Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China

"Yuan Yang, who was the FT ’s China correspondent before that, was born in 1990, and she looks at four women born around the same time—the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s. These women tell the story of a very different China to the one we are used to hearing about. It’s the other side of the economic miracle. These are women who have dreams that might appear modest, but are quietly revolutionary—like going to university rather than raising pigs, or escaping the village to work on a factory floor. Yang followed these women and what she calls their “private revolutions” against increasing state censorship and the clamping down on their lives. You realise that, for these women, trying to make a good life in modern China is really hard. There are so many obstacles that they face, but they are resourceful, resolute and inspiring in the choices they make. It’s an eye-opening insight into the lives of young women who rarely make the headlines and how they navigate the system. Yang is a sensitive and observant writer, and holds their stories with great care and honesty and expertly weaves them all together. I was really taken by this book, and how Yang shows us China through the eyes and lives of these four women. It made me realise that there are so many outstanding books by women, on a whole range of subjects, writers who are offering new ways of looking at some of the biggest issues of our time in original, nuanced ways and with immense authority. Books we need to read to make sense of the times we are living in, on a whole range of subjects. We should all be celebrating women’s writing."