Yuan Yang was born in Sichuan in 1990, immigrated to England when she was four, and was the China correspondent for the Financial Times. In Private Revolutions, she tracks the stories of four Chinese women of similar age. They are successful millennials, perhaps regarded as the embodiment of nouveau riche China - “one-child policy” beneficiaries who pay in cash for their homes and drive fancy cars.
However, Yang’s subjects, Leiya, June, Siyue and Sam, present a more complicated picture. For them life teetered on a knife-edge, with a vacillating economy and government, no guarantee of a future and a stark divide between rich and poor. What saves them is a mixture of verve, luck and unrelenting hustle.
Education, family and, most importantly, money propel Yang’s narrative. June’s mother worked in a coal mine to send her daughter to school, only to be killed in an accident, “white teeth… visible under lips caked in black dust”. June, who now runs her own company, used to walk seven hours to be home on weekends, occasionally splurging 5 RMB (65 cents) on a bus. Leiya took a job at a factory, where she made 1,000 RMB (€130) a month. “They worked over sixteen hours a day in the heat of the factory floor… stitching together the leather phone-holders that fashionable businessmen used to wear clipped to their belts to hold their Nokias.”
Fundamental is the hukou system, which requires each Chinese citizen register in their hometown or village, and determines education and healthcare. Three of the four of Yang’s women come from “migrant” families, registered to rural villages but moved to cities. About a colleague, Yang writes, “It turned out to be easier for my parents to become British nationals a decade after arriving in the UK than it was for (her) parents to change their rural hukou.”
For centuries, China has prided itself on its meritocracy, which promises that anyone can rise through its examination system. However, 10 million Chinese high school graduates compete for university. China’s elite universities “admit five out of every hundred students who apply, the same rate as Harvard University. Beijing University accepts just one in a hundred applicants.” Village grammar schools are less qualified than urban institutions. What fees and bribes are required to change that hukou for your offspring?
Chinese, monosyllabic and staccato, is a difficult language to translate. Yang, whose narratives are culled from interviews and diaries, represents these women honestly, but as a result, the writing can be flat. For example: “(She) realised that rural kids simply ditched school and got jobs, but city kids knew how to scrape by while paying the minimum level of attention to remain at school.” When Yang describes herself in the introduction and epilogue, she is more fluid. Nevertheless, Yang is not a stylist, but a reporter.
Surprisingly, it is Yang’s straightforward prose that makes Private Revolutions a compelling read. Anecdotes, told without sentiment, veer from bleak to absurd; the intricacies, for instance, that one character must navigate (forging her wedding certificate, garnering “points,” paying school fees) so that her daughter, born out of wedlock and hence formally nonexistent, can go to school in their city. Other tales make the reader feel complicit. “Foxconn, China’s largest employer, is most famous for being Apple’s main assembler of iPhones… In 2010, a string of young workers tried to kill themselves by jumping off the buildings in its flagship Shenzhen factory campus. A total of eighteen workers in their late teens and early twenties jumped. Fourteen died.”
Yang’s parents have doctorates, and she grew up in the UK. In her book, there are hints of “what if”. This Oxford graduate muses, “My parents could have stayed in the coastal city where I was born, in Ningbo I could have grown up learning how to crack snow crabs from their crusts… But by the late 2000s, when I was ready to take the entrance exams for university, I would have been competing with over 10 million high-school-educated children across China, rather than the 3 million that my parents were up against.”
Private Revolutions could be a Netflix series, for family, violence and romance abound. In the Chinese literary tradition, many key characters are female - intellectually brilliant, but often tragic. Yang’s book is published in May, which, in China, is a revolutionary month. On May 4th, 1919, intellectuals protested; it was also when the 1989 Tiananmen movement escalated.
However, because Yang is disinclined to be melodramatic, her book rings true. She does not steep herself in past sorrows, and this year, is standing for Labour in the pending Westminster election. While she writes, “I do not believe in an inevitable march from poverty to progress,” she wants to find solutions. Because of her pragmatism, Yang’s portrayal of China’s women and their future is piercing and somewhat hopeful.
