Private Revolutions is a beautiful read and a wonderful insight into life and work for woman in contemporary China.
A well written & researched book with wonderful & inspiring Characters.

This is a thought-provoking and compelling read.

This book excels in making history accessible by focusing on individual lives. By exploring the experiences of four women in 1980s/90s China, it provides a nuanced perspective on the cultural shifts, gender roles, and the challenges of transitioning from a rural to an industrial society. The personal and intimate portrayal of these linked lives offers a unique and engaging way to understand historical changes, making it an ideal read for those who might find traditional history less approachable but are eager to learn about a recent and distinctly different way of life.

Fantastic book, written in a very accessible style. I only wish the book was split into 4 parts, with a part for each woman. The 4 stories being told simultaneously made them a little hard to follow in places.

Chinese-British economic journalist (and newly elected Labour MP) Yuan Yang was inspired to write Private Revolutions after noticing a trend among women of her age, born in the 1980s and 1990s - that, in spite of the economic strides made by China during their lifetimes, they were consistently encountering insurmountable barriers to achieving independent financial stability. Yuan Yang's debut is about China's economic revolution and the personal revolutions of women who came of age amid the emergence of social mobility in China's capitalist era.

Seven years of in-depth reporting, hampered by the reluctance of many Chinese citizens to say anything remotely critical of their government, led to the author writing Private Revolutions, a compelling, ambitious, yet highly readable look at the lives of four millennial women trying to survive and thrive in the country with the world's second largest economy.

Yuan Yang's four subjects represent a cross section of her focus group: Leiya wants to escape her small village, where her destiny is simply to bear sons; June is curious about life beyond her remote mountain home; Sam is inspired by the Marxist revolutionaries who established modern China, and wants to reinforce their legacy; Siyue rebels against her teachers and is determined to remake the education system for others. The author writes that, 'They exemplify China's transformations on many levels: in schools, in factories and in the home.' And yet state surveillance and censorship would suppress their stories - Yuan Yang agreed to anonymise her four contributors lest they become targers for state harassment.

The stories cover a huge spectrum of experiences: rural and urban. Particularly interesting to me was how the book highlights the enduring isolation of China's most remote villages - even in the mid-00s, June's village was completely inaccessible by road, and a story about her father being carried down the mountainside on a makeshift stretcher after being injured is almost impossible to reconcile with the notion of China being one of the wealthiest, most technologically advanced nations in the world.

The author's own grandparents lived on a 'danwei' (Communist work unit), their earning potential limited but their 'iron rice bowl' jobs guaranteed for life, while her parents were of the generation who came of age during the first years of Deng Xiaoping's capitalist reforms, young people who 'went into the sea' confident of out-earning their parents so long as they left their villages for booming cities such as Beijing and Shenzhen. The dynamic between these pioneers and their own children is a sad, fascinating one: fear of the inexorably growing rural-urban divide, tougher competition in school and for top university places, and the fact that their children were highly unlikely to be able to replicate the economic success their parents had experienced drove countless parents to migrate to the cities for work, leaving children behind in the countryside with their grandparents. In the early 2010s, 1 in 5 Chinese children were living separately from their parents, and the educational disadvantages and enduring feelings of emotional abandonment cannot be underestimated.

Education is a theme throughout Private Revolutions. June and Siyue both find themselves working for private tuition companies, recognising that many parents will pay anything they perceive as giving their child an advantage. The four women's accounts of their education throughout their formative years are sobering, especially given how often the Chinese system is held up as an example of an effective pedagogy; my main take-away was that many of the students seemed to have no intrinsic motivation or love of learning for its own sake; instead, they are driven by shame and pressure to succeed. This certainly made me reflect on my own practice as a teacher. Meanwhile, as evidenced by the ever-growing gap between the number of university places and the number of students sitting entrance exams, higher education in China is a system which absorbs ever more effort for ever diminishing returns.

Sam - probably the wealthiest of Yuan Yang's four subjects - is spurred to fight for workers' rights after the exposure of a spate of suicides at a Shenzhen industrial park. She is part of a generation of students whose eyes, the author writes, 'had been opened to widening inequality and the accumulation of social problems inherent to an economy that relied on disenfranchised migrant labour'. Workers were wealthier than they had been under communism, but more open to exploitation too. Meanwhile, Leiya, herself a migrant worker - strives to protect the rights of female migrant workers and tries to help them keep their children with them through finding ways to circumnavigate the biased hukou system and provide childcare.

