Yuan Yang, the former Financial Times China correspondent, has written 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.
Leiya, Sam, June and Siyue, born in the late 80s and 90s, all hail from different regions and social classes – but they share the trait of being “unusually accomplished idealists”. Lieya, who drops out of school to work in a factory, later goes on to run a childcare collective. Sam, “born into a special sliver of her generation: the urban middle class”, is drawn into the world of labour activism after interviewing an injured factory worker for a university sociology course. June is just 13 when her mother is killed – crushed on a conveyor belt in a coal mine. She becomes the only one of her village primary school classmates to make it to high school, and then university. Headstrong Siyue’s stressful childhood is characterised by the rising and falling fortunes of her parents, who try their hands at various business ventures (repairing Nokia handsets, for example). Later, as a single mother, she is adamant about parenting her daughter differently – and giving her own mother (who she tricks into going on her first ever holiday, to Bali) a new outlook on life, too.
Yang is herself a product of this period but brings an outsider’s perspective. Born in 1990, she spent the first four years of her life living in the company town, or danwei, of the factory that employed her maternal grandparents in China’s mountainous south-west. She grew up hearing the national anthem blasted on a loudspeaker each morning and bathing in the “bountiful hot water” of the danwei’s communal showers (they had no running hot water at home). “My grandparents expected their danwei to take care of them, and it did,” Yang writes. But this would not hold true for the generations to come. In the decade after 1993, 50 million workers were laid off during the programme of “Reform and Opening Up”, which saw state-owned enterprises privatised. By then, Yang had left for the UK with her parents.
Returning to China in 2016 as a journalist, she saw a country anxious about its own transformation: “Before I went back … I knew the optimistic giddiness of my parents’ generation, where they could expect to out-earn their parents no matter what, so long as they got out of the village.” What she found instead were rural families who feared that the gap between village and city living standards had grown insurmountable, while their urban counterparts worried that their own financial security was only attributable to “luck and timing and an unrepeatable economic boom”. How could they ensure their children would enjoy the same opportunities?
Many of these fears – of “falling off the ladder” and the feeling of precarity that comes with it – aren’t unique to young people living in China. “Back in the UK, my friends shut out of London call themselves ‘Generation Rent’,” Yang writes; meanwhile, her friends in Beijing are “Generation Involution” – a tag that uses a term from anthropology to invoke “a system which absorbs ever more effort for ever less return”.
What sets the story told in Private Revolutions apart, however, is the speed and magnitude of the upheaval, captured by Yang with palpable admiration for the women negotiating these seismic shifts one day at a time. “Any mass transformation of society requires, and results in, massive change at the level of individuals, friendships and families,” Yang writes. “Yet it is also easy, at a time of such breakneck change, to lose sight of what it feels like to be alive.” Private Revolutions takes care to keep Leiya, Sam, June and Siyue’s individuality in focus without forgetting the broader stakes. As Leiya reminds herself: “I’m not the only one in this situation.”
• Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China by Yuan Yang is published by Bloomsbury (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
