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Letter from Fuling


THE PEACE CORPS BREAKS TIES WITH CHINA

The agency has always been viewed as removed from political spats. But the
timing of the U.S.’s decision seems suspicious.
By Peter Hessler
March 9, 2020

The author, lower left, with other China 3 volunteers in front of the Forbidden
City, in Beijing, in 1996.Photograph courtesy the author
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On the morning of January 17th, shortly before I was scheduled to meet with a
hundred and forty Peace Corps volunteers in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan
Province, there was an unexpected announcement that the China program was
ending. The Peace Corps had first come to the country in 1993, and as a
volunteer from the early years I had been asked to speak at an in-service
training that the organization was holding in a hotel near where I live. But by
the time I arrived nobody was in the mood for nostalgia. The American
volunteers, most of whom were in their twenties, looked stunned; some were
red-eyed from crying. At the back of the room, more than a dozen Chinese staff
members stood with stoic expressions. They had given up some benefits of the
Chinese system in order to work for the American agency. From the ceiling,
somebody had hung a red propaganda-style banner, which proved that Americans
could make their slogans every bit as tone-deaf as the ones in the People’s
Republic. The banner said “Welcome to IST 2020: Be the Tree You Wish to See in
the World.”

An American staff member greeted me with a pained look. She said something to
the effect that the tree she wished to have seen was a tactful announcement, but
Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, of Florida, had declared the closure of the
China program on Twitter. “Rubio and Rick Scott wanted to take credit for it,”
she said angrily.


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The Peace Corps has sent more than thirteen hundred volunteers to China, and the
agency, which is now active in sixty countries, has always been viewed as
removed from political spats. The U.S. had never ended a Peace Corps program
because of a diplomatic conflict, but the timing of the decision about China
seemed suspicious. The coronavirus had yet to come to widespread attention, and
the Senators, who had previously expressed doubts about a Chinese trade deal,
tweeted the day after President Trump signed a Phase 1 economic agreement with
China.

“For too long, Beijing has fooled organizations such as the World Bank and the
World Trade Organization,” Rubio wrote. Scott chimed in: “I’m glad the Peace
Corps has finally come to its senses and sees Communist China for what it is:
the second largest economy in the world and an adversary of the United States.”

Chinese hard-liners also celebrated. In Guanchazhe, a conservative publication,
a columnist named Pan Gongyu published a commentary, “Farewell, Peace Corps in
China, We Won’t See You Off.” The title echoed “Farewell, Leighton Stuart!,” a
famous essay that Mao Zedong wrote in August, 1949. That month, the U.S. State
Department had issued a white paper that, in more than a thousand tortured
pages, tried to explain how America had “lost” China to Mao’s revolutionaries:
“This is a frank record of an extremely complicated and most unhappy period in
the life of a great country to which the United States has long been attached by
ties of closest friendship.”

In his essay, Mao derided American democracy as “another name for the
dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,” and he celebrated the departure of John
Leighton Stuart, the last U.S. Ambassador to China under the Kuomintang
government. For years, the isolationist essay was part of the school curriculum,
and many Chinese people recognize the ending: “Leighton Stuart has departed and
the White Paper has arrived, very good, very good. Both events are worth
celebrating.”



In Guanchazhe, Pan described the Peace Corps’s “ideological and cultural export”
as another chapter in American failure: “After twenty-seven years in China, the
U.S. diplomatic offices intended to ‘raise wolves,’ but ended up with a litter
of huskies.” He concluded, “The Peace Corps has departed and the U.S.-China
Trade Agreement is here, very good, very good. Both events are worth
celebrating.”

In the fall of 1996, the Peace Corps sent me to teach English to college
students in Fuling, a remote city on the Yangtze River. I was twenty-seven years
old, and I was joined by another volunteer, Adam Meier, who was twenty-two. Not
long after we arrived, a student named Richard submitted an essay to my writing
class titled “Why Americans Are So Casual.” Richard was skinny, shy, and
bespectacled. He had grown up in Fuling, and most of his classmates came from
the Sichuanese countryside. At the time, China’s population was more than
seventy per cent rural, and only eight per cent of students went to college.
Adam and I were the first Americans to live in Fuling since the Revolution. In
his essay, Richard wrote, in English:

> Our foreign language teachers—Peter and Adam—came to teach us this term. It
> provides a good opportunity of understanding the American way of life. In my
> opinion, they are more casual than Chinese people. Why do I think so? I’ll
> give you some facts to explain this.

