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The writer of The New Yorker said that the Chinese university where he teaches non-fiction writing did not renew the contract for the next academic year.
Peter Hessler, an American writer and writer for the New Yorker magazine, said that the Chinese university where he has been teaching non-fiction writing has not renewed his contract for the next academic year, and he will leave China at the end of the semester.
Hesler has been an assistant professor at Pittsburgh College of Sichuan University in Chengdu since 2019.
Since 2000, he has been a staff writer for The New Yorker.
In a statement shared on the social media platform Douban on Sunday, he said he had hoped to continue teaching at the university, but was not awarded a contract for the next academic year. Reuters contacted Hesler and said he declined to comment outside of the statement.
The statement said: “What I want to emphasize is that after more than 20 years, I really enjoy going back to the classroom.”
It added that Hesler and his family will return to Colorado in the summer and did not elaborate on why his contract was not renewed.
He Yujia, a friend of Hessler, issued the statement on his behalf. He said that it appeared to have been deleted from Douban and she was not notified.
Minking Chyu, Dean of Pittsburgh College of Sichuan University, said Hessler has been working on a contract that needs to be renewed every year.
“His current contract will expire at the end of this academic year, and Peter and the Institute will not be able to reach a mutually agreed new contract in the future. This situation is very common in temporary appointments in the global academic community,” he told Reuters on Tuesday. Said in the email reply.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs told Reuters on Monday that it had no knowledge of the situation.
The New Yorker and Douban did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Since the 51-year-old Hessler moved to a small city in the Southwest as a volunteer English teacher for the United States Peace Corps for the first time in the mid-1990s, he has written four well-known English books on China, which became his 2001 non-fiction basic book ” River City.
Three Chinese translations of Hessler’s books on China are available on the mainland. An article in The New Yorker published in August last year was praised domestically for describing how China is responding to the COVID-19 epidemic.
In March, Hessler participated in the China Development Forum, a high-profile government-sponsored event. In a panel on media views, he discussed how the COVID-19 epidemic was handled in Wuhan, the city where China first appeared.
In recent years, China has increasingly curbed the influence of foreign countries in its education system. Last year, a draft rule was issued in which foreign teachers will be fired because their “words and deeds” are deemed to undermine national sovereignty.
As relations with the United States have fallen sharply due to the coronavirus pandemic, China’s treatment of Uyghurs, and the deteriorating trade dispute, it has also been suppressing foreign media and expelled more than a dozen American media organizations in 2020. reporter.
Washington has also reduced the number of reporters in the four major Chinese state-owned media that are allowed to work in the United States.
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