For a writer, it’s never a good sign when somebody contacts your agent about a used car. My agent’s name is William Clark, and he’s represented me since 1999, when he took a chance on an unsolicited manuscript of River Town that showed up in his slush pile. Back then, I was just starting out, and even the most mundane communication from William—some paperwork, or a question about schedule—made me excited to think that I had embarked on a new life. But the request that William received in February of this year felt like the end of something. It had been submitted from the city of Chengdu:
Dear Mr. Peter Hessler,
I hope this letter finds you well and in good health. I’ve heard that you have left China and are preparing to sell your Toyota car. I am very interested in purchasing your vehicle and would like to learn more details.
Below are some questions I have regarding your car:
- What is the specific model and production year of the vehicle?
- How is the overall condition of the car? Are there any mechanical or aesthetic issues?
- Do you have any maintenance records or service history that you could provide?
- What is your expected selling price?
If possible, I would like to inspect the car in person. Please let me know a convenient time and location for you.
The writer was incorrect about one detail—the vehicle was a Honda, not a Toyota. But he was right about the larger implication. I was selling the Honda because my family has no plans to live in China again in the near future. A close friend in Chengdu had listed the car for sale on his WeChat circle, which got picked up on Chinese social media where I’m usually known by my Chinese name, 何伟, or Ho Wei.
In response, a writer named Zhang Feng posted an essay titled “The End of the Road: Ho Wei is Selling His Car.” Zhang expressed dismay that China has become increasingly closed to foreigners, with many journalists, writers, and others either being expelled or deciding to leave the country. The essay included a brief assessment of my reporting during the first year of the pandemic:
The article he wrote for The New Yorker during the epidemic was somewhat defensive of China’s anti-pandemic policies—in the United States, he was also considered by some to be too “pro-China.” However, even such a sincere person had to leave China in the end.
Zhang’s essay was quickly censored, but it prompted other comments. Sun Xuyang, a prominent writer and editor in Beijing, remarked that after one of my pandemic articles he had vowed to never read me again, because I wasn’t critical enough of the government. He wrote:
Evaluating Ho Wei is tricky. To some, he’s an annoyance. He’s well-meaning, but in certain environments, faithful reporting can be perceived as malicious.
While living in Chengdu, I was aware of criticisms, but I chose not to respond because I didn’t want to amplify any public discussion that could threaten my family during a difficult time. Now that we aren’t going back, I’d like to comment on the pressures and challenges that face foreign writers in China. I also have a few things to say about that Honda.
* * *
When I moved to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, in August 2019, my intention was to take a break from journalism. I accepted a position at the Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute, where I agreed to a relatively full teaching load, with around 60 students per semester in writing and journalism classes. One of my goals was to get a sense of how Chinese students and universities had changed over the past two decades. I had first arrived in Sichuan in 1996 as a Peace Corps volunteer posted to a small city called Fuling, and ever since I had stayed in touch with many of my former students. I planned to frequently revisit Fuling in order to write a follow-up to River Town.
I told my editors at The New Yorker that it would probably be at least two years before I transitioned back to journalism. During my first semester, the magazine sent two other writers, Evan Osnos and Jiayang Fan, to China and Hong Kong to research stories. But such travel became impossible after the country closed its borders in response to the pandemic. In mid-March of 2020, as part of an ongoing diplomatic dispute with the Trump administration, the Chinese government announced that it was expelling American correspondents from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. The expulsions targeted many of the most experienced journalists, leaving bureaus badly understaffed.
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Given the lack of coverage, I decided to do whatever reporting I could. This involved some risk, because I hadn’t arrived on a journalist visa. Midway through that first pandemic year, on the evening of July 23, a diplomat from the American consulate in Chengdu warned me about possible consequences. Earlier that week, the United States had ordered the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston, because of accusations of spying. All year, the two countries had engaged in tit-for-tat diplomacy, and now it seemed inevitable that the Chinese government would retaliate for Houston. A few hours before I met with the diplomat, the South China Morning Post had reported that China planned to shut down the American consulate in Chengdu. Nobody in the Chinese government had confirmed the report, and the diplomat told me that he wasn’t convinced that a decision had been made. But he wanted to talk before anything happened.
