by WANNING SUN
Yuan Yang is what migration academics call a “1.5 generation migrant” – meaning she was born in her country of origin and then migrated to another country as a child.
She belongs, too, to what Chinese people call jiulinhou – the generation of people born in the 1990s. As a writer, she is interested in the experience of individuals like her – young women eager to make something of their lives.
A journalist who reported on China as a correspondent for the Financial Times, Yang knows firsthand the editorial constraints of China reporting. In fact, a new study finds the vast majority of articles published in British media outlets between 2020 and 2023 framed China negatively, sometimes strongly so. For myriad, complex reasons, the dominant image of China constructed by foreign correspondents is largely one-dimensional, simplistic, and increasingly conforms to a Cold War editorial framework.
Increasingly, China is portrayed as an economic powerhouse, an authoritarian regime and a security threat. Some foreign correspondents, after a stint there, feel they know enough about China to write a book. Some claim to have found the ultimate “truth about China”. Consequently, the Chinese population is mostly imagined by Western readers as a monolith and faceless crowd: divided into those who are victims of a repressive Chinese regime, or heroic individuals who dare to defy the system.
Ordinary Chinese people living their mundane, unremarkable everyday lives are persistently missing. While Western media do report on the phenomenon of rural-to-urban migration in China, the cultural and emotional lives of rural migrants – their hopes and aspirations, worries and frustrations in private life, especially in intimate, familial relations – remain largely unknown.
As a journalist writing to meet the editorial agenda of her paper, Yuan Yang may not have been able to step outside the Financial Times’ negative framework of China reporting. However, her book does not fall into this trap. For this reason, she may not achieve the phenomenal fame of someone such as Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans, the story of three generations of Chinese women (published in 1991), which some claim pandered to Western readers’ pre-existing perceptions. The publishing world does not always reward nuance and complexity.
Yang’s book Private Revolutions is set in the the decades of economic reform, beginning in the 1980s, when China transformed from a socialist to a neoliberal market economy. This transformation resulted in the gradual withdrawal of state support in areas such as health, education and employment, and other market-oriented reforms.
As the state gradually outsourced the responsibility for such services to individual citizens, this has inevitably transformed people’s inner selves. Some China scholars call this process the privatisation of selfhood. The individuals in Yang’s book are caught up in this social transformation. Theirs are stories of inner revolution as they respond to, cope with, or even thrive in a dramatic new world.
Solving the problem of fear
Yang tells the stories of four women who grew up from the 1990s onwards. Three were born in rural China in very humble circumstances. The fourth was born and brought up in the city, but is the child of rural migrants. We follow their lives from the primary and middle school years in their villages.
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