On the morning of January 17th, shortly before I was scheduled to meet with a hundred and forty Peace Corps volunteers in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, there was an unexpected 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 in-service 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 volunteers, most of whom were in their twenties, looked stunned; some were red-eyed from crying. At the back of the room, more than a dozen Chinese staff members stood with stoic expressions. They had given up some benefits of the Chinese system in order to work for the American agency. From the ceiling, somebody had hung a red propaganda-style banner, which proved that Americans could make their slogans every bit as tone-deaf 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 something to the effect that the tree she wished to have seen was a tactful announcement, 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 coronavirus had yet to come to widespread attention, and the Senators, who had previously expressed doubts about a Chinese trade deal, tweeted the day after President Trump signed a Phase 1 economic agreement with China.

“For too long, Beijing has fooled organizations 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 hard-liners also celebrated. In Guanchazhe, a conservative publication, a columnist named Pan Gongyu published a commentary, “Farewell, Peace Corps in China, We Won’t See You Off.” The title echoed “Farewell, Leighton Stuart!,” a famous essay that Mao Zedong wrote in August, 1949. That month, the U.S. State Department had issued a white paper that, in more than a thousand tortured pages, tried to explain how America had “lost” China to Mao’s revolutionaries: “This is a frank record of an extremely complicated and most unhappy period in the life of a great country to which the United States has long been attached by ties of closest friendship.”

In his essay, Mao derided American democracy as “another name for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,” and he celebrated the departure of John Leighton Stuart, the last U.S. Ambassador to China under the Kuomintang government. For years, the isolationist essay was part of the school curriculum, and many Chinese people recognize the ending: “Leighton Stuart has departed and the White Paper has arrived, very good, very good. Both events are worth celebrating.”

In Guanchazhe, Pan described the Peace Corps’s “ideological and cultural export” as another chapter in American failure: “After twenty-seven years in China, the U.S. diplomatic offices intended to ‘raise wolves,’ but ended up with a litter of huskies.” He concluded, “The Peace Corps has departed and the U.S.-China Trade Agreement is here, very good, very good. Both events are worth celebrating.”

In the fall of 1996, the Peace Corps sent me to teach English to college students in Fuling, a remote city on the Yangtze River. I was twenty-seven years old, and I was joined by another volunteer, Adam Meier, who was twenty-two. Not long after we arrived, a student named Richard submitted an essay to my writing class titled “Why Americans Are So Casual.” Richard was skinny, shy, and bespectacled. He had grown up in Fuling, and most of his classmates came from the Sichuanese countryside. At the time, China’s population was more than seventy per cent rural, and only eight per cent of students went to college. Adam and I were the first Americans to live in Fuling since the Revolution. In his essay, Richard wrote, in English:

Our foreign language teachers—Peter and Adam—came to teach us this term. It provides a good opportunity of understanding the American way of life. In my opinion, they are more casual than Chinese people. Why do I think so? I’ll give you some facts to explain this.

We were part of a Peace Corps cohort known as China 3. The agency’s groups have always been numbered, perhaps because it implies a sense of mission. The Peace Corps was founded by President John F. Kennedy, in 1961—the year of Saturn 1 and Sputnik 9. In the same way that the Apollo rockets went up in sequence, each Peace Corps cohort was intended to travel to a distant land, build on the work of its predecessors, then return home. And, just like the rockets, the Peace Corps was a Cold War endeavor. It was inspired by “The Ugly American,” a 1958 novel that warned readers that the Soviets were doing a better job of grassroots work in the developing world. The Peace Corps had three goals: to provide useful assistance to “interested countries,” to improve understanding of the United States, and to help Americans understand the rest of the world.

By the time I joined, relatively few volunteers were aware of these Cold War roots. Time had moved on, or maybe it had stopped—this was the era of “The End of History and the Last Man,” the 1992 book by Francis Fukuyama, who declared the triumph of Western liberal democracy. In 1996, the Peace Corps was sending volunteers to Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, and other former Soviet-bloc states that had supposedly transitioned to democracy. China was the only Communist country that accepted volunteers.

Deng Xiaoping had welcomed the Peace Corps as part of his Reform and Opening strategy, but some Chinese officials weren’t convinced that Americans should be working in remote places like Fuling. They referred to the program by a euphemism—Meizhong Youhao Zhiyuanzhe, or “U.S.-China Friendship Volunteers”—because the Chinese translation of “Peace Corps” had been tainted by years of Maoist propaganda. The first three cohorts were small, which made it easier for the government to track us. The curiosity of locals was even more intense. Richard’s essay continued:

“Can you come look under my bed? It seems like a complete waste of storage space.” Facebook

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Shopping Cartoon by P. C. Vey