We had drinks at a bar near the consulate. The diplomat, who asked that I not name him, mentioned that authorities in the U.S. had recently arrested a number of Chinese citizens on accusations of spying. “I worry that Chinese will start going after Americans here,” he said. “They’ll say, ‘These people are clearly spies, or they’re doing something that’s not in line with their visa status.’” He continued, “There’s not much we can do to stop that. That worries me. The last thing I’d like to see is somebody sitting in a Chinese jail like Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig.”
Spavor and Kovrig, known in the Western press as “the two Michaels,” were Canadian residents of China who, at the end of 2018, had been arrested on what seemed to be trumped-up charges of espionage. It was another tit-for-tat move, this time in response to the Canadian arrest of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer, a Chinese citizen who was being held for extradition to the U.S. on financial charges related to sanctions against Iran.
The diplomat told me that he had been thinking about American citizens who might be potential targets. He mentioned the name of a former State Department employee who was currently doing business in Shanghai. “He could be at risk,” he said. Then he paused and looked up. “You could be at risk.” He continued, “I don’t think that anybody cares about what you’re writing. It’s just that you are here and there are messages to be sent.”
We ordered another drink. The bar was dead; before the pandemic, it had been a popular hangout for foreigners, but now there were few expats left in Chengdu. Before we parted, the diplomat said, “I hate to recommend that you leave China. But I don’t know if I would feel safe if I were you.”
* * *
The last time I had gone to China as a writer, the atmosphere had been vastly different. In 1998, after finishing two years in the Peace Corps, I decided to try to become a foreign correspondent. I had never worked as a journalist, but I had published occasional freelance articles in newspapers and magazines. From Fuling, I returned to my parents’ home in mid-Missouri, where I applied for jobs while writing a draft of River Town.
That fall and winter, I received nothing but rejections, almost all of them form letters. I still have the only personalized response, which had been sent by a recruiter at the Los Angeles Times on January 25, 1999. He was kind enough to offer words of praise, but his conclusion was disheartening:
Your writing is crisp and evocative, commanding without being overpowering . . . and you have a great eye for detail. In short, you seem to have the makings of a solid journalist.
Having said all that, I’m afraid I have some bad news. Generally speaking, we try to look for candidates with a minimum five years of experience at metropolitan dailies. As you can imagine, we receive quite a number of applications, some from among the most experienced journalists in the country. I’m afraid you would not be among the top level of candidates for a job here at this time.
When I received this letter, I was almost 30. The math was simple: If I spent five years at a small-city paper, followed by several more years establishing myself at a larger publication with overseas bureaus, I would be about 40 by the time I returned to China.
I had also been submitting my book manuscript to literary agents whose names I found on a list. Most responded with form rejections, but two expressed interest, with William Clark being the most enthusiastic. After I signed with William, he quickly sold the book to HarperCollins. In industry terms, the advance was modest, but it felt like a windfall to somebody who had just spent two years living on a Peace Corps stipend of $120 per month. The contract gave me the confidence necessary to return to China on my own, and in March of 1999 I left Missouri on a one-way ticket to Beijing.
I found a part-time position as an assistant in the Beijing bureau of The Wall Street Journal, and I freelanced in my spare time. Every six months, I took an overnight train to Shenzhen, walked across the border to Hong Kong, and purchased a half-year multi-entry business visa from a sketchy travel agency in Kowloon. Technically, it was illegal to work as a journalist with a business visa, but a number of other young freelancers in Beijing were doing the same thing.
Such patterns were common at the time. When I interviewed Chinese entrepreneurs, they often admitted to bending the rules, and sometimes they remarked that it was easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. Any risks that I took seemed trivial compared to those of the people I met every day. Some of my Fuling students had grown up in rural poverty but rose to become millionaires, entirely on the basis of initiative, hard work, and good timing. In the late 1990s and the 2000s, that was the China model: If somebody won’t give you an opportunity, create the opportunity yourself.
