Book Review: Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China’s New Social Order, by Yuan Yang, 2024.
Viking Press, 284 pp., $30.00
感谢我的外祖父、祖母和曾祖母,他们教会我讲故事。感谢我的妈妈和爸爸,他们给了我一个故事可以讲
For my maternal grandfather, grandmother and great-grandmother, who taught me how to tell stories. For mama and baba, who gave me a story to tell. — Yuan Yang
Distinguished journalist and politician, Yuan Yang of the British Labour Party, originally born in Ningbo in 1990, grew up in the Sichuan province. The author’s parents attended Sichuan University but left for U.S. graduate schooling. She was raised on her maternal grandparents’ work unit, or danwei, and moved away from the Emei Mountain (“Eyebrow”) to northern England with her parents when she was four years old in 1994. After seven years of reporting (2016-2023), she authored Private Revolutions in 2024 and explored a country “where the gap between rural and urban areas means everything.”
In the Preface, she discussed the “iron rice bowl” and the symbolic legacy it left behind for remembering job security during the Maoist period. She set out to anthologize how a nation essentially experienced capitalist reform after 1978 and traced the histories of Maoism (1949-1976) to Dengism (1976-1989) through the case studies of four women influenced by these generational shifts. In the book, she described the China she knew before moving back there while working for the Financial Times.
Important for Yang was learning about an underdeveloped-developed country and being there on the ground as she was determined to know China “on her own terms.” Her clever usage of the levels of analysis schema was important for understanding cultural differences in social classes across cities and rural settings. The author captures what amounts to the essence of horizontal migration as well as the internal and external migrant experience. The main premise of the book looks at “left-behind children.” In this book, children are left to live in rural villages with grandparents while their parents go off in search of better economic opportunities in a modernizing China. The left-behind status, (there are currently 60,000,000 plus in China) seen in the case studies, demonstrates respective “levels of educational disadvantage and emotional abandonment,” as well as their perseverance and collective will.
Dan
Yang met fellow journalist Dan, also born in 1990 in Sichuan (they detected each other’s local accents). Dan’s parents brought her to Shenzhen and Yang became interested in how the hukou (China’s post 1950 household registration system to acquire government services) impacted internal migrants in China and how that arrangement fostered instability and added to the left behind culture. She showed how China modernized, but at the same time how the pursuit for equality is timeless and universal and demands structural changes over superficial reforms.
Dan’s personal narrative made Yuan reflect further on the “Generation Involution,” (neijuan) the social trapping where progress seems futile no matter one’s work ethic. Involution illustrated how cycles of poverty, races to the bottom, and winners and losers, got entrenched in political and societal worldviews concerning development. The author identified women whose stories exemplified the “changes in the Chinese economy over the past thirty years” to present a story about internal displacement. She was working as a journalist, but more importantly capturing what was emblematic of historical Chinese national life; the book offers “A People’s History of China,” if you will.
Private Revolutions covers two distinct upheavals in a sense, asserts Yang. The first is China’s economic revolutions of the 1980s and 1990s and the Reform and Opening Up Era, as the state-corporate nexus formed leading up to China’s 2001 WTO accession. The second revolutions cover four young women and their social mobility in China’s era of capitalist transition. Since the mid-2010s, it has been more and more difficult to talk to vulnerable participants for such a project because of local police, state surveillance, and propaganda forces that impact and compromise people and testimonies.
The author explains that the “march from poverty to progress isn’t inevitable” or made in a straight line, and how a vast diversity of economic stages of development happened quickly within China’s modern history. She successfully pushes back against the winners and losers paradigm and illustrates that China is a developed nation but with underdeveloped facets like most world powers including the U.S. To take inventory of Chinese modernity, she acknowledged that the transformation of society required her to “take inventory of individuals.” Every word that Yang puts to page is interesting and each character she describes is special and unique. The book is a comprehensive study of power, human rights, development, and peace and conflict through the studies of Sam, Siyue, June, and Leiya.