These four women are remarkable. Each has had to overcome practical and psychological barriers to achieve success. They embody millennial 'hustle culture' - teaching themselves English, setting goals and working relentlessly towards them, and constantly looking for opportunities to uplevel their skills. They are women who stand up for themselves and believe in their own abilities; they are shaped by their adverse experiences but determined to rise above them. They share a common goal of wanting to improve life for those around them too.

In the author's words, 'The four women in this book show us how we both create and are recreated by societal changes. I hold up their stories as a mirror to our own.' I hope this remarkable book finds the audience it deserves.

Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing Plc for the opportunity to read and review an ARC of this book.

Yuan Yang’s ‘Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China’

Yuan Yang was born in China in 1990. Her father came to the UK to do a PhD in Computer Science, just after she was born and her first 4 years were spent living with her mum and her maternal grandparents. The family reunited in the UK where she has lived, studied and worked. She studied economics and became a journalist for the FT, as Beijing correspondent from 2016 till COVID. She is now a Labour parliamentary candidate.
I have for a long time admired Yuan Yang’s journalism and had a chance to talk to her last year, so I was delighted to be offered a review copy of her book by Netgalley.
The book is based on the lives of people Yuan met during her spell as a journalist in China. Although her FT work focussed on business and economics, this book is about the personal lives of 4 young women, more or less her contemporaries, who she got to know in China. The underlying theme is that while ordinary people’s lives in China have in many ways improved dramatically, the new market oriented but politically authoritarian China is still a tough place to live.
When I first visited China in 1989 it was still normal for married couples to be assigned jobs by the state in far separated cities. Children were often brought up by grandparents. The families united very rarely. The huge increase in material living standards has allowed people to look for work more freely, but there are many challenges. Yuan shows how the Hukou residence permit system restricts access to schooling social services and free market rents are often prohibitive. Families can still be forced apart.
The youngish women whose stories Yuan tells have chosen lives that would have been unthinkable a generation ago, but as Yuan finds, the new-found freedoms are double edged. The security that was once guaranteed by the state is long gone. And the state still watches over how choices are exercised.
One of the stories is that of Sam, from a relatively prosperous background who became a sociology researcher and labour rights campaigner, tracking the lives of workers in the new factories supplying globalised markets, and working to improve them. She was under constant surveillance from the authorities. At the other end of the spectrum is Leiya, a “left-behind” child determined to make a good life for herself and her own daughter living together in the same place, and trying to get round the hukou system to access state schooling.
Two other women work in the private education sector: June, born in an impoverished village, but encouraged by an inspirational teacher; and Siyue, daughter of early entrepreneurial parents, who had been discouraged by her own teachers.Their lives were more prosperous but the competitive pressures were very tough.
The characters come alive to the reader. Yuan tells the stories with empathy and insight. She wants to put them into a wider context of the massive inequality developing in China. Her economist’s analysis of the nature of Chinese growth is always in the background.
Yuan herself slips in and out of the story as she tells how she contacts her friends, and especially the difficulty of keeping in touch with the activist Sam.
Yuan writes from the perspective of a Brit who speaks the language and understands the culture. She is critical of modern China, not in a polemical way.
It is a good read and highly informative about modern China. Very strongly recommended.

I have several books based in or about China in recent years and several long reads in papers and magazines about the cities, the economy , the social contracts and censorship but still I find it hard to imagine life in China. Books I' ve read based in China ( The Real Americans, River East, River West, Land of Big Numbers, The Funeral Cryer to name a few more recent reads) generally have been historical fiction or from the perspective of migrants and I have rarely come across a book from the perspective of people in contemporary China. As a county it fascinates me yet I can only really view it in an abstract sense. This is the book I was waiting for.

Private Revolutions is a book about the coming of age of four women born in China in the 1980's and 1990's. " Generation Involution" , the term, taken from anthropology , has recently become popular in China, and means a system which absorbs ever more effort for even less return."

These women grew up in a time of rapid economic revolution and this is the story of their personal revolutions. This book is meticulously researched as the author interrogates their hopes, histories, desires and plans over a six year period. These are ordinary women who want different lives than those their parents live. It examines the hukou system and how it restricts you when you move from a home village and how you have to build credit from work, education , and savings to be able to access education for your children. The education system is central to these women's stories as is their incredible determination and flexibility and their drive, these are extraordinary women and I loved reading about their experiences.

This is brilliantly written and researched non fiction, it is intimate, informative, moving and as a book, it is so accessible and quite difficult to put down. Nothing else I have read in the past has come close to offering an understanding of what life is like as a woman in China today or unveiled so much of modern Chinese society.

