Tales of Transformation in China

THAT THE PERSONAL is the political is no less true for its having become a cliché. Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China’s New Social Order (2024), the debut book by Yuan Yang, provides a master class in this truism, as it follows four young Chinese women coming of age against the larger political canvas of contemporary China’s explosive metamorphosis into the factory of the world.

Meticulously researched and reported, this bildungsroman uses the narrative arcs of its protagonists to throw light on some of the major themes that define 21st-century China—in particular, the consequences of the transformation of farmers into factory workers and the mass migration from country to towns that this entailed. These themes include the plight of “left-behind children,” brought up by grandparents, often illiterate, who can offer little more than to “keep them full and keep them warm”; the injustices of the hukou system, China’s internal visa, which denies migrant labor equal access to health services and schools; the stress of competition at every rung of the education and career ladder that young people trying to remake themselves face; and the ways in which women are beginning to take control of their own destinies, despite myriad challenges from both state and society.

That Yang, who served as the deputy Beijing bureau chief for the Financial Times and later became the paper’s first China-Europe correspondent, is a journalist shows in her direct writing style, which is completely shorn of stylistic pyrotechnics. The result is that, in parts, the book—whose author has just been elected to Parliament in Great Britain as a Labour candidate—reads like a long feature article, its emotional punch weaker than it might have been. But the scale and pace of the “revolutions” that the title references are sufficiently epic to give it propulsive force.

Three of the book’s protagonists—Siyue, June, and Leiya—were “left behind” in their villages by their parents, who were men and women tossed about on the early waves of migrant labor that broke upon China’s eastern seaboard in the “Reform and Opening Up” era, which began at the end of the 1970s. For these parents, the city was a place wholly defined by their labor. “Life,” in terms of the education of their children, access to health care, and retirement, was all expected to occur back in their villages. In the early 2010s, more than 60 million Chinese children, or one in five, were left-behind children. One in 14 lived alone.

Siyue is the daughter of small-time rural entrepreneurs who moved to Shenzhen in the 1980s. Their lives were totally occupied with money—making it, losing it, longing for it. Siyue went from being a lazy student, ranked at the bottom of her English class in high school, to becoming an autodidact who runs English camps for a generation of anxious children driven on by anxious parents.

The fear of “falling off the ladder”—that precarious path that will lead to a better life so long as one keeps climbing—is omnipresent in the book. China is a resource-scarce environment, and the pie is limited. Today, about 10 million students compete for high school entrance exams annually, compared to three million a generation ago. The acceptance rate of the top 200-odd elite universities is about five percent—matching that of Harvard’s. The acceptance rate for the most coveted of them all—Peking University—is one percent.

Another of the book’s heroines, June, somehow manages to get into a small local college despite unpromising beginnings. When June was only 13 years old, her mother, the family’s main breadwinner, died in a coal-mining accident. The village she lived in was so remote that it was a five-hour walk by foot to the closest middle school. June’s grandmother advised her to prepare for a life of raising pigs, but instead she went on to become a tech executive in Beijing, eventually landing a job on the operations team of a delivery services app.

The third of the trio of rural-urban stories is that of Leiya, who dropped out of school at age 15 in 2001 to move to Shenzhen. Armed with a fake ID, she got a job working in a garment factory, from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. most days (and nights). Her earnings of 600 yuan a month (70 USD) may sound meager, but they were nonetheless three times that of the average farmer at the time.

Leiya went on to become a factory labor organizer. And eventually, driven in part by her desire to ensure that her own daughter could remain with her in the city, she founded a day-care center for female factory workers’ children.

Sam, who completes the book’s quartet, is an anomaly in her urban, middle-class upbringing. But, like Leiya, her story explores the new labor movements that have sprung up in reaction to the excesses of the low-cost labor, mass-production model that has exemplified the China story for most of this millennium.

As the limits of this system are being reached, some Chinese are choosing to step off the conveyor belt. Young people in today’s China are described not as Gen Z but as Generation Involution (“neijuan”)—a term that refers to a “system which absorbs ever more effort for ever less return.”

As inequalities remain stark and economic growth slows down, there is a sense of disillusionment with the China Dream, a feeling of ennui and burnout that is at the heart of another new book, The Mountains Are High: A Year of Escape in Rural China, by journalist Alec Ash.

Ash details a year that he spent in the hippie-hideaway of Dali, a Shangri-la-esque town in China’s southern Yunnan province, whose “high” mountains protect it from the panopticon of the state, allowing it to become a refuge for a gaggle of “alternative” characters—from organic farmers and yoga teachers to magic-mushroom worshippers and would-be monks.

Many whom Ash encounters are in fact running away from “capitalist excess rather than communist control.” He discerns in them a nostalgia for the early communist era, even though most of these nostalgists were born in post-Mao China. Yet, they hark back to the supposed equality and simplicity of China’s communist period, blending this yearning with a Taoist-inspired spirituality that hankers for the purity of nature.

If they sound a tad confused, so does Ash himself. The book reads like a less compelling version of Eat, Pray, Love (2006), as Ash waxes cliché about heartbreak and emotional healing.

There are sections of the book where the lyrical writing makes it an enjoyable enough, if light, read. But the larger social and political significance of Dali’s dropouts for China’s future is unclear. It is certainly ironic that after decades of rural Chinese folk heading to the cities in a desperate attempt to escape poverty—exemplified by the stories in Yang’s book—there are now a number of city-born folk making the reverse journey to soil and open farmland. But how large is this trend? A trickle or a flood? How likely is this group to become a force for China’s authorities to reckon with? We are left none the wiser for having read the book.

What the protagonists of Yang and Ash’s books share in common is their openness to new ideas and self-transformation. But the tenacity and grit, the ability to chi ku (or eat bitterness), that Yang’s women display are absent from Ash’s pantheon. It is possible to see the latter’s refusal to participate in the system by tangping, or “lying flat,” as a political statement. But the impact of this statement is diluted by its being so open to charges of self-indulgence. A bit like Ash’s book itself.

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Featured image: Traditionally attributed to Shen Zhou. Walking by a Mountain Stream, ca. 1368–1644. Freer Gallery of Art, gift of Charles Lang Freer in 1920. National Museum of Asian Art (F1911.163o). CC0, asia.si.edu. Accessed July 8, 2024.

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