After reading this important book, it is evident that Leiya’s private revolution, especially from schooling and labor organizing, to advocating for working mothers — encapsulates the narratives that the author meticulously unpacked. All four women faced the trade-offs between migration, gendered expectations, and economic self-determination in modern China, but I’d argue that Leiya does in the most pronounced way. Yang depicts her route as direct and visceral.
Early Years
In the initial section of the book, Yang describes the women’s formative years, and “Women’s work,” and Leiya, who had to navigate a gendered rural patriarchy and spent her developmental years getting bullied. She was expected to be a quiet girl, married, and eventual mother. Leiya was a left-behind child after her parents went to the Pearl River Delta. She was street smart, forged documentation in her early teens to get work, and navigated a world dominated by rude and dismissive men in the garment factories. She was homeless for a year before landing a job in a leatherwork factory that made her three times the money of farm workers back home. Leiya found comfort, solidarity and sisterhood with her dormmates as she worked the job, but she resented the working conditions and the line managers. She and her friends all quit together.
Beyond the Riverside
We also meet Siyue, from a family of rural entrepreneurs in “The riverside.” She is very smart but disliked by teachers since she’s considered a poor student with an inability to focus. She lived with her grandparents after her parents left for work far from the village. They dove “into the sea.” These were people that vacated secure state jobs to attempt private industry. The author describes how life was difficult for Siyue, who attended five schools in five years and spent time with both sets of grandparents. When her parents went to become traders in Shanghai she enjoyed time with her maternal grandmother.
Siyue’s mother subscribed to the concept of ziqiang, which means perseverance, but at all costs. The concept was passed down as a generational ethos among women. Siyue’s more cosmopolitan classmates looked down upon her rural appearance, but she started to find classes that worked for her, and she fell in love with reading. Books became life changing escapes. Yang cited Siyue’s love for Jane Eyre, a “heroine that was plain and poor” and violated class demarcations. She felt like she was set up for failure in a way — when you combined her household registration that tied her to poor schools, her mother’s cutthroat conservativism, and the high stakes stress of the ever lurking Gaokao entrance exam that rewarded “merit.”
When Yang revisits Siyue, she was approaching “cram schooling” with a reluctant focus. Siyue was bored by endless multiple-choice study guides and resented learning out of necessity but knew the exams were her best ticket. This reflected her determination to take control of her life despite uncertainties at home. Her parents faced financial issues (their “savings trapped in stocks”) after investing in the volatile Shanghai Stock Market around 2001. They too were dealing with the challenges of China’s capitalist turn. A source of motivation for Siyue to learn English was the Chinese TV show Outlook, which introduced her to real conversations in everyday contexts. Watching the show nurtured Siyue’s dream of broadcasting and allowed her to connect with an inverted mechanism of soft power and taught her helpful “cross-cultural communication understandings” and skills.
Pathbreaking
June is introduced in “The pathbreakers.” Coming from the mountains, she was only thirteen years old when she experienced her mother’s tragic death in the coal mines. June also witnessed the brutal stabbing of her father as Yang described the horrific scene as well as the structural classism that rendered her emergency 120 call almost useless. There were no roads to access emergencies. Her life was hard, and she witnessed the village’s eldest daughters work as “Mulan-esque substitute conscripts.”
Like Siyue, June developed a love for reading. Although the Chinese Ministry of Education further implemented compulsory education in 1986, funding still fell short, and it looked like June might remain left behind. Yang introduces us to June’s beloved Teacher, Ms. Song (Laoshi), who was assigned from the city to teach in a rural setting. Song introduced to June the writings of the Taiwanese author Sanmao, an independent feminist icon, who much like Teacher Song, symbolized a bridge to the outside world, far away from pig herding.
When we find June again in “One hundred nights of struggle,” she had gotten into the country-town level high school. Yang shows June’s private revolution and shares her beautiful diary entries (in a journal she won for an essay prize) that captured emotional subtlety, sheer determination, and outright fear:
If you were still here, I’d smile back at the smiling face of the clouds, and I would smile even more splendidly, the kind of smile that you can’t stop smiling. Looking at the towering mountains, no matter what thunderstorms may dance on them, they will stay standing tall. If you were here, I’m sure you’d teach me how to be strong like them, I’m sure you’d teach me how to rise to the occasion.
