Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China's New Social Order

by Yuan Yang

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A stark look at China through a striking new lens. Digging into the every day life of four women subjected to unfair rules and limitations, this is a poignant portrait of today's China.

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE PICK
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NONFICTION

“Riveting . . . a powerful snapshot of four young Chinese women attempting to assert control over the direction of their lives.” —The New York Times Book Review

“As powerfully intimate as it is politically incendiary.” —British Vogue

A sweeping yet intimate portrait of modern China told through the lives of four ordinary women striving for a better future in a highly unequal society

While serving as the deputy Beijing bureau chief of the Financial Times, Chinese-British journalist Yuan Yang began to notice common threads in the lives of her Chinese peers—women born during China’s turn toward capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, who, despite the country's enormous economic gains during their lifetimes, were coming up against deeply entrenched barriers as they sought to achieve financial stability.

The product of seven years of intimate, in-depth reporting, this transporting and indelible book traces the journey of four such women as they try to make better lives for themselves and their families in the new Chinese economy. June and Siyue are among the few in their villages to graduate high school. Each makes her way to Beijing, June as a young professional and Siyue an entrepreneur. Like Siyue, Leiya lives with her grandparents in their village while her parents send money home; yearning for a different life than those of the women she sees around her, Leiya soon joins her parents in Shenzhen as an underage factory worker. Born to an urban middle-class family, Sam is outraged when her eyes are opened the poor treatment of workers, and becomes a labor activist, increasingly under threat by the authorities.

As the women grapple with government policies that threaten their businesses, their children's access to education, their choice of where to make a home, and, in Sam’s case, their lives, a vivid, damning, and urgent picture emerges of the previously unseen human cost of China’s rising economic tide—and the courage and perseverance of those caught in the swell.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593493908
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/02/2024
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Yuan Yang is a campaigner and former journalist standing for parliamentary selection in the Labour Party. She is a former columnist and Europe-China correspondent at the Financial Times and the cofounder of the charity Rethinking Economics, which campaigns for a more diverse and realistic economics curriculum. She studied philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford and has a master’s in economics from the London School of Economics.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Private Revolutions:

“A portrait both sweeping and intimate — as much a study of a radically changing society as of four very different people.” —The New York Times

“The riveting book that results from Yang’s persistence is a powerful snapshot of four young Chinese women attempting to assert control over the direction of their lives, escape the narrow confines of their patriarchal rural roots and make it in the big city . . . Yang’s reportage offers up raw human stories . . . because she documents each woman’s journey from childhood, including encounters with casual sexism, intermittent personal violence and the impossible weight of parental expectations, we can appreciate just how far they have come as adults — and just how far they have to fall.” —New York Times Book Review

“The prose is as powerfully intimate as it is politically incendiary, tackling the censorship and economic voraciousness plaguing China today head on.” —British Vogue

“A moving work of reportage, whose scale toggles between the global and the personal.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice

“An engrossing new book that meticulously reports on a country in the throes of change, using the lives and choices of four women from her own generation as a lens.” —The Guardian

“[Private Revolutions] is the tale of a unique time and an intimate picture of what it was like to live through, and learn to navigate, the storm.” —Isabel Hilton, The Guardian

“[Yang] knows how to tell a story and how to capture attention. Each of these interwoven tales is studded with fascinating details.” —The Times

“Meticulously researched and reported, this bildungsroman uses the narrative arcs of its protagonists to throw light on some of the major themes that define 21st-century China.” —The Los Angeles Review of Books

“Yang’s book captures the contradictions and nuances of modern China.” —The New Statesman

“Yang offers a fresh interpretation of the ongoing nature of China’s many upheavals, the actual effects of its oft-discussed policies, the cost of its meteoric economic growth, and the role a new generation of women is poised to play. [Private Revolutions is] a highly revealing, human-centered cultural inquiry.” —Kirkus (Starred Review)

“This engaging effort follows four women from childhood to the current day as they navigate city life and establish careers, documenting their struggles with school admissions and quotas, educational scams, unsafe working conditions, forays into social activism, and family and corporate intrigues…This very readable account offers rare and unblinking insights into modern China.” –Booklist (starred review)

“A portrait of the country through four women who grew up there in the eighties and nineties and refused to accept the life laid out for them. Activists, factory workers, pig farmers turned students: they provide incredible insight into the lives of ordinary Chinese people.” —The Sunday Times Best Books of 2024

“Yang provides a fascinating portrait of womanhood and society in a rapidly evolving—and increasingly repressive—global superpower.” —Waterstones Best Books of 2024

“A powerful and sometimes heartbreaking picture of the making of modern China. Brilliant” —Tim Harford, author of How To Make The World Add Up

“Acute and moving - a frank, unsparing, yet tender portrait of young women searching for happiness and purpose in a fast-shifting world.” —Tania Branigan, author of Red Memory

“A revelatory, moving and tender tale of hopes, fears and change. A real eye-opener about life in contemporary China.” —Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads

“This is a book of delights. Yuan Yang shows us the real China in all its complexity – the rich, detailed, often brutal life of the villages and cities. Anyone who wants to understand what China and the Chinese are like will find great pleasure, and sometimes pain, in reading it.” —John Simpson

“Written by one of the most sensitive and acute chroniclers of contemporary China working today, this is a beautiful, immersive, moving account of the country’s whirlwind transformations since the 1990s, told through the lives of four extraordinarily resilient and idealistic Chinese women.” —Julia Lovell, author of Maoism and The Opium War

“Private Revolutions has the extraordinary, novelistic power to show how everyday lives on the other side of the world are actually lived that won Behind the Beautiful Forevers a Pulitzer… A landmark work.” —Felix Martin, author of Money

From the Publisher

★ 2024-04-20
The stories of four women who came of age during China’s economic boom.

When Yang, a columnist and Europe-China correspondent for the Financial Times, returned to her native China, she met other professionals who, like her, had been “left behind.” While their parents sought opportunities in the factories and cities, fueling the country’s opening to global manufacturing and trade contracts, these children were often raised by their grandparents and other relatives in rural villages. The author follows four women—Siyue, Leiya, Sam, and June—through their adolescence and early adulthood, delineating their experiences during China’s drastic transition to authoritarian capitalism. While their economic roots, family dynamics, and professional prospects vary, these four exemplify the country’s rapid, almost whiplash-inducing, change over the last two decades. Yang attends primarily to the individual dreams, relationships, and trajectories of these four women, but as their paths intersect with economic trends and political movements—from the trajectory of China’s stock market to modern Marxist activism—the author includes relevant commentary that grants fuller context to global headlines. Her treatment of a variety of relevant topics—oppressive labor conditions, the high stakes and competitive market around education, the lasting implications of the one-child policy, and government surveillance—is embedded in the roles her characters play as daughters, students, mothers, workers, and romantic partners. The overlap of the four women’s stories and their individual wrestling with the challenges presented by their country demystifies the too-easy narrative of China as a behemoth set on a linear path to superpower. Through these interlocking biographical sketches, Yang offers a fresh interpretation of the ongoing nature of China’s many upheavals, the actual effects of its oft-discussed policies, the cost of its meteoric economic growth, and the role a new generation of women is poised to play.

A highly revealing, human-centered cultural inquiry.

Kirkus Reviews