A year after arriving, during one of my visa runs, I stopped in Guangdong province. I had read about a village where restaurants specialized in rat, so I did a taste test, interviewed the owners, and submitted a story about the experience to The New Yorker. The magazine published that piece, and then the editors accepted another story; soon, they agreed to write letters of introduction to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The ministry registered me as The New Yorker’s representative in China, with a proper visa. At another government bureau, I paid a small fee and the staff carved out a legal chop, or ink seal, with The New Yorker’s name in Chinese and English. And that was it: I was officially a foreign correspondent.
Brendan O’Kane, another American writer who started out as a teacher in China, has referred to himself and other members of our generation as “feral sinologists.” Foreigners often arrived with minimal training, but the wide-open climate made it possible to learn on the ground. The Peace Corps produced more than its share of feral sinologists and journalists. Michael Meyer, a volunteer who taught in a decrepit Sichuanese town called Neijiang, went on to publish three acclaimed books about China. My own Peace Corps cohort was small—only 14 volunteers—but three of us went on to write China books. Rob Schmitz eventually served as NPR’s correspondent in Shanghai, and Craig Simons worked for Newsweek in Beijing before joining the U.S. State Department. Another volunteer who arrived in China four years later than us, Jake Hooker, eventually won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Beijing for The New York Times. As undergraduates, none of these Peace Corps writers had taken a single course in Chinese language, history, or politics.
The first time I returned to my alma mater of Princeton and met with professors at the East Asian Studies Department, I felt embarrassed that I had never set foot in the building as a student. But Perry Link, one of the most prominent China scholars in the country, couldn’t have welcomed me more warmly. I found this generally to be true in the field of China studies at the time. Scholars tended to respect grassroots experience, and they recognized the value of people arriving in China from different directions.
Years later, I better appreciated this openness. After China, I lived in Egypt from 2011 to 2016, and I found that Middle East specialists reacted differently to outsiders. My wife, Leslie T. Chang, had written a book about migrant women workers in China, Factory Girls, and in Egypt she also researched issues of women and labor. But regional scholars often pushed back against instances in which she used a Chinese perspective when analyzing Egypt. I had similar experiences; once, when I met with a dozen or so Ph.D. students in Cairo, they became aggravated by a reference to something I had observed in China. “You can’t talk about China!” one young European woman said angrily. “Egypt has nothing to do with China!”
But was this true? Like China, and unlike other Middle Eastern countries, Egypt was traditionally populous and agricultural; also like China, Egypt’s powerful sense of national identity comes in part from a direct connection to ancient civilization. In the modern era, both Egypt and China had been traumatized by Western imperialism; both suffered grinding poverty; both struggled to balance modern change with long-standing traditions, including the low status of women. But in that respect, their contemporary paths had diverged. Egypt remained among the world’s lowest in rates of female labor participation, whereas the Chinese had built an economic miracle in part upon the energy and drive of young women factory workers. Was there really nothing to be gained by former China journalists’ bringing their research perspectives to Egypt?
I realized that any discipline of regional studies is bound to acquire some characteristics of both the moment and the place. I had gone to China during an era of pragmatism and relative openness, qualities that also influenced the field of sinology at that time. But Egypt in the 2010s was very different. The Middle East was troubled, with a long history of ignorance on the part of Westerners, and the Iraq War and other misguided foreign interventions had left people wary. It wasn’t surprising that scholars and others had little patience for outside perspectives.
* * *
On July 24, 2020, about 15 hours after I met with the American diplomat, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that it was closing the Chengdu consulate. Over the next three days, I periodically stopped by the consulate walls to watch the crowds of Chengdu residents that gathered there. The mood was somewhere between curiosity and celebration, with people taking selfies in front of the gate that bore the official seal of the United States.
At home, Leslie and I had a couple of long conversations about the diplomat’s warning. I had planned to make a research trip to Wuhan the following month, and the safest thing would have been to cancel the project. But I had been in contact with residents of the city where the pandemic had started, and I wanted to interview people while their memories were still fresh. In the end, Leslie and I agreed that the diplomat’s worst-case scenario of an arrest was unlikely. Over the years, three of my books had become popular in Chinese translation, which made it harder to portray me as a spy. We figured that if the authorities wanted to get rid of me, they would probably find a quieter way to do so, like canceling a visa. I decided to continue with Wuhan and my other research projects.
