A Chinese Education: Teaching and Learning from Two Generations of Students in China

The Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs program on Global Economics, Development and Political Economy presents “A Chinese Education: Teaching and Learning from Two Generations of Students in China” with Peter Hessler.

Peter Hessler first taught in China from 1996 to 1998, an experience he chronicled in River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. More than two decades later, he returned to the Chinese classroom, teaching from 2019 to 2021 and writing about the experience in Other Rivers: A Chinese Education. In this talk, Hessler compares these two generations of students and what their experiences reveal about a changing China. Drawing on his writing, teaching, and ongoing surveys of both cohorts, he reflects on how the aspirations, attitudes, and lives of young Chinese have changed—and what has endured—across a quarter century of extraordinary transformation.