34 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
The author, lower left, with other China 3 volunteers in front of the Forbidden City, in Beijing, in 1996.
LETTER FROMFULING
BROKEN BONDS
The Peace Corps exits China, ending a cultural tie.
BY PETERHESSLER
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY THE AUTHOR
O
n the morning of January 17th,
shortly before I was scheduled to
meet with a hundred and forty Peace
Corps volunteers in Chengdu, the capi
tal of Sichuan Province, there was an un
expected 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 inser
vice 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 vol
unteers, most of whom were in their
twenties, looked stunned; some were
redeyed from crying. At the back of
the room, more than a dozen Chinese
staff members stood with stoic expres
sions. They had given up some benefits
of the Chinese system in order to work
for the American agency. From the ceil
ing, somebody had hung a red propa
gandastyle banner, which proved that
Americans could make their slogans
every bit as tonedeaf 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 some
thing to the effect that the tree she
wished to have seen was a tactful an
nouncement, 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.
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 corona
virus had yet to come to widespread at
tention, and the Senators, who had pre
viously expressed doubts about a Chinese
trade deal, tweeted the day after Pres
ident Trump signed a Phase 1 economic
agreement with China.
“For too long, Beijing has fooled or
ganizations 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 hardliners also celebrated.
In Guanchazhe, a conservative publica
tion, a columnist named Pan Gongyu
published a commentary, “Farewell,
Peace Corps in China, We Won’t See