One of the best non- fiction books I have read in a long time .I Highly recommend this one, a fantastic read.

This is one of the most accessible book I've read about China - or rather its female inhabitants. Yuan Yang takes the lives of four disparate women and tells their extraordinary stories.

Along the way we learn about life for rural Chinese and the vast difference there is between the way these women want to conduct their lives from that of their parents generation.

What struck me about each of them was their desire to get what they wanted no matter what it took - including 19 hour days orsetting up their own NGOs or collectives. It seemed that nothing could hold these extraordinary women back.

Another part of what I found fascinating is the day to day experiences of ordinary Chinese. The hukou system which defines what benefits you get depending on where you live. Moreover if you move you need to build up your hukou by extra study, wealth, working more hours. Or the left at home children whose parents would go to the city where they could earn more leaving the children with grandparents or even home alone if they were able to care for themselves. It sounds utterly alien to me being brought up in the UK but it works in rural China - that's not to say the women in this story wanted that for their own children -- but the story is fascinating all the same.

What truly struck me about these women was their confidence and ability to alter plans when things turned against them. They were all incredibly adaptable in a way that left me in awe.

I'd put this book in the category of "You Don't Know You're Born". Wonderful book. Absolutely mesmerising.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for the advance review copy.

Learning about history is often most easily approached through looking at individual lives and this book achieves this very well. The focus on four women, living different but linked lives in 1980s/90s China gives real insight into the culture, the roles of women, the harshness of a move from a rural society to an industrial one. It feels personal and intimate in a way that conventional history does not and so is perfect for those who hesitate over non-fiction but want to learn more about a very different way of life in the near past.

On a revelatory portrait of life in contemporary China, told through the stories of four Chinese women born in the 1980s and 1990s. Reading this book opened my eye to what it’s like to be living in contemporary China, but also moved me via the stories of these courageous women.⁣
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The writer Yuan Yang herself is a Europe-China correspondent at the Financial Times and she writes this book following a return to China in 2016 which made her feel anxious about the country’s transformation. This book is an in-depth exploration into how each of these women is trying to make lives better for themselves and their families. ⁣
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This book shows us the coming of age of the four women, i.e. Leiya, June, Siyue and Sam, and gives them voices, which I think others in the same position can easily relate to. Yuan Yang tells the stories of how these women perservere in doing what they believe is right, from attending universities to becoming an activist. I was humbled by what I read as it’s hard to imagine what it must be like for the women.⁣
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“Leiya, Dan, Siyue, June and Sam are all unusually accomplished idealists; if they weren’t, they wouldn’t have tried to do improbable things. They are open to new ideas and self-transformation; they reflect deeply and face their challenges, while also finding resilience through their loving relationships with family and friends. ⁣
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They demonstrate the creative ability of humans to transform themselves, and to make possible what was previously unimaginable – particularly when in supportive, like-minded communities.”⁣

An important book.

A really fascinating and surprisingly gripping history of China since the 1980s through the lives of four millennial women, each with a profoundly entrepreneurial spirit. The focus on four very different women and their families humanises the economic and social history and shows clearly how laws and slogans trickle into lived experience. Once i started I couldn't put it down.

Really well-researched, yet personal and intimate. A great insight into contemporary China and a peek into one slice of being a working woman.

Keen to read this as I very much enjoy learning about life in China. This book is well written and tells the story of several characters over a period of six years. Not always easy to read, China is a very different culture to our own.
possibly a bit young for me- I wanted to know more about the future

In 'Private Revolutions', Yuan Yang tells the stories of 4 women born in China in the 1980's and 1990's. Alongside Yang's own experiences of growing up in post Mao China, this novel shows how the cultural and economic policies established in that time continue to directly impact upon family life.

Some time ago I read Xinran's novel that has a similar brief and loved it. However, whilst when Yuan Yang is talking about her own life there is a vivacity and immediacy that draws the reader in, I didn't feel that with her depiction of the other 4 women's stories. This was a shame, as the contrast between their experiences and many of those in the west is sharp and shocking.

In the vein of The Good Women of China and Factory Girls, Yuan Yang tells the stories of four millennial women coming of age in a fast-changing China.

Leiya, Siyue, June and Sam are all engaging protagonists: ordinary, remarkable young women. Yang weaves their stories together to represent a cross-section of the modern female experience in China, a world of breakneck change. Yang tackles some weighty themes and sprawling political concepts - economic reform, emerging labour movements and the pressures of urbanisation - but by keeping a tight focus on her four subjects, she keeps these issues intimate and relevant. I felt like I learned a lot without really trying: Yang's fluid, personable prose makes for a compelling read.

