Peter Hessler on China

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.6 • 907 Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2025

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Yascha Mounk and Peter Hessler describe how China has changed over the last 30 years–and where it might go next. For more than a quarter of a century, Peter Hessler has been a staff writer for the New Yorker. In 1996, he joined the Peace Corps and taught English language and literature to college students in Fuling, a small city on the Yangtze River. In 2019, Hessler returned to China, teaching at Sichuan University during the pandemic. His most recent book, Other Rivers (2024), is about his time in Sichuan. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Peter Hessler discuss Peter’s experiences as a teacher in China in the 1990s and in recent years, how his students have changed, and what he thinks the United States could learn from China. Podcast production by Jack Shields and Leonora Barclay. Connect with us! ⁠Spotify⁠ | ⁠Apple⁠ | ⁠Google⁠ X: ⁠@Yascha_Mounk⁠ & ⁠@JoinPersuasion⁠ YouTube: ⁠Yascha Mounk⁠, ⁠Persuasion⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Last year, Amazon was the world's largest corporate buyer of renewable energy.
0:07.0	Seeing all and more of our energy comes from wind bombs like this one.
0:14.0	Guys, what happened to recording that a solar bomb?
0:18.0	To learn more,
0:22.1	is it about Amazon.com at UK forward slash sustainability?
0:30.9	China is unusual because it's been, first of all, it's been successful in the last, you know,
0:34.5	30 years pretty much.
0:36.1	But it's also, it's been there for so long. The party's been in power since 1949, right? And so you have, you know, 30 years pretty much. But it's also, it's been there for so long.
0:37.6	The party's been in power since 1949, right? And so you have, you know, even the leader of
0:42.2	China, Xi Jinping was born in that system. I mean, he doesn't remember anything before
0:46.9	1949, right? There's, so everybody is just, it just becomes part of who you are. Your expectation
0:53.1	is that you deal with it. You find your, you know, your way you are. Your expectation is that you deal with it.
0:55.0	You find your way to cope.
0:57.4	Your expectation is not that you should have something different.
1:01.0	And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
1:10.5	The conflicts in American politics are going into overdrive and at the same time we see a dangerous war between Israel and Iran that is showing signs of escalating further with a possible entry into this war by the United States.
1:30.5	Persuasion, I think, is doing a really good job covering this conflict.
1:35.2	So if you don't yet get those emails, please go to persuasion.comunity in order to keep up to date.
1:42.6	And we hope to have an episode of this podcast with Francis Fukuyama
1:47.4	about the current situation in the world for you this coming week. In the meanwhile, I'm sharing
1:55.2	with you slightly less timely, but I think just this important conversation. I'm currently in China, and one of the
2:02.5	things that I'm struck by here is the extent to which Americans really don't understand
	...

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