Journalist and writer Peter Hessler delivers the 2026 Zeidman Memorial Lecture.

In 1996, Peter Hessler paid 25 cents for a boat ride to an outcropping of rock, known as White Crane Ridge, which peeked up out of the Yangtze River in Fuling, China. White Crane Ridge is inscribed with 12 centuries of fishermen’s observations on water levels, weather, and fishing conditions—it’s a remarkable archaeological site. But Hessler, then a Peace Corps volunteer, knew that big changes were on the horizon, including a dam project that would swallow White Crane Ridge entirely.

The massive and looming Three Gorges Dam initiative provided the backdrop for Hessler’s first book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, in which he details a China on the precipice of change. It’s a beat he has continued for 30 years as an author and a writer for The New Yorker. Before an audience of hundreds at Sidwell Friends, Hessler gave the keynote address at this year’s Zeidman Memorial Lecture, in which he detailed his exploration of modern China, then and now—also the subject of his latest book, Other Rivers: A Chinese Education.

A large part of Hessler’s success dates back those early days as an English teacher at rural Fuling Teachers College, where he taught and then befriended a generation of twentysomethings raised by Maoists. Over the decades, Hessler kept up a staggering level of correspondence with 100 of his students, giving his written work a ground-level and near-sociological perspective. “Those young people were already extraordinary just by being in college,” he said of his students. “In 1996, only 8 percent of Chinese people went to college, and the country was 83 percent rural.”

The students were also quite small and undernourished. They had few possessions and often wore the same clothes day after day. Many had seen intellectuals punished under Mao and diverted to jobs like cleaning and coal-mining. And Fuling itself felt a world away: It was eight hours by ferry to the nearest city, Chongqinq. The lowest parts of Fuling near the river were degraded and unimproved, as they’d soon be submerged when the Three Gorges Dam would transform the landscape. And what of White Crane Ridge? In a backwater town with zero tourism, the local paper nevertheless had theories: everything from collecting rubbings of the centuries-old inscriptions to building an underwater museum.

Over the years, Hessler’s 100 students started to get married, have children, and make their way in an economically burgeoning nation. While in the 1990s, the students could expect to make $500 a year, they now command nearly $38,000 (as of 2024) as English professors. And their universities, too, have grown. With more than half the population getting a college degree by 2019, schools like Fuling Teachers College saw enrollment spike tenfold.

What’s more, many students embraced the nation’s new entrepreneurial spirit: One student made a fortune selling walkie-talkies to one of the country’s largest labor forces: construction workers. Another sells external elevators, retrofitting thousands of 12-story walk-ups into more user-friendly buildings. Of course, the spread of capitalism across China has also meant the spread of fiscal inequality (the top .001 percent now own as much as the bottom 50 percent), rivaling if not surpassing America’s own wealth gap.

These days, China is also overwhelmingly urban. And the eight-hour ferry ride from Fuling to Chongqinq is now a brisk 38 minutes by high-speed rail. The air quality is noticeably better; the rivers are cleaner. The Chinese are even standing taller, with men now 3.5 inches taller on average than in the 1990s.

“I was lucky to ride the changes of reform,” said Hessler, who returned to Fuling recently. After all, he had to check out the new $34 million underwater museum for White Crane Ridge.

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The John Fisher Zeidman ’79 Chinese Studies Fund, created in his memory by family and friends in 1982, advances the study of Chinese language, history, and culture at Sidwell Friends. Since its inception, the Chinese Studies Program has grown significantly and includes the annual John Fisher Zeidman ’79 Memorial Lecture. For questions about the program please contact Helen Schreiber, director of donor engagement and strategic initiatives, at schreiberh@sidwell.edu.