We were part of a Peace Corps cohort known as China 3. The agency’s groups have
always been numbered, perhaps because it implies a sense of mission. The Peace
Corps was founded by President John F. Kennedy, in 1961—the year of Saturn 1 and
Sputnik 9. In the same way that the Apollo rockets went up in sequence, each
Peace Corps cohort was intended to travel to a distant land, build on the work
of its predecessors, then return home. And, just like the rockets, the Peace
Corps was a Cold War endeavor. It was inspired by “The Ugly American,” a 1958
novel that warned readers that the Soviets were doing a better job of grassroots
work in the developing world. The Peace Corps had three goals: to provide useful
assistance to “interested countries,” to improve understanding of the United
States, and to help Americans understand the rest of the world.



By the time I joined, relatively few volunteers were aware of these Cold War
roots. Time had moved on, or maybe it had stopped—this was the era of “The End
of History and the Last Man,” the 1992 book by Francis Fukuyama, who declared
the triumph of Western liberal democracy. In 1996, the Peace Corps was sending
volunteers to Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, and other former Soviet-bloc states that
had supposedly transitioned to democracy. China was the only Communist country
that accepted volunteers.



Deng Xiaoping had welcomed the Peace Corps as part of his Reform and Opening
strategy, but some Chinese officials weren’t convinced that Americans should be
working in remote places like Fuling. They referred to the program by a
euphemism—Meizhong Youhao Zhiyuanzhe, or “U.S.-China Friendship
Volunteers”—because the Chinese translation of “Peace Corps” had been tainted by
years of Maoist propaganda. The first three cohorts were small, which made it
easier for the government to track us. The curiosity of locals was even more
intense. Richard’s essay continued:

“Can you come look under my bed? It seems like a complete waste of storage
space.”
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> For example, when Mr. Hessler is having class, he can scratch himself casually
> without paying attention to what others may say. He dresses up casually,
> usually with his belt dropping and dangling. But, to tell you the truth, it
> isn’t considered a good manner in China, especially in old people’s eyes.

China 3 consisted of fourteen volunteers, and, before joining, none of us had
taken a single class in Chinese language, history, politics, or culture. In
those days, Peace Corps applicants didn’t choose their destinations. All the
China 3 volunteers were white, and had almost no experience in the developing
world; one, from Mississippi, had never been on an airplane before. The majority
came from the Midwest or the South—Adam was from Wisconsin, and I was a
Missourian. For many of us, the Peace Corps represented an inexpensive way to go
abroad.

Our students were majoring in English, another project of Reform and Opening.
China was expanding compulsory English education, which created new demand for
instructors; after graduation, our students would be assigned to teach in middle
and high schools. But their concept of the outside world remained abstract. They
had no Internet access, and the Communist Party published all their texts,
including a cultural-studies book called “Survey of Britain and America.” A
chapter about American history began, naturally enough, with China: “The Indians
living in America originated from Asia some 25,000 years ago.” After listing
some key details about the European discovery of the New World—“it also opened
up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie”—the text proceeded to the founding
of the United States. (“The Constitution of 1787 established the dictatorship of
the American bourgeoisie.”) A section about contemporary society claimed that
nowadays most New Englanders work in factories. (“They are good at making
watches and clocks.”) There was some useful information about American slang.
(“For example, ‘draw one’ or ‘shoot one’ means ‘pour a cup of coffee.’ ”)
Chapter 4 covered “Social Problems”:

> Homosexuality is a rather strange social phenomenon that most people can
> hardly understand. It widely spreads. One reason for this may be the despair
> in marriage or love affairs.

The chapter concluded by explaining the primary cause of homosexuality and other
social problems:

> The most important reason is the capitalist system of America. In this
> capitalist society, although science and technology is highly advanced, some
> people are suffering from spiritual hollowness. Thus they start to look for
> things curious and exciting.




In part to keep the students as far as possible from “Survey of Britain and
America,” Adam and I used whatever we could find as teaching materials. We
brought photographs of family to class, and we made copies of articles from
American magazines. When we received our absentee ballots for the 1996
Presidential election, Adam and I each gave a lecture on the U.S. political
system to a section of senior students. At the end, we took out the ballots,
allowed the students to inspect them, and voted.

