Year of the... dragon?: Yuan Yang’s new book explores the flip side of China’s boom

What is it like to be young and ambitious, or striving and average, in the country today? Private Revolutions peers behind the red curtain.

What is it like being part of the “China story”, one of 1.4 billion in an economy that has grown 3,000% since the 1980s?

Street art in Chongqing. ‘There is growing uncertainty, particularly among the urban middle-class,’ says journalist, author and UK MP Yang. ‘An idea that, even with greater effort, the returns will be lower.’ (Getty Images)

What do survival and success look like? How does young China cope with the added weight of a regime that treats resistance as treason?

What lessons could their experience hold for the rest of us?

British-Chinese writer Yuan Yang, 35, investigates these questions in her book, Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China (2024).

A former Financial Times (FT) journalist, Yang was born in China and lived there, with her grandparents, until she was four. In 1994, she joined her parents in the UK. She only returned to the country of her birth about two decades later, in 2016.

Living there as a journalist, over the next six years, she reported on the economic revolution, of course. But she also noticed “private revolutions” unfolding, she says. There wasn’t always space for these stories in FT, so she eventually picked four of them for her book.

The women she profiles — June, Leiya, Sam and Siyue (names and certain personal details have been altered, to protect them from reprisals) — were picked, she says, to represent different backgrounds and economic classes.

Siyue was raised amid immense pressure to excel academically. She has built a life as an English tutor but feels like a disappointment to her parents, and worries about her future.

June, raised in abject poverty, brought great pride to her parents, as the first girl in her extended family to go to university. She built a life in Beijing as a tutor, but amid new government rules against rote learning, had to reinvent herself. She now runs her own start-up.

Leiya dropped out of school in 2001 and found work as a factory worker. The harsh conditions pushed her to become a labour activist. She worries that her work is doomed to fail, and could see her end up in detention.

Sam is a labour activist at the other end of the class spectrum. She is wealthy and driven by idealism. She heads a labour-activism blog and worries about the repercussions she and her family could face.

(Inigo Blake)

As China’s juggernaut of an economy slows and changes shape, “there is greater uncertainty,” says Yang, who, incidentally, was elected to UK’s Parliament last year. Excerpts from an interview.

You’ve said that a text from a friend kicked off this book…

In 2019, amid a crackdown against student activists in China that had lasted months, with several of the students going missing and others appearing in “confession” videos, a friend messaged me saying she couldn’t meet up anymore. She was going quiet for a long time. In that moment, I really felt that these stories, which the world had not heard, needed to be expressed.

We’ve watched the boom play out. What can you tell us about the flip side, as you saw it?

What’s interesting about the last decade of China’s development is that while there has been an unprecedented explosion in wealth and incomes, especially for the university-educated, the urban middle-class appear to feel very burdened by the increasing competition for status.

This is expressed, I think, in the intense competition for school admissions, the struggle to afford housing in the cities, and the pressure to advance in one’s career by 35, which is widely considered a cut-off for success.

All this leads to what, in recent years, is being called an involution: the idea that even with far greater effort, the returns will either be the same or lower.

You say the problem, and growing disparity, reminded you of some of the crises of the Global North…

The situation in Beijing, where a generation of young professionals can’t afford housing, felt very similar to the situation of my friends in London. There is similar competition at the high end of the university education spectrum as well. China, like so many countries, in the Global North and South, has grown in uneven and unequal ways.

How has this arc played out differently for women?

That gets at something really important. Leiya, for example, describes how in a lot of women moved to the cities in the ’80s, where a lot of new factories were opening, because they felt there was little for them in the countryside. Rural China is much more patriarchal.

In a way, those with ambition were forced to do something new because of the lack of opportunities for them at home, and the fact that daughters get no inheritances in a traditional Chinese family. In some ways, this was greatly challenging; in others, it was also freeing.

What about civil liberties, censorship… it is often hard to see clearly into China. What did you observe, in your time there?

Individuals in China do face much harsher penalties for their speech and political action than I do, for instance, in the UK. Within those constraints, people are creative. But the constraints are very real. People in China still speak in different voices to different groups of people: trusted family vs friends vs colleagues vs officials.

Meanwhile there is also the anxiety of losing one’s footing, in this newly hypercompetitive world…

If you’re at or near the top of the ladder in China, you have quite a long way to fall. That does create the fear that one’s children may not make it to the same rung as you.

Parents fear that an “average” child might not be able to compete to get the social status and support they may need from a state organisation or government body, or even get the respect they would like from, say, the police.

What kinds of difficulties did you face, as a foreign journalist in China?

It’s difficult to say what kind of surveillance one is under in China, but I certainly always assumed that I was under online surveillance there. Sometimes there was physical surveillance as well.

When visiting villages as a foreign journalist, I was viewed with a great deal of political suspicion. People were wary. Officials are really worried you might see something that goes against their narrative that, for instance, they have won the war on poverty and poverty has been “eradicated”.

Of course, it hasn’t been, unfortunately. That is a long and a difficult fight to “win”, in any country.