I’m sure you’d teach me how to fix what I don’t understand, in the dawn light the waves struck against the shore, the water seemed so brave. If you were here, I’m sure you’d let me be like the waves, brave like them, like them unafraid, and even though the path I walk might have thunderstorms, still surging forward vigorously. If you were here, would I have a few less scars? Would I have a few more smiles? Would I hold my head higher? Would I walk at a firmer pace?
At fourteen years old, college seemed far off, so June wrote to reflect, hone her own craft, and dream of inclusion into something like Project 211, the country’s university sponsorship program initiated in 1995. By the time June went to university, her hometown had seen accelerated development. She later visited and saw the completed road by her hamlet, an unimaginable thought since the days emergency vehicles waited at the bottom of the hill. She was stunned at what the Targeted Poverty Alleviation policy had brought.
Breaking Cycles
Yang chronologically transitions from the left-behind and formative years that charts three of the four women in Part I, to highlight their educational and work progress in Part II. She eventually tells their stories of internal migration and the precarious nature of adult life and contemporary challenges in Parts III and IV. Midway through the book, June’s breakthrough comes when she’s admitted to the small local college. Further, Siyue uses New Thought books to connect with her parents, and becomes a mother with social capital, while working with CCTV and CGTN. Her child born out of marriage could only be delivered after she paid a “social maintenance” fee (later banned), which she could afford from tutoring.
Like Leiya, Siyue “breaks the cycle,” (of proverbial tiger parenting) and raises her daughter, the precocious Eva (“bearer of good news”) with the Resources for Infant Edu-carers (RIE) method. This type of education uses the Magda Gerber approach that allows for child exploration. It reminded me of Joseph Chilton Pearce’s notion of “cracking the cosmic egg,” which also stated children “liked routine” and should not interact with the video (digital) world in the first three years of their life. This worked effectively to the extent that even Siyue’s mother Sulan “starts to consider the complexity of the child’s perspective,” asserts the author.
In the sixth chapter, “Surveying Shenzhen,” Yang introduces us to Sam for the first time, a Shenzhener born of rural migrants. She is beginning to study at a university, and in a sense marks a departure from June, Leiya and Siyue. She is a product of the urban middle class but with limited hukou (rural rights without urban rights). She became interested in American labor history and the practice of salting, entering a job with the intent to organize it.
Sam had access to the Shenzhen Children’s Library, started in the 1980s with the mission statement: “When the children are wise, so is the nation; when the children are strong, so is the nation,” but was sent back to the village as a teen due to her hukou restrictions. In theory, she admired Communism before realizing how it did not support the principles of revolutionary socialism or Marxism in practice. With parents from the Guangdong countryside, she characterizes her as a quiet but determined intellectual well versed in East Asian scholarship and interested in the work of sociologists like Joel Andreas. Although she was a dedicated Maoist, student, activist, laborer and New Commune blogger, she found it hard to fight through the excesses of state power and command economies no matter what the label.
During her time at university in Shenzhen, “the city without history,” itself invented in the 1980s as a showcase of China’s reform era, Sam tried to conduct surveys near the special economic zones of the region and in places where her mother Zhou once worked. These attempts in ethnographic interviews with villagers and former factory workers tried to summarize China’s changing labor force. Sam wanted to understand how workers experienced China’s transformation, but the study frustrated and radicalized her.
As for Shenzhen, a living symbol of “pragmatic socialism” or socialism with Chinese characteristics, it pushed her to question the uneasy coexistence of capitalism and state control alongside its unsmooth transitions. Even further, “Shenzhen,” Yang indicated, “was the opposite of Communist nostalgia: it embodied the capitalist present.” Sam had a flurry of intellectual activity and life experience to keep her busy, but at a cost.