In any case, it was difficult to anticipate reactions in a situation as volatile as the pandemic. My first long feature about the experience of living through Chengdu’s initial lockdown had been published in The New Yorker on March 30, 2020, just as the virus was starting to cause closures in the United States. On Chinese social media, some people criticized details in my account, believing that I had picked negative incidents. I described a video that had been sent by a friend in Fuling, where a middle-school boy, having argued with his parents about remote schooling, committed suicide by jumping from his family’s fifth-floor apartment. The story never appeared in the state press, and I couldn’t find the video on social media, where it must have been removed by authorities. Most of my former students from the 1990s were now teaching in middle schools or high schools in small cities, where they described many troubles with remote schooling, including a few more instances of unreported suicides or attempted suicides by children. From my perspective, it didn’t matter whether these were extreme cases. American readers entering lockdowns needed to be aware of potential psychological damage to children who were isolated.
In the same article, I described the initial cover-up in Wuhan and the tragic death of Li Wenliang, the ophthalmologist who had been silenced by authorities after he tried to warn former medical-school classmates about the new virus. For weeks, I had exchanged WeChat messages with a pharmacist at a large Wuhan hospital where many staff members had been infected. He often wrote angrily about local events:
My personal opinion is that the government has always been careless and they suppressed dissent. Those are two of the direct causes [of the early spread]. Because of this, they lost the golden opportunity to control the virus. . . I don’t believe the state-run media or read their reports.
But the situation had already changed dramatically during the relatively short span of time in which I reported that first article. The story ended with my family going out to dinner on March 8, 2020, our first restaurant meal since the lockdown had begun in late January. By that point, Chengdu had reported only three deaths, and there hadn’t been a locally transmitted symptomatic case in the city since February 20. Even some of the most outspoken critics of the government were now supportive of more effective policies that included a large investment in contact-tracing and quarantine facilities. Fang Fang, the Wuhan novelist whose online diary became a sensation, had bravely called out dishonest and incompetent cadres by name in the early weeks of the city’s lockdown. But on February 13, she wrote:
But one thing clear is that the government actions taken to control the outbreaks are proving to be increasingly effective. Over time, they are also gradually finding methods that are more humanistic.
This shift was part of what made China’s 2020 pandemic experience unique. For the most part, countries that made early mistakes never recovered: Once the disease gained a foothold, it became increasingly difficult to control the spread. Other than China, there was no other large country that did so many things wrong in the early weeks and then did so many things right in the months that followed. In August, when I visited Wuhan, I met with a young building-company manager who had worked on the construction sites of various emergency clinics and quarantine facilities during the city’s outbreak. “The pandemic is like a mirror,” the manager told me. “A person can see himself more clearly, both his good qualities and his bad qualities.”
This pandemic mirror applied to China as a whole. The first phase of the outbreak revealed many terrible qualities of the system: the lack of a free press, the brutal silencing of whistle-blowers, the tendency of local officials to lie and cover up problems. Later, in 2022, after I’d left China, the system would also show its weaknesses in the way that strict “zero-COVID” policies were maintained long after they should have been abandoned. But in between these two debacles was a long and important second phase that reflected China’s capacity to implement effective policies quickly, using neighborhood committees and other bureaucratic structures to carry out tasks like resident surveys and contact-tracing. This phase also benefited from many citizens’ willingness to work hard at labor-intensive measures to control the disease.
A number of my Sichuan University students volunteered to help neighborhood committees with various tasks during this period. As a resident, I experienced the impact of such efforts in almost every facet of my life. By April, I was traveling to Shanghai for research, on a plane without a single empty seat; by May, my twin daughters were back in their third-grade classroom, with no masks or social distancing; by August, I was meeting Fang Fang for an unmasked interview in a crowded Wuhan café. When I surveyed my classes that spring and fall, out of more than 120 students, nobody knew anybody who had been infected. The first infected individual whom I knew personally wasn’t from Wuhan, or Chengdu, or even China. He was William Clark, my agent. On January 28, William had been among the many U.S.-based friends who reached out with messages of concern. He wrote: “We’ve been thinking of you and the family during the coronavirus outbreak.” At the time, many people wondered why we didn’t leave China. Less than two months later, on March 24, I was the one checking in on William and his wife. He responded:
We’re fine, and in Brooklyn. Both of us have lost our senses of smell and taste, but still no fever or difficulty breathing. Our MD friends think we are towards the end of it.
