Hessler connects the dots between Li’s 2020 sales and the stimulus check sent to many Americans. In his story “The Rise of Made-in-China Diplomacy,” which appeared in March in the New Yorker, Hessler explores the intricacies of U.S.-China trade ties, mainly through the experiences of a Chengdu-based export entrepreneur, Li Dewei. journalists from China as part of a tit-for-tat dynamic that had started with the Trump administration curbing the number of Chinese journalists in the U.S. His stay coincided with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in Wuhan and the rising tensions between Beijing and Washington over trade, China’s treatment of its Uyghur ethnic minority, and a spate of other issues.Īmong them was the expulsion last year of more than a dozen U.S. In 2011, Hessler was awarded the MacArthur “genius grant” for his “keenly observed accounts of ordinary people responding to the complexities of life in such rapidly changing societies as Reform Era China.”Īfter spending a few years covering Egypt for the New Yorker, Hessler returned to China in 2019 and took a teaching job at the Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute in Chengdu, the major city in south-central China. His magazine works shows that same signature style. With a combination of humor and boots-on-the-ground discovery, Hessler dove into the stories of students, entrepreneurs and archaeologists while etching out a sense of time and space, and using his perspective as a foreign journalist to guide Western audiences.
He credits that partly to nostalgia: During a time when Chinese society was changing so quickly and dramatically, few people had time to reflect on the experience.
Instead, he was surprised by the positive response. “When I wrote ‘River Town,’ I assumed that any Chinese person who read it would hate it,” Hessler told Nieman Storyboard. His first book, “River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze,” documented his experience teaching as a Peace Corps volunteer in a small town in the southwestern Sichuan province in the mid-1990s. Hessler is the China correspondent for the New Yorker magazine, a position he also held between 20, when he published two of his four books on China. Women wearing face masks to help curb the spread of the coronavirus walk by a smiley faces billboard during their lunch break in Beijing, Monday, July 19, 2021.ĪP Photo/Andy Wong Peter Hessler’s books about China have resonated with both Western and Chinese audiences, an accomplishment that seems unlikely today, when the “China story” has become a political and diplomatic battleground.
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