PRIVATE REVOLUTIONS: Four women confront China’s new social order, by Yuan Yang
There’s an unforgettable moment in Yuan Yang’s new book, when an idealistic university student is assigned to conduct a survey by going door to door to random addresses in Shenzhen, the Chinese industrial metropolis.
In a poor neighborhood, the student asks a young man, who lives in a tiny apartment with four other adults and a baby, to rate his current job satisfaction. His first reaction is to ask if she was sent by the Communist Party.
Although she denies it, he replies, “I guess they did send you, so let’s just say we’re completely, completely happy with everything in our lives.”
Set in the early 2010s, the story highlights Yang’s concern for the plight of Chinese workers and the class divisions that define their encounter.
In 2016, Yang returned to China, where she had spent her early childhood, to work as a journalist for The Financial Times. Over the next six years, Yang followed four young women as they navigated what she calls China’s “new social order.” All, like Yang, were born in the late 1980s and 1990s, and came of age following the “optimistic giddiness” of their parents’ generation, a generation marked by rising prosperity in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms of the 1980s.
Leiya, June, Siyue and Sam (the district inspector) must deal with a very different economic landscape, one marked not by cheerful optimism but by anxious uncertainty.
As Yang notes, she happened to be on the ground when “increasing political repression and censorship” in China — coinciding with Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2013 — made it increasingly dangerous for journalists and their informants to shed light on social problems that the Communist Party would rather not discuss. The compelling book that results from Yang’s persistence is a potent snapshot of four young Chinese women trying to take control of the direction of their lives, escape the narrow confines of their patriarchal rural roots, and make it in the big city.
In doing so, these women are crossing what is perhaps the greatest socioeconomic hurdle in Chinese society: the urban-rural divide. The Maoist-era household registration system was relaxed by market reforms in the 1980s and early 1990s, allowing rural migrants to move to China’s coastal cities to work and power the factories that fueled the country’s economic boom.
And they did, with more than a third of the country’s workforce now considered rural migrants. Yet major obstacles remain: such migrants are still largely denied basic social benefits in cities, such as pensions, medical care and education for their children.
Yang’s reporting offers the raw human stories behind these colossal numbers. As she documents each woman’s journey from childhood, including encounters with casual sexism, occasional personal violence, and the impossible weight of parental expectations, we can appreciate how far they’ve come as adults—and how far they still have to fall.
Two of the women escape the constraints of their villages through education: June defies the odds, becoming a university student and then a tech worker, while Siyue manages to parlay a dismal private university education into an unexpected career as an English interpreter, tutor, and entrepreneur. Another, Leiya, takes the most direct route out of her village, working in a Shenzhen factory as a teenager and eventually becoming a workers’ rights organizer.
The “success” of the middle class, however, offers no respite: the exhaustion is palpable, as these young women continue to struggle and toil just to stay above water. As Yang explains, this is the pervasive Chinese fear of “falling off the ladder.” And over the past 30 years, as massive socioeconomic inequality has emerged, “the ladder has gotten very high.”
The social milieu in which Yang’s subjects live, suspended between rural past and urban future, is fraught with uncertainty. Lives and destinies can change overnight, with the stroke of a pen — and a subsequent new government policy.
The hugely successful education company Siyue founds, for example, loses much of its staff when the government decides to crack down on the relatively unregulated private tutoring industry. Leiya’s careful navigation of a byzantine points system to ensure her daughter has a shot at getting into a coveted Shenzhen school is derailed when the school district map is redrawn. These setbacks offer no time for self-pity or reflection: Pivot they must, and they do, to survive.
We celebrate when Siyue, who never marries but gives birth to a child on her own, decides to raise her daughter in the company of other strong, single women. At this point, even her own highly critical mother admits: “Why marry? When you’re a girl who earns money, in the modern world…” She doesn’t finish the thought, but it’s a remarkable victory.
These flashes of light, unfortunately, come all too rarely for the book’s protagonists, and feel all the more unlikely as Xi’s government policies squeeze the breath out of Chinese civil society. The book’s ending is left unresolved, while the lives of Yang’s subjects continue to unfold.
The question remains: If only private—and not political—revolutions are open to Chinese citizens today, are these self-transformations really enough? How many times does your source of income have to be crushed, your savings squandered on a bad real estate deal, or you have to be a graduate who can’t find a job before you give up and “lie flat”—or, for those with means, move abroad?
The vast majority of Chinese workers today have no choice: they must keep climbing the ladder.
PRIVATE REVOLUTIONS: Four women face the new social order in China | By Yuan Yang | Viking | 294 pp. | $30