Living through this experience, and writing about it, was distinctly strange. These reports were also targets for critics. For my second New Yorker piece about the pandemic, published on August 17, 2020, I focused on the public-health strategies that had proven effective that spring and summer. In response, I was attacked by a number of China specialists, some of whom had been colleagues in the 2000s. On Twitter, John Pomfret, the former Washington Post correspondent, compared me to Edgar Snow, the Communist sympathizer who had notoriously denied the effects of famine after touring China during the 1958-1962 Great Leap Forward, when tens of millions of Chinese starved to death. Lynne O’Donnell, an Australian journalist who had also been based in China, referred to me as a “collaborator.”
Both journalists were piling onto an attack from Geremie Barmé, an Australian emeritus scholar based in New Zealand. In a 3,700-word post on the website China Heritage, which Barmé publishes and edits, he compared me to Walter Duranty, a Russia correspondent for The New York Times who in the 1920s and 1930s had acted as an apologist for Stalin. Barmé claimed that I made “no mention of the widespread outrage of February-March regarding the way Xi Jinping and his government first ignored and then mishandled a major health emergency in Wuhan.” Of course, I had described these events in detail in my first 8,000-word piece about the pandemic. For my second story, I didn’t recount these incidents because they had just been covered, and I knew that I would revisit them again in my next piece about Wuhan. But like many other critics, Barmé avoided context; he simply didn’t refer or link to the earlier story. In his essay, he highlighted my visa status:
I would suggest that Mr Hessler is to my understanding engaging in unaccredited reporting, something that, strictly speaking, is illegal in China.
* * *
In the old days, it would have been unimaginable for a foreign-based academic to publish something that might expose a writer inside China to legal pressure. But that was the era of the feral sinologists, when there was a sense of community among the wide range of people engaged in trying to understand the country. Even before the pandemic, this community had largely collapsed because of the various crackdowns and restrictions under Xi Jinping. It had become harder to live in China, harder to research in China, and harder to write in China. Fortunately, technology allowed many experts to continue to do valuable work from afar, whether it involved analyzing Chinese social media, or tracking satellite images of internment camps in Xinjiang, or simply communicating regularly with long-time interlocutors inside the country.
But for certain things, like capturing the texture of daily life, there was no substitute for being in China. In that respect, we had entered the age of the sideline sinologists: the experts who hadn’t lived in China for years and in some cases couldn’t return at all. As one of the few foreign writers reporting from the country, the sense of isolation was profound. It often felt like standing alone at midcourt in a game in which virtually every other potential player has been transformed into a grumpy and hyper-critical color commentator.
For some sideline sinologists, anger at what China had become under Xi resulted in a kind of tunnel vision. They failed to recognize that for a writer in my position, witnessing the early stages of a pandemic, the story was at least as much about public health as it was about China. If I observed a bad policy in China, like the Chinese decision to keep children out of school longer than necessary, then I needed to write about it before the same issue confronted readers in the United States and other countries. In the same way, I had a responsibility to describe effective policies clearly and accurately. Writing about containment strategies that kept hundreds of millions of Chinese healthy in 2020 was not comparable to covering up the worst abuses of Joseph Stalin, nor was it deserving of terms like “collaborator,” which has strong connotations to foreigners who praised or appeased Nazi Germany.
I documented the early mistakes in Wuhan, but as time passed I became less comfortable with the American obsession with assigning blame for the pandemic. I noticed that epidemiologists and other scientists who specialized in disease seemed much less inclined to do this. “I tend to take a charitable view of countries that are at the beginning stage of epidemics,” Jennifer Nuzzo, then an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, told me on July 10, 2020, when we spoke on the phone. Referring to the virus’ ability to spread asymptomatically, Nuzzo said that it was unrealistic to expect that any country could have stopped it at the source. “I’ve always believed that this thing was going to spread,” Nuzzo said. Wafaa El-Sadr, the director of ICAP, a global-health center at Columbia University, told me that she viewed both COVID and HIV as part of a much larger issue, the encroachment of people on the natural world. “We are now living through two concomitant massive pandemics that are the result of spillover from animal to human hosts, the HIV and the Covid pandemics,” El-Sadr wrote me in an email, in May 2020. “Never in history has humanity experienced something along this scale and scope.”