Sam’s activism emphasized the confines of political expression in a state founded on “Marxist ideals” but increasingly intolerant of popular labor movements. I would be interested in Leiya’s thoughts on Sam’s ability to stand apart as “the most unradical one” — choosing factory life, not out of necessity, but conviction. I consider Sam a rare example of defiance in a political climate of fear. She enjoyed the muscularity of activism, “ten [police] officers all for me!” Sam saw her political space dwindle however, as China was placed under more strict state surveillance by 2018. After the labor activist disappearances of 2019, she was eventually staked out and warned for her participation in Today’s Collective.
In some ways, Parts II-IV of the book are even more depressing than Part I, when all four women have clearly less agency. It reminded me of the book Black Enlightenment, where Surya Parekh points out how much more complicated the great Phillis Wheatley’s life becomes after manumission. This in no way, however, excuses the structural violence Wheatley faced. Further, it’s not an argument to cancel out June, Siyue, and Leiya’s pursuits for liberation because of the agency they held earlier. As political repression is woven into these parts of the book, you realize that it’s not just Sam that must hide along with her activist peers in the face of crackdowns against dissent.
Radical Work
Leiya appears again in “The worker’s centre” and the author explains how she acquires another garment factory job, this time run by Hong Kongers. Here, Leiya reflected on her life and became involved in the City Workers Community Center. After 1993, 50 million workers had been laid off in China and there had been much labor organizing in protest, although China made efforts to quiet down the waves of unrest. In the Pearl River Delta there were striking unions but at times, they were largely controlled by management. In the absence of worker power, “labor activism pivoted to NGOs,” writes Yang. A year after the first training session, Leiya decided that the center might give her the ability to live the life she valued. She met her husband, and they had a daughter.
After attending more workshops Leiya realized that the “injustices of womanhood could be renamed and redressed.” The 2008 China Labor Contract Law went into further revisions as cheap labor became more and more unsustainable. Through Leiya’s heroic efforts she organized topics and workshops around reproductive health, negotiations with managers, how to get maternity leave and social insurance, and the ways to attain nongovernmental legal support in general. All this mimicked in a way, the feminist movement in the United States that used social feminist consciousness raising networks (CR) to bring about social change in “building a workers movement,” as Yang outlined Leiya’s efforts.
Also in Part III, in the “Should we jump?” chapter (a reference to the Foxconn suicides) Leiya wishes to keep her daughter, Xinling in the city after she left the workers’ centre to set up the Garland District Women’s Centre. To protect her from left-behind childhood, Leiya wants her daughter to attend a local school. She sets out to accumulate points for school entry. She refers to the government issued booklet on how to get verified as a member of the mobile population.
Although Leiya never received an Award for Excellence, or Good Person of the Community, Xinling received a spot in a local school but later on didn’t care much for studying although she exceled in music, art and dance. She called her mother “feudalistic” for not allowing her to wear makeup. At one point, after Xinling says she’d rather die than study and flippantly references suicide to make a point, Leiya fetches a knife and scornfully dares her. The moment is troublingly reminiscent of when Siyue’s mother threatened to throw her into the river for failing to concentrate at school.
Also in this chapter, we meet Guihua, a fierce organizer who petitions for back pay contributions towards social insurance; 99% of her 10,000 co-workers were women. Leiya set up a communal system for child day care in Lion’s Head Village in response to the worldwide attention insecurities and tragedies brought on by children without care. Her outfit and Banyan Tree Center, a mutual aid site and learning place for kids with working parents, rooted in the community, was recognized by the Civil Affairs Bureau and became officially registered.
Policy Changes
Leiya continues to act as the glue that connects subtexts and characters throughout the book in my opinion. When she reappears in Chapter 16, “Only money in my heart,” Yang starts out by commenting on the rapidity of Chinese industrialization and deindustrializing in a span of four brief decades when compared to that of hundreds of years in places such as the United Kingdom. The author recounts Leiya’s ongoing efforts at Banyan to address how women were “subject to the unfairness of the hukou-based society.” Migrant women’s main goal was usually to get their kids into a solid primary school and then to find motivational techniques that broke illegitimate and rigid modes of tiger mothering and filial piety.
