PRIVATE REVOLUTIONS: Four Women Face China’s New Social Order

by Yuan Yang

There’s an unforgettable moment in Yuan Yang’s latest book where an idealistic university student is given the task of conducting a survey by visiting random addresses in Shenzhen, China’s bustling manufacturing hub. During her visit to a poor neighborhood, she asks a young man living in a cramped apartment with four other adults and a baby to rate his job satisfaction. His immediate suspicion arises as he questions if she has been sent by the Communist Party.

Despite her denial, the young man remarks, “I’m guessing they did send you, so let’s just say we are completely, utterly satisfied with everything in our lives.” This incident, set in the early 2010s, sheds light on Yang’s exploration of the challenges faced by China’s labor force and the deep-rooted class divisions prevalent in society.

In 2016, Yang returned to China, the country of her early childhood, to work as a journalist for The Financial Times. Over the span of six years, Yang closely followed the lives of four young women as they maneuvered through what she describes as China’s “new social order.” All these women, much like Yang herself, were born in the late 1980s and 1990s, coming of age in a period following the economic growth of their parents’ generation, marked by the increasing prosperity brought on by Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in the 1980s.