And while Americans were furious at China’s initial missteps, they almost never saw any benefit in the country’s more successful subsequent policies. From a global perspective, this seemed obvious: In the summer of 2020, it was in humanity’s best interest to have as few infected people as possible. By effectively taking one-sixth of the world’s population out of viral circulation, China had made it less likely that variants were going to develop in the pre-vaccine era. The Delta variant, whose increased transmissibility sparked deadly second waves around the world, was first detected in India, the world’s other most populous country, in October 2020. Everybody on earth was better off without such variants also emerging in China during this dangerous pre-vaccine era. But such logic conflicted with basic human psychology. I sometimes sensed that China’s later success only made foreigners more upset about the country’s early mistakes.
This pattern reflected the zero-sum mindset that had contaminated so much thinking about China. Of course, such a mentality was promoted by the Chinese government itself, along with Chinese ultra-nationalists. Some Chinese seemed to take pleasure in the American failure to control the disease, and they had a hair-trigger sensitivity to any reference to Wuhan or to their country’s early mistakes. After I published my article about Wuhan, on October 12, 2020, a number of Chinese readers were upset that I had interviewed Fang Fang. By that point, she had been banned from publishing and participating in literary conferences or other events in China, and mainstream publications had been instructed not to print her name. She told me that I was the only foreign reporter with whom she met in person that year. Her American translator, Michael Berry, a professor at UCLA, also came under attack. In Berry’s account of this experience, Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary, he quotes a Chinese social media comment that described him and me as American propagandists enlisted to distract readers from a public-health catastrophe:
No matter how many writers like Michael Berry and Peter Hessler that the American fascists hire, their words will never be able to bring back the 210,000 [American] lives that have been lost.
One of my Sichuan University students, an English major who used the name Serena, became interested in the patterns of such attacks. Serena intended to become a journalist, and she started researching reactions to my pandemic coverage. She observed that the same story might be criticized as both pro-China and anti-China, depending on which side of the Pacific readers happened to be on. The only consistency seemed to be that everybody could always find something to be mad about.
On March 15, 2021, I published “Manufacturing Diplomacy,” an article about Chinese export entrepreneurs during the pandemic. In the story, I mentioned that my family had purchased a Honda CR-V, which had been produced in a factory in Wuhan. Even in the city that had represented ground zero of the pandemic, manufacturing had bounced back: Honda reported that, in 2020, its automobile sales in China had increased by five percent over the previous year. My family called the Honda our COVID car. In The New Yorker, I mentioned that when I drove to Sichuan University, I parked the COVID car in a garage beneath the College of Marxism.
A number of Chinese readers were unhappy about this positioning of the COVID car. One writer with the pseudonym Lin Yiwu responded with a 4,000-character criticism of my pandemic coverage, which was published on an open WeChat channel. “Mr. Ho Wei understands neither Marx nor contemporary China,” Lin wrote. He also took issue with the earlier article that had angered Geremie Barmé, although each writer cherry-picked different details to make opposing arguments. (Whereas Barmé described me as too supportive of the Communists, Lin believed that I was anti-China because I compared a scene on campus of masked, silent students converging on a package-delivering robot to something out of a horror film—“Children of the Corona.”)
In part because of censorship, anonymous commentary can be influential in China, and Lin’s post was read more than sixty thousand times. The following month, the Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute declined to renew my teaching contract. Some people saw a connection, although I doubted that it was so direct. My impression was that the larger atmosphere, with so much volatility and general unhappiness, had made certain administrators wary of keeping an American writer on staff.
As part of Serena’s research, she tracked down Lin Yiwu. He agreed to talk, although he wouldn’t tell her his real name. It turned out that Lin wasn’t a journalist or a professional critic; he was a highly educated young man who had formerly been a lawyer in London and Beijing. Now he worked as a translator and wrote nationalistic screeds in his free time. He told Serena that he was happy that the university had let me go. “It’s good that he’s leaving, because he’s too old,” he said. “He should go back to America and think more carefully about what he writes.”
