Peter Hessler’s coronavirus piece: privilege and self-censorship?

The latest controversy to rattle the rather esoteric and increasingly acrimonious world of China-watchers has been Geremie R. Barme's response to Peter Hessler's latest essay for the New Yorker, "How China Controlled the Coronavirus". The Australian Sinologist's attack on the American author is pretty savage; Barme accuses Hessler of self-censoring, of writing from a position of privilege, and of essentially being an apologist for the Chinese state.

I read Hessler's essay when it came out last month, and I have to say I was a bit disappointed. For one of the most perceptive Western writers on China it felt like a rather vacuous effort, if well-written as always. I learnt little new about China, or even about how the country brought the pandemic under control (in spite of not actually having been in China myself since January). The essay might be of more interest for people unfamiliar with China, but for those who know the country well it doesn't really say anything new.

On the other hand, the gist of Barme's criticism seems to centre around Peter Hessler's failure to talk about the really sensitive issues in today's China: the human rights abuses, the stifling of any dissent within academia, the total control over public life and people's movements which the coronavirus crisis has only intensified, and the initial public anger at the way the government handled the pandemic.

I happen to think that Barme's criticism is seriously over the top. Comparing Peter Hessler to Walter Duranty, the Moscow Bureau Chief of the New York Times from 1922 to 1936, is just unwarranted any way you look at it. Duranty was an apologist for Stalinism who infamously denied the dreadful Soviet famines of 1932-33, claiming that "any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda", even as millions starved in Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR. Even once he was back in America, he defended Stalin's show trials.

Apart from the fact that China today is not Stalin's USSR, Hessler is also no Duranty. You only need to read his books to see that. They are often intelligently critical of the country, and certainly don't whitewash its bad sides. In his most famous book, River Town, a description of his two years teaching English literature in a small town in Sichuan, Hessler doesn't hide his disdain for the propaganda in the school textbooks he had to use, nor does he shy away from describing the Chinese as "colonizers" while writing about a trip to Xinjiang. Same goes for his later books. This is no apologist for the CPC. 

Hessler's latest essay cannot fairly be described in such terms either. He is not simply repeating the talking points of government propaganda, and in fact at one point he does touch upon some of the most delicate issues: 

"As the spring wore on, conversations often included a standard conclusion: the pandemic showed that Chinese value life over freedom, whereas Americans take the opposite approach. I disliked such simplifications, which failed to consider the initial Chinese coverup of the virus, or the government’s policies in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, or the fact that any number of democracies were handling the crisis much better than the Americans."

Barme notes that a translated version of the essay has been circulated on the Chinese internet "with official sanction", and that Hessler is now being described as a "Good American". He fails to point out however that the translation is censored: for instance, the last sentence in the quote above is left out. It is easy to turn a balanced piece into a propaganda coup when you censor the bits that don't fit your narrative. The problem here isn't so much Hessler's writing, as much as a censorship for which he bears no blame.

A bit further down, Hessler also states that "many aspects of the Chinese strategy could never be adopted in America or in any other democracy" (this was purposefully mistranslated in the Chinese version as "any other country"). All in all it is clear that this is hardly an article fit for China Daily, and Hessler's points aren't unreasonable. It isn't unreasonable to claim that China has been successful at controlling the pandemic, because it clearly has been. Yes, many neighbouring countries haven't done badly either, but given China's size and the fact that the pandemic started there, the system's success at bringing new infections down to virtually nil has been quite impressive. It also isn't unreasonable to ask whether some aspects of the Chinese approach might have something to teach the US, which has had 50 times more deaths.