The students became very quiet when I handed them my ballot. We were in a small,
unheated room, packed with more than forty simple wooden desks. One by one, the
students examined the piece of paper. By the time I retrieved the ballot and
voted for Bill Clinton, the room was so silent, and they were watching with such
intensity, that my heart was racing. Not long afterward, a Peace Corps staffer
in Chengdu reported that college officials had called and weren’t happy about
what Adam and I had done. But the college left it at that—such communication was
often indirect.

The people who were farthest away seemed the most likely to perceive a threat.
Students were thrilled, whereas our Chinese colleagues were curious but guarded.
College administrators were warier, but even they were proud to have foreigners
on campus. Opponents of the program tended to be at the Chinese provincial or
national level.

The American reaction was the opposite. Recently, I talked with William Speidel,
a Sinologist who served as the first Peace Corps China director, and he
remembered the attitude of State Department officials. “They were overjoyed,” he
said. “The idea that Peace Corps had a foothold in quote-unquote Communist China
was really something.”



Speidel commissioned a linguist to design a course in Mandarin, and, in remote
places, a hardworking volunteer could gain fluency in only two years, the length
of a Peace Corps assignment. Many volunteers had studied pedagogy as undergrads,
and often they returned to teach in U.S. classrooms. But there were others whose
life paths were radically transformed. They became diplomats, civil servants,
businesspeople, or scholars specializing in China. Today, twenty-seven former
China volunteers, including Adam, work in the State Department, and there are
others at organizations like U.S.A.I.D.

Journalists and writers were also common. Michael Meyer, a China 2 volunteer
from Minnesota, went on to write three books about the country. In my cohort,
three of us became China correspondents and authors. All told, former volunteers
have published at least eleven nonfiction books about China.

I sometimes wondered how the situation looked to Communist intelligence
analysts. In 1999, I moved to Beijing while preparing to publish my first book,
about my experience in Fuling, and there was a period when I sensed that I was
being watched with particular attention. There were strange encounters in my
neighborhood, and a couple of former students back in the Fuling region reported
being intimidated by security agents who showed up because of their connection
with me. In Beijing, at a couple of government-sponsored events, Foreign
Ministry officials sought me out with pointed questions: Why did you study
English literature if you planned to go to China? Why did you teach in such an
undeveloped place?

They clearly worried that teaching had been a cover for intelligence work, and
they seemed baffled by the Peace Corps. The organization didn’t attract many
people from élite backgrounds, and it paid volunteers about a hundred and twenty
dollars a month. Speidel’s Chinese staff had been assigned to him by the
government, so there was no question that some lines of information ran straight
to security, along with the likely phone taps. But nobody from Peace Corps
headquarters ever told me what I should or should not teach, and staff visited
Fuling only twice in two years. At its best, the Peace Corps was an expression
of American confidence: if you sent motivated young people to remote places and
left them alone, good things were likely to happen.

Recently, I reminisced about the era with somebody from Fuling who is well
connected in the Communist Party. He confided that the Fuling volunteers were
supposed to be sent to Wanxian, another Yangtze city, whose name was eventually
changed to Wanzhou. But officials were concerned that the city was too close to
the construction site of the Three Gorges Dam, where Americans might learn
sensitive information. So they pushed us a hundred and thirty miles upstream. Of
course, I ended up writing about the dam anyway. And, after the Peace Corps
finally got into Wanzhou, the organization posted a China 7 volunteer named Jake
Hooker there. Despite having no Chinese background, Hooker learned the language
to a remarkable level, and he proved that it didn’t matter who got sent
downriver. In 2008, as a reporter for the Times, Hooker won a Pulitzer Prize for
exposing how rural Chinese factories were exporting toxic ingredients for use in
pharmaceutical products.

In 1998, during my last year as a volunteer, I didn’t notice two national
developments that later proved to be significant. One was the system of Internet
restrictions that became known in English as the Great Firewall. The other was a
speech delivered by President Jiang Zemin, at Peking University, on May 4, 1998.
Jiang’s words were hardly dynamic (“the future of the motherland is infinitely
glorious”), but, more than twenty years later, if you say “Project 985,” many
educated Chinese people recognize the reference to the year and the month of
Jiang’s speech. The President called for the development of world-class
universities, and this endeavor joined Project 211—the Chinese fetish for
mission-oriented numerology exceeds even that of the Peace Corps. These programs
involved university expansion and improvement, and they reflected a strategy
that was hard for Americans to grasp: the idea that education and restriction
could proceed in tandem.

