Hope and spunk in unpredictable terrain

Yuan Yang, the first Chinese-born British MP and a former journalist, spent her early childhood being cared for by her maternal grandparents in a place that ‘straddled’ the gap between the rural and the urban in the Sichuanese mountains. Her grandparents lived in a danwei or Communist work unit, purpose-built under Mao’s leadership to house the workers of China’s first semiconductor materials factory.

Yang, who was born in 1990, describes these early experiences of living with her grandparents in the preface to her book, Private Revolutions, which weaves together the real life stories of four women coming of age in a China that has long left behind Maoism and embraced an authoritarian capitalism that began under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership in the early 1980s. These women — Leiya, June, Siyue, and Sam — come from different backgrounds ranging from rural villages to the urban middle class but have one thing in common: they are, as Yang writes, ‘…unusually accomplished idealists; if they weren’t, they wouldn’t have tried to do improbable things.’

Shortlisted for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, Private Revolutions first introduces us to Siyue as a dreamy eight-year-old unfit for rote learning, which is the norm in Chinese schools. She lives in a village with her maternal grandmother, while her parents, who took a bet on entrepreneurship during the early years of the Reform era, move to various cities as their fortunes rise and fall.

But even that distance from Siyue doesn’t prevent her overbearing mother from having an outsize influence on her childhood that verges on the abusive. What provides Siyue with an escape is her love for reading, especially English literature.

Siyue’s academic travails continue through university, but all those missteps and experimenting with designing her own English classes, as well as the entrepreneurial spirit she inherited from her parents, help her become a first-mover in the private tutoring industry that flourished in China for almost a decade. What ends that phase of Siyue’s professional growth is a government ban on for-profit tutoring in 2021.

That ban would also affect the professional fortunes of June, another of the women Yang profiles in the book. As a child, June, whose mother died in an accident in a coal mine when she was in school, was part of a larger cohort of ‘left-behind children’ in the mountain village where she lived with her illiterate father and grandfather. June has to cross the hurdles of inadequate rural schooling, limited access to better schools in a nearby county town, and then pass the entrance exams to a good university in the city. After a brief wayward phase, the arrival of an inspirational teacher in her village steers June towards academic excellence and, eventually, a career in China’s tech sector.

Whether an individual can make changes at the grassroots level is a common theme that threads through the lives of the remaining two women in Yang’s quartet. Through Leiya, who sets up centres for mothers who work in factories to socialise and navigate the challenges of being migrants in cities, Yang shows how small labour NGOs are trying to make a tangible difference in the lives of some of the most marginalised in Chinese cities. It is hard work — which means not just negotiating red tape and scrabbling for limited funding but also trying to educate workers on their rights (albeit in a way that doesn’t attract the censure — and worse — of the powers-that-be).

The most compelling story in Private Revolutions is that of Sam, who starts out as a sociology student from an urban middle-class family and gradually turns into an activist trying to revive the Marxist ideals on which the modern Chinese nation had been founded. When the government cracks down on Marxist activists in 2018-19 — yes, a country that proudly flaunts the visual markers of Communism arrested those who put the ideology into practice — Sam somehow escapes detention. Even though she helps fellow activists get legal representation to fight their cases, Sam doesn’t feel she has done enough for the movement and questions whether she can be a true revolutionary leader like her icons from the early days of the Communist Party.

Through the lives of these four women, Yang paints an intriguing portrait of contemporary China with all its contradictions, its astonishing economic progress and now the ever-widening income inequality, which makes social mobility harder for the people than before. Even though Leiya, June, Siyue, and Sam live in a country where life is deeply unpredictable, there’s some hope to be gleaned from these women’s openness to new ideas and self-transformation.