After Serena tried to interview Sichuan University administrators about my situation, she was called in by college Party officials for the kind of conversation that Chinese refer to euphemistically as “drinking tea.” In Serena’s case, the tea-drinking also involved some tears, which she later said were largely performative. The final outcome of this miserable meeting was that Serena promised not to publish anything about my job or about the university’s decision to let me go. The next day, she sent me an email. Her message reminded me that few things in China are as heartbreaking as the patience of the young:
I will write about this “forbidden” topic 30 years later when things are better. I have an outline that I really like.
* * *
On at least one detail, I agreed with Lin Yiwu: I was too old for this. By the summer of 2021, I had had enough of conversations, public or private, about my possible prejudices, fears, visa status, perceived espionage activities, understanding of Karl Marx, and supposed similarities with various apologists for various atrocities throughout modern history. A few days before Leslie and our daughters were scheduled to fly out, an official from Sichuan University approached me and suggested that there might be a way for me to stay. The university seemed to be responding to a backlash against the decision—some students and other people in China were upset that I was leaving—and I couldn’t tell if the offer was sincere. In any case, we had already bought tickets and ended the lease on our apartment, and too much trust had been damaged by incidents like the one with Serena.
Near the end of July, a couple of weeks after my family was gone, I left China on a one-way ticket to Colorado. The night before departure, I drove the COVID car across Chengdu. In a perfect world, I would have cruised into the basement of the Marxism Institute, parked the vehicle, and headed off across the Pacific into the sunrise. But instead I dropped off the Honda with a friend.
Apart from the public side of being a writer, I enjoyed those two years in Chengdu. I couldn’t have been happier with my students at Sichuan University, and it was a pleasure to reconnect with the people I had taught in the 1990s. At Chengdu Experimental Primary School, where my daughters were the only American students, the administration and teachers behaved with the utmost class, protecting the girls against the anti-American sentiment of that period. As a journalist, I found people to be surprisingly open and engaging in interviews. This was especially true in Wuhan, where, in the summer of 2020, respondents spoke in honest and thoughtful ways about what they had just experienced. Unlike the government, they were unafraid to look into the mirror of the pandemic.
In the end, that reflection changed one last time. It turned out that my family and I were fortunate to leave when we did. The following year, in 2022, after vaccines had become widely available, and after the rise of the more infectious but less deadly Omicron variant, China entered the third phase of its pandemic policies, maintaining the zero-COVID strategy long after it should have been abandoned. The outcome was a brutal series of lockdowns in Shanghai and other cities, and the government squandered much of the goodwill that it had accumulated during the second phase. Once again, this failure reflected important things about the Chinese system: a tendency toward hubris and a stubborn resistance to change policy. It also seemed to indicate that too much power had been concentrated in the hands of one man who clearly exercised poor judgment when it mattered most.
The larger story, though, was that China was capable of both great failure and great success in the same pandemic. For anybody who engaged with the country, this shouldn’t have been a surprise; after all, the same Communist Party that created the horrendous internment camps in Xinjiang had also developed effective economic policies that enabled hundreds of millions of Chinese to lift themselves out of poverty. Whenever I encounter simplistic thinking about China, I remind people of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous remark from The Crack-Up:
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
Recently, I’ve noticed that the long second phase of the Chinese pandemic—more than a year and a half in duration—tends to be elided in the popular understanding. When I tell people that I lived in China in 2020 and 2021, they often assume that I spent the entire time locked in my apartment. Even Chinese sometimes confuse the timeframes. After reports appeared about my Honda being put up for sale, Sun Xuyang, the Beijing-based editor and writer, criticized my coverage:
[That Ho Wei] could experience the red-armband sentries, the corrugated metal walls, the endless PCR swabs, the temperature checks and QR-code scans and yet still defend them, is actually understandable. There is a Stockholm in every person’s heart.
In fact, I hadn’t experienced or defended the brutal lockdowns, which occurred more than half a year after my departure. When I lived in Chengdu, disease-control measures were present but hardly life-defining; my daughters actually took only three PCR tests in the span of a year and a half. (I had a few more, because I was often flying for research.) Without question, our lives would have been much disrupted if we had spent that period in the United States. Again, it’s necessary to hold two opposing ideas in mind at once: Describing a policy as effective and appropriate in 2020 does not mean an endorsement of that same policy two years later, after vaccines and Omicron have transformed the pandemic.
