Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China

This is a book about the coming of age of four women born in China in the 1980s and 1990s, in a society about to change beyond recognition.

It is about Leiya, who wants to escape the fate of the women in her village. Still underage, she bluffs her way on to the factory floor.
It is about June, who at fifteen sets what her family thinks is an impossible goal: to attend university rather than raise pigs.
It is about Siyue, ranked second-to-bottom of her English class, who decides to prove her teachers wrong.
And it is about Sam, who becomes convinced that the only way to change her country is to become an activist - even as the authorities slowly take her peers from the streets.

With unprecedented access to the lives, hopes, homes, dreams and diaries of four ordinary women over a period of six years, Private Revolutions gives a voice to those whose stories go untold. At a time of rising state censorship and suppression, it unearths the identity of modern Chinese society - and, through the telling, something of our own.

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 -- Best Books of 2024 ― Sunday Times

An engrossing new book that meticulously reports on a country in the throes of change, using the lives and choices of four women . . . What sets the story told in Private Revolutions apart is the speed and magnitude of this upheaval, captured by Yang with palpable admiration for the women negotiating these seismic shifts one day at a time -- Mythili Rao, Book of the Day ― Guardian

Private Revolutions interweaves the stories of a quartet of women born in the wake of China's Cultural Revolution, from Leiya, a garment factory worker in Shenzen, to Sam, a middle-class schoolgirl turned Maoist revolutionary. The prose is as powerfully intimate as it is politically incendiary, tackling the censorship and economic voraciousness plaguing China today head on ― Vogue

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'

A revelatory, moving and tender tale of hopes, fears and change. A real eye-opener about life in contemporary China -- Peter Frankopan

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

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 powerful and sometimes heartbreaking picture of the making of modern China. Brilliant -- Tim Harford

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

Through the eyes of a quartet of women who were born in China in the 1980s and 1990s, Yang provides a fascinating portrait of womanhood and society in a rapidly evolving - and increasingly repressive - global superpower -- Waterstones, Best Books of 2024

About the Author

Yuan Yang was born in 1990 in China, where she lived with her grandparents for four years before her parents brought her to the UK. She returned to China as an adult, posted there as a correspondent for the Financial Times; after the mass expulsion of journalists from China in 2020, she was one of the few journalists writing in English left in the country. She moved back to the FT's London headquarters as their first China-Europe Correspondent, and at the end of 2023 was selected as the Labour Party's parliamentary candidate for the new constituency of Earley and Woodley. Private Revolutions is her first book.