Join ChinaFile for an evening with author Peter Hessler to discuss his new book, Other Rivers: A Chinese Education. Hessler will be in conversation with National Public Radio’s Asia Editor, Vincent Ni.

Book sales and signing will follow the discussion.

In Other Rivers, Hessler uses his inside view of China’s education system as a vehicle to examine the country’s past, present, and future.

In 1996, when he first arrived in China, almost all of the people in Hessler’s classroom were first-generation college students. They typically came from large rural families, and their parents, subsistence farmers, could offer little guidance as their children entered a brand-new world. By 2019, when Hessler arrived at Sichuan University, he found a very different China, as well as a new kind of student—an only child whose schooling was the object of intense focus from a much more ambitious cohort of parents. At Sichuan University, many young people had a sense of irony about the regime but mostly navigated its restrictions with equanimity, embracing the opportunities of China’s rise. But the pressures of extreme competition at scale can be grueling, even for much younger children—including Hessler’s own daughters, who gave him an intimate view into the experience at their local school.

Peter Hessler is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he served as Beijing correspondent from 2000 to 2007, Cairo correspondent from 2011 to 2016, and Chengdu correspondent from 2019 to 2021. He is the author of The Buried; River Town, which won the Kiriyama Book Prize; Oracle Bones, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; Country Driving; and Strange Stones. He won the 2008 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting, and he was named a MacArthur fellow in 2011.

Vincent Ni is the Asia Editor at NPR, where he leads a team of Asia-based correspondents whose reporting spans from Afghanistan to Japan, and across all NPR platforms. In the last decade, Ni has reported from the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, on major global events such as the Arab Spring from Egypt in 2011, the Maidan protests from Ukraine in 2014, and the U.S. presidential elections in 2012 and 2016. Before joining NPR in 2022, Ni was the China Affairs Correspondent and Bureau Chief for The Guardian newspaper and its Sunday edition, The Observer. Prior to The Guardian, he spent seven years at the BBC in London. Ni holds a Master of Science degree from the University of Oxford. He was a 2018 World Fellow at Yale University, and was one of Asia Society’s Asia 21 fellows in 2023.