China’s complexity and many contradictions should also make us careful about predicting the future. Today’s China is not Mao’s China, and it’s not Stalin’s Soviet Union. There is no model or precedent: We have never witnessed an authoritarian system that has remained so repressive while experiencing so much material and educational improvement. The current moment is unquestionably dark, but tomorrow may be different. As a teacher, I have faith in the many young people like Serena, who was curious, hard-working, and tough-minded. I’ve also observed that of my former Fuling students, and of the other people I’ve known well since the 1990s, I can’t think of a single one who strikes me as having become more close-minded, more reactionary, and more ignorant over the years. In fact, the trend is precisely the opposite. In that regard, the transformation at the individual level runs directly against the grain of what’s happened with the political system. This is by no means a guarantee of change—systems have a way of overwhelming individual talent and decency. But between these two dynamics is an underlying tension, and within that tension lies hope.
It’s also worth remembering that specialists in any field are susceptible to the mood of the moment, for better and for worse. In recent years, there has been a marked trend toward intolerance of more moderate positions on China. Some sideline sinologists exaggerate certain details and take them out of context; at times, they don’t behave much better than the Chinese ultra-nationalists who hide behind false names. The goal is to demonize—for me, one of the most damning faults of Barmé’s essay was that he never contacted me for comment, explanation, or defense. If he had, he couldn’t have pretended that my first article about the pandemic didn’t exist, and he also would have known that by the time of his essay I had already gone to Wuhan to meet with Fang Fang and report at sensitive sites like the former Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. Barmé’s main point of attack—that I was avoiding topics that might get me in trouble—would have collapsed with even a short personal conversation.
Finally, there needs to be a fundamental respect for those who work in China. This doesn’t mean that they are above reproach, but criticism should be fair and in context. Writers in China are under tremendous pressure, and often they have made great efforts and sacrifices to live there. The legal system is flawed to such a degree that any foreign writer or journalist is always vulnerable, regardless of visa status or institutional support. Nobody standing on the sidelines should make any public comment that potentially exposes an in-country writer to unwelcome attention or pressure. It’s inappropriate to speculate about somebody’s visa status, just as it would be wrong to wonder publicly whether some aspect of a journalist’s reporting could be targeted by Chinese national security law; such details can be picked up by ultra-nationalists attacking from the other side. If you see somebody else do this, don’t blithely retweet or broadcast the comment as if it’s part of a legitimate discussion.
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In the 2000s, when I had a home in the countryside north of Beijing, local villagers occasionally trapped a feral pig. These were typically domestic animals that had escaped, and they flourished at a time when the rural human population was dwindling. It was amazing how quickly a pig in the wild will change physically, growing long tusks and thick hair.
Almost all the journalists I worked with 20 years ago are no longer in China. I worry that we’re losing the younger generation, because so much of the media industry has collapsed, and it’s hard to get a visa, and there are so many challenges to working in such a negative atmosphere. Most of the feral sinologists I knew in the Peace Corps have long since transformed into something else. Rob Schmitz is now the Berlin correspondent for NPR, and sometimes he reports from the war in Ukraine. Michael Meyer teaches at the University of Pittsburgh, and after finishing his three books about China, he wrote one about Ben Franklin and another about a Victorian activist for birth-control rights.
This spring, I took a job as a middle-school track coach in the small Colorado town where my family lives. Coaching has similar appeal to teaching: There’s something satisfying about showing a kid how to clear a hurdle or get her steps right for the long jump. Track is also appealing because, unlike in many other youth sports, parents tend to behave themselves on the sidelines.
In April, my Chengdu friend finally sold the COVID car. The transaction wasn’t complicated, and we didn’t end up using William Clark’s lead, although I’m fairly certain that William would not have taken an agent’s commission. The previous month, my family bought another Honda CR-V in Grand Junction, Colorado. This time, the color was dark blue instead of black, and the vehicle was manufactured in Ontario, Canada, rather than in Wuhan. But nobody should read too much into those details. Here in the mountains it doesn’t matter where I park.