At this stage, after leaving factory life to work in a labor NGO, Leiya was balancing both mothering and activism full-on while reshaping her own identity within China’s modernity as her mother looked on. Making local NGO projects even more difficult was China’s NGO Law of 2017 which restricted local operations that competed with interests of the State. Covid added additional challenges and job loss, and her friend Yulan joined the gig economy and slept in her car without social insurance, as Leiya struggled to acquire it as well. Leiya wanted to work and maintain the center. She dedicated fifteen long years of her life to civil society.
Eventually, she attempted to recruit volunteers for Opening Page, a project that encouraged parents to read to their children with animation and enthusiasm. Yang continues to discuss the societal stresses placed on women and parental decisions that were mounting and initiated in the three-child policy era. By this time Xinling was fourteen years old in her second year of middle school.
Further, you discover that after all their trials and tribulations both June, with a new home near the capital, and Siyue, suffer as casualties of the 2021 ban on private tutoring. Yang explains how, “China’s 120 billion dollar private tutoring industry collapsed in value within a few days.” This highlights the fragility of personal success under authoritarian policymaking. June’s journey from rural poverty to the urban middle class was compromised by the stroke of a policy pen. It was a political decision (“a chronic disease”), not an educational one, by Xi Jinping. Siyue’s triumph over academic failure and childhood trauma was also undermined somewhat but she held her head high and often quoted Mencius. All these stories expose how economic mobility in China often rests on precarious foundations, vulnerable to volatile and sudden political shifts.
Conclusion
At the end of the book, Yuan is reacquainted with Dan, and she observes the local politics that split local communities around China’s demolition of villages that forced urbanization. When she visited Emei, it was not out of filial devotion or nostalgia but her attachment to the only place she knew in the world unchanged. Altogether, Yang’s incredible stories of Sam, June, Siyue, and Leiya exposed the private revolutions that women face in China’s evolving social order. She writes of their statuses in a fascinating Epilogue, which I’ll leave for the reader to discover. Through characters like Siyue and her applications of Gerber, the author’s writing also reveals that “humans are hardwired for connection.”
Epilogue
This book is relevant and worthwhile for a wide audience that enjoys both popular social science and scholarly academic writing. I admire Yang’s ability to “think tragically” and sketch characters that desperately try to narrow the distinctions between 1) idealistic, political theory and 2) actual, realistic, public policy. Like a modern-day Isabel Cook, she demonstrated how interrogating political repression, educational obsession, entrepreneurial grit, and generational trauma, can have a firm basis in understanding the politics of the left. She accomplished this despite the ongoing difficulty of defining what it means to be politically left in both China and the U.S.
Just as recently as April 2025, as British Labour MPs, Yang and Abtisam Mohamed were detained and denied entry by Israeli authorities when they attempted to visit the occupied West Bank as part of a parliamentary delegation. The reason? They were a breach to “security” and “intended to spread hate speech,” cited the outlandish allegations. The actual reasons were in reaction to Mohamed and her calls for sanctions and citing opinions of the ICJ related to banning goods entering illegal settlements. Just as her already impressive record of public service shows, Yang’s book also reminds us that the work of activists, civil society, and global governance is never complete.
Notes and References for Further Reading
American Dreams in China (film), released 2013.
Andreas, Joel. Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London, 1847.
Carlisle, Gabriel Solomon. Baby Knows Best: Raising a Confident and Resourceful Child the RIE Way, 2014.
Chan, Jenny, Mark Selden, and Pun Ngai. Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn and the Lives of China’s Workers, Pluto Press 2020.
Fu, Diana. Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Friedman, Eli. The Politics of Development: Labor Markets and Schooling in the Chinese City. Columbia University Press, 2022.
Lee, Ching Kwan. Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt. University of California Press, 2007.
Nelson, Jane, Cheryl Erwin, and Rosalyn Duffy. Positive Discipline: The First Three Years, 1998.
Ngai, Pun. Made in China: Women Factory Workers in the Global Workplace. Duke University Press, 2005.
Rozelle, Scott, and Natalie Hell. Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise. University of Chicago Press, 2020.
Sanmoa. Stories of the Sahara. Translated by Mike Fu. San Francisco: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.