While it’s not new (but new to me), here is an interesting talk on C-SPAN by Peter Hessler, best known as the author of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze
Particularly interesting for people new to China or looking for some even-handed information on China is the Q&A period mid-way through the talk. If you don’t have much time (the whole video is nearly an hour), I suggest jumping over to the source page and checking out the chapter breakdown to cherry pick some of the more interesting questions.
The Summary from FORA.tv
Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present featuring Peter Hessler
Hessler discusses his book Oracle Bones, which compares modern day China to its past. The title is derived from an archaeological site in China where the earliest form of writing was found inscribed on shells and bones. During this discussion, Mr. Hessler reads letters from young Chinese students who migrated from the countryside to the rapidly growing cities.
Peter Hessler is Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker. He also writes for National Geographic. His earlier book on being a Peace Corps volunteer in China is called “River Town.”
H/T to FORA.tv and Adam Daniel Mezei.
Ryan came to China in the wee morning of 2005 as a way to get to Australia. He assumes there's still a visa waiting for him at the Sydney airport. 
Hessler is quite possibly a nice enough guy — we actually corresponded once (by email), very briefly, back in 2006/06, when he sent some original copy to the magazine I was at the time editing. He was accommodating, sincere, and I presume understanding when the local government (at the 11th hour) demanded I pull the piece. But here are my problems with Hessler.
Let me say that, in fact, none of my issues have anything to do with his writing qua writing. He has matured as a wordsmith, and Oracle Bones is very well-crafted. It’s rather how he got into the China-writing game that bothers me — and if you care about good China-writing it should bother you too.
So far as I can tell, Hessler’s stint in the Peace Corps (which got him to Fuling) seems to have been calculated to get him on the fast-track to publishing — he’s shared with readers enough about personal life, background, and his time at the feet of John McPhee to warrant that inference. Not that there’s anything wrong with that per se; its just that, when someone sets out to discover a place or a people with a specific view to writing about it or them, they tend to see things in editorial terms — how to describe this, how to explain that, etc.
I know this from my personal experience as a travel and feature writer. When my team and I descended upon, say, some village in Lishui (Zhejiang Province) with the publisher’s brief to bring back photos and stories about where to go and what to see and what to eat (etc), we hit the ground focused on that task. We taste the food knowing that every mouthful is a rough draft; we tune-in to the sounds of our assigned locale with a journalist’s ear, and scan the horizon with a photographer’s eye. That’s a casualty of writing for a living, and it is tricky to get around.
One can’t fault Hessler too much for sins endemic to the profession.
Its just that, the younger Hessler of River Town landed in China not merely the innocent abroad who turned to writing, but a MSWord mercenary, knowing rather clearly that this country and her people were grist for his future mill. (If you’ve done a lot of traveling and writing, you can smell this kind of thing.) What’s more, his observations suggest strongly that he has never really engaged China, so much as siphoned just enough color, tone, and pedestrian insight to satisfy his readers’ hankering for dirt on ‘the real China’. Little wonder his editors/publishers adore him. Like his mentor McPhee, Hessler is safe, formulaic, witty, and after a while totally predictable — the Garrison Keillor of the Far East.
Hessler’s China might be fascinating for those who don’t know the place or people, but for those who do, the content of his admittedly well-written essays and books is trite and aenemic. It is a pity that he is feted as a kind China expert. He is not. He’s a long-term tourist with a laptop and expense account from America’s intellectual-Lite clearinghouses for NPR-style voyeurism.
This might sound harsh, and needlessly ad hominem; but, you need to read Hessler carefully, and pause now and then to think about the man telling you the story. In Fuling, he comes down awfully hard (shamefully so, in fact) on the young girl he assumes is a prostitute — pity, because he would have learned a lot more about Fuling and about China if he didn’t brush her off with brahminic disgust. He also took part in a local road-race (read: by the locals, for the locals) that he surely knew he was likely to win (not a very friendly gesture from out Peace Corps ambassador), and – at his school’s banquet – got drunk and ran around shooting plastic pellets at his lao’wai fellow teacher. (Oxford graduate? Is that right?) These behaviours say loads about the man; and if it is ‘ad hominem’ to evaluate a foreign correspondent partially in terms of his actions, so be it. I do not see how someone who gets squeamish at the thought of chatting with a hooker (if hooker/’sanpei’ she was) can be a very good journalist, in a country where business and government involve copious amounts of Chivas, cigarettes, and ass.
The older, wiser Hessler of Oracle Bones again gets fidgety in the presence of sexual vice, this time in a bar/ktv joint (I forget which) in Beijing — there’s that good Catholic upbringing again, being judgmental and a-prioristic. He complains when Chinese law enforcement personnel demand to see his passport (etc) when Hessler pitches a tent on/near the Great Wall, as if it is old-school Red thuggery for the Chinese constabulary to require a foreigner to obey the law. Most puzzling perhaps is when Hessler very bizarrely devotes a few paragraphs to tell the reader about his attempts to persuade his former student to feed a live baby duck to an alligator/crocodile in a Shenzhen zoo. (Shrinks from contact with prostitutes; awkward and self-conscious at a KTV; wants desperately to see a large reptile eat a duckling. Hmm. You connect the dots).
Throughout the book plays fast and lose with (eg) prices/wages (now in $USD, now in RMB, depending on whether he wants something to seem expensive or insanely cheap), and in general packages a vision of China that is not too offensive to his Chinese hosts/friends/et al. but which hits enough of the right points to ensure that Chinwatchers will love it — love it like crocs love fresh young poultry.
Hessler is to China-writing what Sue Williams is to China-filmmaking: Better than a hamfisted hack, for sure, but no more than another bright middle class yahoo hopelessly compromised by his prejudices, weak-kneed, and and soft around the middle — no doubt the latter condition coming from being suckled so long on the teat of The New Yorker. It’s not his fault that he was born with a silver spoon up his arse, and I don’t begrudge him his good fortune.
Well, actually, I do. He enjoys his commercial success because his academic pedigree and connections – and not his talent as an observer – opened doors for him.
Read his books, because they are not terrible. But read them on library loan. Let someone else subsidize undeserving mediocrity.