During the period that followed, the country’s over-all growth was so intense
that Peace Corps cohorts could be represented by micro-histories. The year that
China 8 arrived, the country joined the World Trade Organization. By China 12,
the Three Gorges Dam had been completed. China 14 was the Beijing Olympics.
Between China 1 and China 16, the G.D.P. increased more than tenfold. When I
taught in Fuling, the college had about two thousand students; by China 10,
there were twenty thousand, on a brand-new campus.

In the classroom, even smaller histories showed how the system worked at the
lowest level. One of my students, a poor boy who grew up on a farm, where his
family planted potatoes, corn, and tobacco, took the English name Mo. Mo’s
father had a third-grade education and his mother never attended school, but a
village schoolteacher inspired Mo, who became the only boy from his class to
test into college. In Fuling, he joined the Communist Party, and every summer he
returned home to haul sixty-pound sacks of tobacco to market. When some of Mo’s
classmates started giving themselves English surnames, he asked Adam and me for
advice, which was how he became Mo Money. (Another China 3 micro-history was the
series of prominent deaths that occurred in the span of six months and that, at
least in my mind, are forever connected: Tupac Shakur, Deng Xiaoping, and Biggie
Smalls.)

After graduation, Mo Money accepted a teaching job in his rural home town. Among
the students was his younger brother. It was the community version of education
by the bootstraps: somebody escapes the village to attend college, then returns
and pulls up the others. For three years, Mo taught his brother and more than
forty classmates, and his brother tested into the Fuling college, too. He
entered as China 8 arrived. Of the four children in Mo Money’s family, three
graduated from college, and all are now middle class.



When this happens at scale across a population of more than a billion, the
effects are staggering. Mo currently teaches in a school in Chongqing, and
recently I asked him what percentage of his graduating students from last year
made it to university. “Every one of them,” he said. In terms of national
statistics, the college-entrance figure—seven per cent for Mo’s year—is now
forty-eight per cent.

The Peace Corps China groups started to expand with China 4, which was also the
first cohort to include an African-American volunteer. There were significantly
more women than men that year, and that became the general pattern. In 2014, the
Peace Corps started allowing applicants to specify which country or region they
wanted to work in, and China became a coveted assignment. Yung-Mei Haloski, a
China 4 volunteer who later worked in recruitment and placement for the Peace
Corps, told me that China was seen as a top priority. “I was always directed
that the people who had the most skills should go to China,” she said.

By China 17, the Peace Corps was sending between seventy and eighty volunteers
per year, and the program had expanded into undeveloped parts of Gansu and
Guizhou provinces. But some volunteers went to Sichuanese cities that had become
much more connected and sophisticated. Chengdu acquired the nickname Gaydu,
because of a relative tolerance for gay culture that would have been
unimaginable during the days of “Survey of Britain and America.” (“It widely
spreads.”) With China 21, the Peace Corps sent a same-sex married couple for the
first time.

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In August, 2018, Jody Olsen, the Peace Corps director appointed by President
Trump, came to China to celebrate the program’s twenty-fifth anniversary. The
Peace Corps hoped to move into even more remote places, and Olsen and Stephen
Claborne, the head of the China program, met with officials in Beijing. The
Chinese politely rejected the request. “The message was that they were happy
with it the way it was,” Claborne told me recently.




The Chinese strategy never changed: education and restriction continued in
parallel, like opposite lanes of the same highway. Today’s citizens are often
more tolerant and aware, but the Great Firewall is also more sophisticated than
ever. Many topics of civic interest, ranging from the Hong Kong protests to
concentration camps that sequester Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang, are highly
censored. Even as the government became more comfortable with the Peace Corps,
it restricted other organizations, and a 2017 law made it increasingly difficult
for foreign N.G.O.s to operate. If you connect all the micro-histories—each
individual improvement in material and educational circumstance—they still don’t
add up to political change. Mo Money remains a member of the Communist Party.

In 2018, during a visit to Fuling, I happened to run into my first-year student
Richard. Like Mo, Richard has prospered as a high-school teacher. During our
conversation, he quickly brought up the lecture about absentee ballots. “That
made a deep impression,” he said. “I’ve always thought about that.”

