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U.S. writer Peter Hessler has left China after losing coaching career | Another Story

A New Yorker writer says that at a Chinese university where he teaches fiction he did not form a union in the following academic year.

American writer and New Yorker journalist Peter Hessler says the Chinese university where they teach fiction has not made their union the following academic year and that they will leave the country by the end of the semester.

Hessler has been an assistant professor at the Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute in Chengdu since 2019.

He has been a New Yorker employee since 2000.

In a statement shared with the media on Douban on Sunday, he said he hoped to continue teaching at the university but was not offered a contract next year. Arriving by Reuters news agency, Hessler said he declined to comment other than what he said.

“I would like to say that I am very happy to be back in the classroom after more than two decades,” the statement said.

He further added that Hessler and his family had returned to Colorado this summer and did not say why his contract had not been renewed.

Hessler’s colleague He Yujia, who wrote this on his behalf, said it appeared to have been removed from Douban and had not been notified.

Minking Chyu, dean of the Sichuan University Pittsburgh Institute, says Hessler has been working under an agreement that requires renewal every year.

“His current alliance is nearing the end of this academic year and Peter and the Institute are failing to deliver on a future agreement. This is very common in placing temporary nominees in student groups around the world,” he said in an email to Reuters on Tuesday.

China’s foreign ministry told Reuters on Monday it was unaware of the situation.

New Yorker and Douban did not respond promptly to the request for comment.

Hessler, 51, has written four well-known English books in China since he became a volunteer English teacher at the US Peace Corps in the mid-1990s to a small town in the southwest, which formed the basis of his fictional story. 2001 book “River Town”.

Three Hessler Chinese books available in China are available on the ground, and a new New Yorker piece published last August has been praised in the country for demonstrating China’s response to the COVID-19 epidemic.

In March, Hessler took part in the China Development Forum, a well-known government event, in which he addressed a panel of observers on the spread of COVID-19 in Wuhan, a Chinese city where it first appeared.

China has been reducing foreign power in its studies in recent years, and last year enacted laws that would see foreign teachers fired for “words and actions” that appear to undermine the country’s sovereignty.

It has been battling foreign journalists and removing more than a dozen journalists working in US news organizations by 2020 as relations with the United States deteriorated due to the coronavirus epidemic, China’s support for Uighurs and growing trade tensions.

Washington also reduced the number of journalists in the four major Chinese state-owned enterprises allowed to operate in the US.




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