Private Revolutions

Four Women Face China's New Social Order

By: Yuan Yang

Narrated by: Crystal Yu, Gabby Wong, Kae Alexander, Naomi Yang, Yuan Yang

Length: 8 hrs

Publisher's summary

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by the BBC

A sweeping yet intimate portrait of modern China told through the lives of four ordinary women striving for a better future in a highly unequal society

While serving as the deputy Beijing bureau chief of the Financial Times, Chinese-British journalist Yuan Yang began to notice common threads in the lives of her Chinese peers—women born during China’s turn toward capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, who, despite the country's enormous economic gains during their lifetimes, were coming up against deeply entrenched barriers as they sought to achieve financial stability.

The product of seven years of intimate, in-depth reporting, this transporting and indelible book traces the journey of four such women as they try to make better lives for themselves and their families in the new Chinese economy. June and Siyue are among the few in their villages to graduate high school. Each makes her way to Beijing, June as a young professional and Siyue an entrepreneur. Like Siyue, Leiya lives with her grandparents in their village while her parents send money home; yearning for a different life than those of the women she sees around her, Leiya soon joins her parents in Shenzhen as an underage factory worker. Born to an urban middle-class family, Sam is outraged when her eyes are opened the poor treatment of workers, and becomes a labor activist, increasingly under threat by the authorities.

As the women grapple with government policies that threaten their businesses, their children's access to education, their choice of where to make a home, and, in Sam’s case, their lives, a vivid, damning, and urgent picture emerges of the previously unseen human cost of China’s rising economic tide—and the courage and perseverance of those caught in the swell.

©2024 Yuan Yang (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“The prose is as powerfully intimate as it is politically incendiary, tackling the censorship and economic voraciousness plaguing China today head on.” —Vogue

“Yang offers a fresh interpretation of the ongoing nature of China’s many upheavals, the actual effects of its oft-discussed policies, the cost of its meteoric economic growth, and the role a new generation of women is poised to play. [Private Revolutions is] a highly revealing, human-centered cultural inquiry.” —Kirkus (Starred Review)

“A portrait of the country through four women who grew up there in the eighties and nineties and refused to accept the life laid out for them. Activists, factory workers, pig farmers turned students: they provide incredible insight into the lives of ordinary Chinese people.” —The Sunday Times Best Books of 2024

“Written by one of the most sensitive and acute chroniclers of contemporary China working today, this is a beautiful, immersive, moving account of the country’s whirlwind transformations since the 1990s, told through the lives of four extraordinarily resilient and idealistic Chinese women.” —Julia Lovell, author of Maoism and The Opium War

“Private Revolutions has the extraordinary, novelistic power to show how everyday lives on the other side of the world are actually lived that won Behind the Beautiful Forevers a Pulitzer… A landmark work.” —Felix Martin, author of Money