Recently, a couple of other former students also mentioned the incident in
positive terms, which surprised me. I had thought of it as a clumsy attempt by
two young teachers to deal with a frustrating political environment. Even now, I
can’t tell exactly what lessons the students took away. I occasionally send
survey questions to the people I taught, and in 2017 I asked if China should
become a multiparty democracy. Out of thirty respondents, twenty-two said no.
“China is going well this way,” one former student wrote. Others were more
cynical. “We already have one corrupt party, it will be much worse if we have
more,” one man wrote. Another student remarked, “We have seen America with
multi-party, but you have elected the worst president in human’s history.”

Rick Scott began demanding an end to Peace Corps China in the summer of 2019.
“What the Peace Corps shouldn’t be doing is propping up our adversaries with
U.S. tax dollars,” the Senator said, in a statement. Such criticism had also
been made in 2011, by Mike Coffman, a Republican congressman from Colorado.
Scott introduced a bill that would cancel programs “in hostile countries, like
China,” and place the Peace Corps under the oversight of the State Department.

The agency has always functioned independently within the executive branch, in
part to prevent programs from being manipulated as direct tools of foreign
policy. No other senators signed on to Scott’s bill, but he continued to attack
the Peace Corps and China. His criticism of both seemed to be recent. Before
entering politics, Scott reportedly amassed a fortune of more than two hundred
million dollars as an entrepreneur in the health-care industry. In two terms as
governor of Florida, from 2011 to 2019, Scott welcomed Chinese investors to the
state, and he chaired Enterprise Florida, a pro-business consortium that has
offices in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing. A blind trust held by the Governor
included stocks with ties to Chinese companies.



Once Scott entered the Senate, though, he became a vocal opponent of China. In
response to the Senator’s pressure, Claborne, the head of the China program,
received an unusual request from Peace Corps headquarters. Scott wanted to
analyze Peace Corps China in business terms, examining the return on investment.
“He was looking for things like how many volunteers came back and started
businesses and created wealth because of their work in China,” Claborne told me.

Claborne worried that somebody with little understanding of the Peace Corps was
being allowed to redefine how it should be valued. He also believed that Scott’s
point that China is now a developed nation was irrelevant. Nothing in the Peace
Corps mission statement specifies that partner countries must be poor, and the
agency often looks closely at the Human Development Index, which considers a
range of factors, including access to education. But the Peace Corps asked
Claborne to assemble materials about return on investment, which he assumed were
passed on to Scott. The Senator declared himself unsatisfied, and the Peace
Corps never responded publicly.

The director, Olsen, had a long history with the agency, including time as a
volunteer in Tunisia, in the nineteen-sixties. Some members of the Peace Corps
community had feared that the Trump Administration would bring in an outsider to
dismantle the agency, so Olsen’s appointment was greeted with relief. But, when
the China program was attacked, Olsen stayed silent.

The pressure on the Peace Corps was connected to a growing anti-China sentiment.
In some ways, it’s reminiscent of the era of “Farewell, Leighton Stuart!”—a
frustration that China has not followed a path that Americans would prefer. Many
China specialists are concerned that the U.S. is overreacting. James Millward, a
Georgetown University historian who is a vocal critic of China’s treatment of
Uighurs, told me that he opposed cutting off the Peace Corps and other forms of
engagement. He believes that the Magnitsky Act, which allows the U.S. to
sanction human-rights violators, should be applied to Chinese organizations and
individuals who are active in the concentration camps. “It’s a measure that
should be more directly associated with what is going on in Xinjiang, rather
than keeping people from teaching English in Chengdu,” he said.

But the issue was settled quickly, behind closed doors. In November, the
National Security Council held a meeting about Peace Corps China, chaired by
Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national-security adviser. Pottinger is a former
journalist in Beijing who subsequently joined the Marines, and he is known for
his hawkish views on China. A senior official who served on the N.S.C. during
the Obama Administration told me that it’s unheard of for a deputy-level meeting
to be held about a specific volunteer program. Peace Corps China cost $4.2
million in 2018, less than the State Department spent on the International
Pacific Halibut Commission. “If you are deputy national-security adviser, you
should have much more important issues on your plate,” the official said. “Think
about what’s happening in November. Shouldn’t he be meeting on Iran?”

