Yuan Yang was born in China but moved to the UK when she was four. She returned to China in 2016 as a journalist for the Financial Times and is now their Europe-China correspondent. As such she brings a uniquely personal perspective to the massive economic and cultural shifts shaping China in the 21st century.
Over a period of several years, Yang conducted extensive interviews with four ordinary women born during the 1980s and 1990s, the period following the era of China’s Reform and Opening Up, when private enterprise and market mechanisms began to supersede the centrally controlled state system.
Contrary to government propaganda, these developments have not bestowed unlimited freedoms and social benefits on China’s population. On the contrary, as these four women make clear, intractable problems such as rising state censorship and surveillance, the urban-rural divide, inequalities in education and health care provision and the exploitation of low-waged workers in the manufacturing and service sectors continue to thwart the opportunity to prosper for most people.
The four young women whose personal revolutions we follow are: Leiya, desperate to escape the preordained destiny of women in the patriarchal rural village where she was born; June, from a remote mountain village who becomes inspired to attend university by meeting a gifted teacher; Siyue who rebels against the strictures of the education system by reforming it for other students; and Sam who sees the restoration of the old Marxist revolutionary ethos as China’s way forward.
In focusing on the lived experiences of women we can relate to, their families and day-to-day struggles to make their lives mean something, Yang has translated the sweeping and anonymous canvas of China’s changing social order into an intimate and moving account. Private Revolutions is a remarkable and fascinating book and essential reading for anyone wanting to know what’s going on behind the news reports.
Reviewed by Anne Green
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Yuan Yang is a columnist and Europe-China correspondent at the Financial Times and the co-founder of the charity “Rethinking Economics,” which campaigns for economics curriculum that is pluralist, realistic, diverse and decolonized.
She read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford and has a Masters in Economics from the London School of Economics.
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