’t have toys, and sometimes we didn’t have enough to eat.” He grew up on a farm in southeastern Sichuan Province, and he was the only person in his family to become educated.
Li is now in his mid-forties, and, like Zhang, he’s a member of what could be described as the reform generation. They were children when Deng Xiaoping came to power, in 1978, so they grew up with the country’s economic and educational changes. But many still remember poverty and isolation, and their parents and grandparents gave them some sense of the horrors of the Mao era. This generation reminds me a little of the one that came of age in America in the sixties and seventies, with elders who had experienced the Depression and the Second World War. I understood why Zhang published books like “The Children of Sanchez,” which was influential in discussions of poverty and urbanization in the U.S. during the sixties and seventies.
My former students, most of whom teach at middle schools in small cities, are also of this generation. I’m still in touch with most of them, and periodically I send out a detailed questionnaire. Last fall, among the twenty-nine who responded, the median household income was around sixteen thousand dollars, which is much higher than the national average, and all but two owned both an apartment and a car. The transformation had been dramatic; most had grown up in rural poverty, and when they entered the workforce, in the late nineties, their salaries averaged only about five hundred dollars a year. But when I asked about social class more than seventy per cent still defined themselves as poor or lower class. One private-school teacher, who earns more than fifty thousand dollars a year and owns two apartments and a car, without any debt, said that he is lower class. In China, the concept of a middle class remains unfamiliar, and I sensed that my students were trying to figure out appropriate expectations in the new environment. And the country has changed so fast that few feel secure with their status.
They often remark on how different life is for their pupils. “I know their world and their thoughts very well,” a teacher named Maggie Qin wrote on the questionnaire. “But they don’t know our world. And they never can, because life for them is so easy.” In China, where generation gaps are enormous, the reform cohort may be the only one that understands the thinking of both the preceding and the following generations. Its members are something of a bridge, and the idea of these people growing older, and progressing into positions of greater authority, makes me cautiously optimistic. In the long term, Zhang Jiren could be right—the current political campaign may be a surface storm that, once it passes, will have had little effect on deeper currents.
But these are questions for another day, another place. In Fuling, Li Xueshun had something else to show me. He returned to the locked cabinet, retrieved an old copy of “River Town,” and opened to a description of the Wu River on page 149. “You wrote ‘western bank,’ ” he said. “It should be ‘eastern bank,’ right?”
I read the paragraph, visualized the geography, and thanked him. I told Li that I’d ask the American publisher to correct the mistake, and he put the book back in the cabinet and turned the key. ♦