The following month, Olsen submitted a letter to the Office of Management and
Budget announcing that Peace Corps China would be closed. Olsen’s letter noted
that budgetary funds would be freed up for use in other places, mentioning three
possible sites that don’t currently have volunteers: the Solomon Islands,
Vietnam, and Greenland. There has been speculation that these countries were
named in order to appeal to various geopolitical interests within the
Administration. The Solomon Islands would satisfy those hoping to counter
China’s influence in the Pacific, and a new program in Vietnam would fulfill the
old idea of battling Communism. And Greenland because—well, because Greenland.

The day that the closure was announced, I had dinner with one of the Peace
Corps’s Chinese staff members. The government no longer assigned people to these
positions, and many of the thirty-plus staffers had applied hoping for better
relations between China and the United States. They had largely given up the
opportunity for social-security benefits in order to work for the American
agency, whose status meant that some staff had difficulty applying for mortgages
and credit cards. The woman I dined with asked me not to use her name, because
the Peace Corps hadn’t yet negotiated severance packages.

The agency had informed staff and volunteers that China would be “graduating”—it
was now so developed that it no longer needed Peace Corps teachers. But, the
woman asked me, “if that was the case, why were they trying to expand so
recently?” She added, “It’s like a divorce by one side,” noting that the news
came less than a week before the lunar New Year holiday. Back in the U.S., the
Peace Corps had already invited scores of new volunteers to serve in the next
China cohort; now those applicants had to be reassigned. Helen Lowman, a former
Peace Corps regional director who organized the graduation of programs in
Romania and Bulgaria in the past decade, told me that she had never heard of
such an abrupt and chaotic decision to phase out a country. “I probably talked
to the host-country government for three years before we actually closed,” she
said.

After dinner with the staff member, I met some volunteers at a hip bar called
Commune. Such Communist chic wasn’t part of the Chengdu landscape when I served,
although other things remained recognizable as the Peace Corps experience. A
couple of volunteers quietly brought their own beer in bags. For China 25, the
monthly stipend was less than three hundred dollars.



An African-American woman named Khloe Benton told me that she had been posted to
a site in Gansu that had few foreign residents. “It’s been hard,” she said.
“People follow me around, and they say things.” But she believed that it was
important for locals to meet a person of color. The Peace Corps had told
volunteers that they would finish out their terms, and they tried to cheer one
another up.




“You know why they lied to us,” another woman said, referring to the political
pressure. “They didn’t have a choice.”

Eleven days later, the coronavirus caused the evacuation of all China
volunteers. The same thing had happened with SARS, in 2003, but the Peace Corps
had returned the following year. This time, the program was finished—the last
micro-history belonged to China 25. The volunteers had spent a little more than
six months in the country.

One official in the State Department told me there were rumors that the White
House had threatened the Peace Corps with budget cuts if it didn’t end the China
program. When I asked Rick Scott, he said that he didn’t know how the
Administration had made the decision, although he described his meetings with
Jody Olsen and other Peace Corps officials. “I said, ‘What I’ve been told is
that the volunteers who are there, they don’t coördinate anything with the State
Department, they don’t promote American values, they don’t promote
capitalism,’ ” Scott said. I asked if he had received the materials about return
on investment, and whether they included such information as the number of
volunteers who became diplomats.

“I asked the Peace Corps about that,” Scott said. “They didn’t know of one
person who had ever gone to the State Department from the Peace Corps.”

I said that twenty-seven former China volunteers now work in the State
Department, and asked if this knowledge might have changed his mind. “I’d have
to get more information,” he said, adding that the Peace Corps hadn’t been
forthcoming. I had no way of checking this, because the Peace Corps and Olsen
ignored multiple requests for an interview.

It occurred to me that this would have been a good follow-up lesson to our
Fuling lectures about American democracy. In the nineties, we had known that the
Chinese could cancel the program at any time. It had seemed a small miracle that
local colleges were somehow able to communicate to high-level conservatives that
Peace Corps teachers were worth the risk.

“These days, it’s nearly impossible to meet a hot sociopath the old-fashioned
way.”
Cartoon by Emily Bernstein
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Twenty years later, though, the Americans had discussed nothing openly, and
Peace Corps administrators must have been either so frightened or so incompetent
that they hadn’t defended themselves. The ideas that inspired “The Ugly
American”—the importance of grassroots and local knowledge—had been abandoned.
During our conversation, Scott acknowledged that he and his staff had not spoken
with any current or former China volunteers.