And yet, I can see where some of the criticism is coming from. At one point in River Town Hessler writes about the way that he and his fellow American Peace Corps volunteers always seemed to have the effect of encouraging their students in Fuling to be questioning and irreverent, perhaps too much for their own good. He puts the reason down to this: "we were waiguoren (foreigners), and we didn’t have that voice in the back of our minds that warned us when certain lines were being crossed.” After spending so long in China, Hessler has clearly developed that voice in the back of his mind. At some points it feels like he really is trying to describe some sort of "Kumbaya China", as Barme puts it. Take this quote:

Serena’s response to her nonfiction experience—first rejected, then denied credit—was to ask politely if she could finish out the term’s work and then do it over again in the spring, this time on the books. That was one tradition that hadn’t changed: in China, a student always respects her teacher, even if the teacher is a moron.

It is interesting that Hessler should say this, because in December last year there were rumours that he had been reported by one of his own students at Sichuan University for teaching content that was "subversive" or "offensive to China". While it is unclear whether this actually happened, and Hessler still seems to be teaching there quite happily, plenty of other Chinese university professors have been reported by their own students in recent years, and there is no way Hessler isn't aware of this.

Or take this excerpt:

But I worried about my daughters, who were the only Westerners at a school of some two thousand students. Our isolation increased throughout the spring: most of my American acquaintances had left, and it became rare to see a non-Chinese person on the street. At the end of May, the twins told my wife, Leslie, and me that a boy in their class had made some anti-American comments, but we didn’t say anything to the teacher. Virtually all of the girls’ classmates treated them warmly, and, with everything on the news, it seemed inevitable that there would be scattered instances of anti-American sentiment. That week, George Floyd had been killed, and the American death toll from the coronavirus was approaching a hundred thousand.

The teacher, though, responded quickly. The following Monday, she stood before the class and told a story that, in the Chinese way, emphasized science, education, and effort. She talked about Elon Musk, and she described how his California-based company had successfully launched a manned rocket into space the previous weekend. At the end of the story, she said, “Every country has its strong points and its weak points.”

It's great that Hessler and his family didn't have any trouble, and that the teacher at his daughter's school was so enlightened. Being stuck in a campus in Chengdu probably helped. Out in China's big coastal cities, however, there were quite a few instances of discrimination against foreigners, and particularly against the African community in Guangzhou, who were targeted in an unacceptable fashion both by local people and local officials after a few of their number tested positive.

The fact is that there has been plenty of nastiness in China's response to the pandemic that Hessler doesn't mention, or only mentions in a very oblique fashion. Hessler cannot have failed to notice the exceptional (and quickly forgotten) wave of public anger in early February after the death of a whistleblowing doctor, and yet he doesn't mention it at all. Perhaps he has forgotten it too, but more likely he just doesn't feel comfortable talking about it. 

The crux of the matter is that Peter Hessler currently lives and works in China, and just like all those who do he has to measure his words carefully. Officially accredited foreign reporters have far more leeway (although even they may find their visas revoked if they really cross the line), but Hessler is not one of those. In theory he could even be accused of breaking the law by engaging in unaccredited reporting, as Barme points out. He certainly knows that if he wants to carry on with his life in Chengdu he needs to tread carefully, and only mention sensitive issues in passing and obliquely, or not at all.

It wasn't like this ten or twenty years ago, when Hessler wrote his books. Censorship was far more lax in general, for certain, but also Westerners living in China seemed to enjoy a certain level of immunity: as long as you didn't write in Chinese or try and appeal directly to the Chinese public, you could say almost anything you wanted. This has changed, and nowadays any writer based in China will feel the presence of that invisible censor peering over their shoulder as soon as they stray into dangerous territory. I am pretty sure that even Hessler's decision to use the turn of phrase "China was the first country to experience the pandemic" was taken because it has become impossible to openly state that the virus originated in China.

Barme claims that Hessler has "unexamined Caucasian privilege", leading him to write the way he does, but if anything it may be the opposite: part of the reason Hessler is so cautious is the fact that being white or having a foreign passport no longer affords you much protection. The real question that should be asked is whether it is problematic for Hessler to continue explaining the country to the outside world, when he finds himself in a situation where he has to measure every word carefully and make sure he doesn't cross any "red lines". On the ground reporting is valuable of course, but then so is the chance to give the full picture without self-censoring.