American writer Peter Hessler will leave China after losing his teaching job at China News

The New York writer says the Chinese university, which teaches fiction writing, has not renewed its contract for the next academic year.

U.S. author Peter Hessler and New Yorker magazine writer said the Chinese university, which has been teaching fiction writing, has not renewed its contract for the next academic year and will leave the country by the end of the semester.

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

He has been a New York staff writer since 2000.

In a statement released via social media platform Douban on Sunday, he said he hoped to continue teaching at the university, but was not offered a contract for the next academic year. At the hands of Reuters news agency, Hessler said he did not want to comment beyond the statement.

“I want to emphasize that I really enjoyed going back to the classroom after more than twenty years,” the document says.

He added that Hessler and his family would return to Colorado this summer and did not specify why his contract was not renewed.

Hessler’s friend He Yujia, who issued a statement on his behalf, said he was later removed from Douban and not informed.

Minking Chyu, dean of the Pittsburgh Institute at Sichuan University, said Hessler works under a contract that requires annual renewal.

“His current contract is coming to an end at the end of this school year and Peter and the Institute cannot get a new contract agreed in the future. This situation is very common in temporary meetings of the academic community around the world,” he told Reuters in an email on Tuesday.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry told Reuters on Monday that it was unaware of the situation.

New York and Douban did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Hessler, 51, has written four well-known books in English about China since moving to the United States as a volunteer English teacher for U.S. Peace Volunteers in the mid-1990s, becoming the basis for the 2001 nonfiction. the book “River Town.”

Hessler’s three Chinese-language books on China are available on the peninsula, and a New York article published last August was praised within the country, explaining how China handled the COVID-19 outbreak.

In March, Hessler attended the China Development Forum, a high-level government event, where he spoke about how media relations were managed at the COVID-19 event in Wuhan, the first city in China.

In recent years, China has had an increasing influence on foreign education in its education system, and last year introduced draft rules that would expose foreign words and “deeds” that foreign teachers consider to be detrimental to the country’s sovereignty.

He has also been expelled from foreign media and expelled more than a dozen journalists who worked for U.S. media outlets in 2020. In 2020, relations with the United States led to a coronavirus pandemic, China’s treatment of Uyghurs and a serious trade dispute.

Washington has also reduced the number of journalists in the four major Chinese state-run media outlets licensed to work in the U.S.