The old confidence had also vanished. It seemed part of a larger American trend:
every foreign contact was a threat, every exchange was zero-sum. Instead of
trusting themselves and their best models, people regressed to the paranoia of
those with closed systems. In the Washington Examiner, a conservative magazine,
Tom Rogan celebrated the end of Peace Corps China. When Rogan mentioned the
Chinese Ministry of State Security, he probably had no idea how much he sounded
like a ministry hack:

> We must thus ask how many of the more than 1,300 previous volunteers in China
> may have been recruited by the MSS during their time there. The number is
> likely very small, but unlikely to be zero. How many of those volunteers then
> returned home to take up employment in the State Department or another U.S.
> government agency?

In January, I visited Fuling with my family, and one afternoon we went to the
former campus. It had been abandoned after the expanded college opened, up the
Yangtze. Last year, developers started tearing down the old campus in order to
construct high-rise apartments.

The classroom building was already gone, but my former apartment still stood.
The library was also intact, although its doors were chained shut and many
windows were broken. In front of the ruined building, a faded red banner
proclaimed another tone-deaf slogan:

> Build Nationwide Civilized City and National Hygienic Area
> 
> I Am Aware, I Participate, I Support, I Am Satisfied

While we were there, a man called out my Chinese name. He introduced himself as
a former colleague who was also visiting the campus before it was demolished.
Suddenly, I recognized him—in the old days, he sometimes came to my apartment
late at night to borrow banned books. In front of the shuttered library, he
said, “I remember reading about the Cultural Revolution.” I asked if the
authorities had warned him about associating with the Americans, and he smiled
shyly. “It wasn’t that direct,” he said. “But we were careful.”

I hadn’t known him or his colleagues as well as I knew our students. In my first
book, I mentioned the surreptitious visits from the man and a few others. I
described them as “shadowy figures who seemed to be groping for something that
couldn’t be found in Fuling.”

Twenty years later, much remained in the shadows. I didn’t know what the teacher
had gained from the banned books, or how my students were changed by our
classes. But, as time passed, I was impressed by how much people remembered. “We
were all poor at that time, we were eager to learn,” a student named Andi wrote
recently, mentioning some school supplies that Adam had loaned her class. The
accumulation of these small moments added up to something larger, but it wasn’t
a formal accounting. That was a teacher’s confidence—confidence in his material,
but also confidence in his students. They could make their own decisions about
how they applied their lessons.

One evening, I spoke by telephone with Gabriel Exposito, a twenty-two-year-old
who was among the last people to receive invitations to Peace Corps China.
Exposito grew up in Havana, where one of his school memories involved a visit by
a group of Americans. The children were instructed to avoid the foreigners, who
made a donation that was spirited away by Communist officials. Exposito’s father
eventually fled to Florida, where he found work as a nurse. He brought his son
over from Cuba at the age of eleven. Exposito graduated cum laude from Florida
State University, and when he applied to the Peace Corps he requested China.

“I know what a Communist education is like,” Exposito told me. “I was the
student who wasn’t allowed to ask the hard questions. I saw the foreigners and
couldn’t interact with them. I wanted to be on the other side of that.”

He was shocked to learn by tweet of the China program’s closure, and as a
Floridian he called the offices of Senators Rubio and Scott to complain. He told
staffers, “I agree with you—the Communist Party is a hostile entity. But we are
breaking down the image they build of the American people.”

He requested a reassignment to a former Communist state, and the Peace Corps
offered Mongolia, the Kyrgyz Republic, and Moldova. Exposito chose Moldova. “I
thought, This is a former Soviet republic that’s next to Ukraine,” he said.
“It’s an area that’s often forgotten about.” He had started studying Russian,
and he hoped to eventually become either a scholar or a diplomat; I wished him
the best of luck. He would have been perfect for China 26. ♦





Published in the print edition of the March 16, 2020, issue, with the headline
“Broken Bonds.”
Peter Hessler joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2000. His forthcoming
book, “Other Rivers: A Chinese Education,” is due out in July.

More:Peace CorpsChinaXi JinpingForeign Policy


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