Private Revolutions is an impressive piece of biographical non-fiction: a coming of age story not just of four young women, but of twenty-first centry China itself.

So much of what I read about China feels abstract - the changing economy, demographics, the opportunities or lack of for educated young people. Private Revolutions really humanises these issues, gives you a sense of what it's like to be a young woman living in China now.

It features case studies of four young women from different backgrounds, describing their childhoods, coming of age and their adult lives. Some of the experiences are universal - disagreements with parents, falling in and out of love, balancing political and social commitments with career ambitions and the need to earn a living.

Other aspects are particular - such as the way many children in rural areas are brought up by grandparents as their parents move to the city to work, the boarding schools they attend in nearby towns, and the way life chances are limited by a person's hukou. This is the household registration that determines access to education, healthcare and other government services, with the best opportunities falling to people with a city hukou.

Private Revolutions highlights the complexity and nuance in these women's lives, as they negotiate the constraints and opportunities in contemporary China.

I read an eARC of this book so thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley.

This was a great book to read when I’ve been trying to read more non-fiction. It was written in such a compelling way that I found myself flying through it. The author explores the lives of four different women in China. Some we meet them as children, but all of them we see their creativity and ingenuity to solve problems, strive for more and succeed.

These are four inspiring women with different backgrounds, education and family. Working in different fields, married or single, with and without children and we see them navigating the challenges they face with great determination, looking to improve lives for their children, families, communities. This was a fascinating look at different people’s lives and I felt like I learnt a lot from reading this book.

I was really intrigued by the premise of this book - I have read a few books set during the 1950s and 60s in China, but this was fascinating as it covered the era I grew up in, of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. It was really interesting to have a glimpse of how China pivoted from rural farming labour to manufacturing and education in huge cities. The women had many things in common, particularly the movement of their families to the cities, and some were more successful than others. It really painted a picture of how attitudes have changed over the past few decades, and how the internet and technology have had an impact, especailly for workers' and womens' rights which are both woefully inadequate. A very interesting factual read.

An astonishing, painstaking and often painful to read work, about the lives of four modern individual Chinese women set against the wider and almost inconceivably vast population of hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of years of tradition.
Written by a Chinese-British journalist, Yuan Yang traces the lives of these young women during the economic boom of the 1980s when opportunities opened up, but demanded a move from rural poverty to the more affluent cities.
But my goodness, are there hurdles to overcome. So many traditional rules and regulations about residency and consequent entitlement or limitation, traditionally, exhaustingly long hours toiling in factories or on the land, missed opportunities and family pressures. But in their own, and very different ways, these four do overcome these hurdles, stumbling at times,maybe, but overall, successfully. And the lives they build for themselves are testament to courage, determination and initiative. And have massive impacts on many others.

This is an important book, which I will never forget.
Bravo Yuan Yang and thank you #NetGalley and Bloomsbury publishing plc (UK and ANZ) for my re-release download.

This biography tells the stories of 4 women in China who've been negotiating the hurdles to rise upwards in China. Each chapter focuses on one of the women and tells the next segment of their story. What comes across within the narrative are:
- Absent parents who are always away in the cities working so children are brought up by grandparents in the villages (which made me wonder how the children came to be in the first place...)
- The abject poverty in the villages and their subsistence farming
- The truly terrible working hours for anyone in a factory (7am to 9pm plus "optional" (i.e. mandatory) overtime)
- A permit system which determines which schools you can apply for and where, which is very difficult to update if the family moves
- A culture which doesn't expect children from villages to achieve anything so doesn't encourage them to aspire
- Non-existent health & safety so any workplace injuries are likely to be severe / career limiting

The book lets itself down by its dry, clinical tone. The above list (and there's plenty more in the book) should provoke outrage in the reader but the tone just narrates the above in a neutral tone. As such, it is easy to let the injustices faced by these women just wash over you, which they shouldn’t.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Years ago, I read and enjoyed a book called The Good Women of China by Xinran, about ordinary women in that vast country, and how diverse their lives were, and how common some of the persistent themes of women's lives are, including misogyny, poverty and caregiving.

This book is set in a slightly different time period, at a time of transition for China. But in the telling of the events of four womens' lives, once again some of those common themes pop up, and we find much that is relatable in the stories of Leiya, Sam, Siyue and June.

This book is less emotional than the earlier one I mentioned, but there is much to learn from it and to think about. Definitely a book for those who are interested in China, in women's lives, and in encountering those who meet adversity with the unflinching determination to follow their dreams.