Private Revolutions

Author Yuan Yang
Narrator various
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
Run Time 9 hours and 9 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Biography and non-fiction prose, Economic growth, Ethical issues: censorship, Gender studies: women and girls, History, Political activism, Politics and government, Reportage, journalism or collected columns, Revolutions, uprisings, rebellions, Society and Social Sciences.

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What to expect

'As powerfully intimate as it is politically incendiary' VOGUE
'A portrait of China through four women who refused to accept the life laid out for them. Incredible' SUNDAY TIMES
'A revelatory, moving and tender tale of hopes, fears and change' PETER FRANKOPAN
'Meticulously reports on a country in the throes of change' GUARDIAN
*A Sunday Times, Observer & BBC Highlight for 2024*

This is a book about the coming of age of four women born in China in the 1980s and 1990s, in a society about to change beyond recognition.

It is about Leiya, who wants to escape the fate of the women in her village. Still underage, she bluffs her way on to the factory floor.
It is about June, who at fifteen sets what her family thinks is an impossible goal: to attend university rather than raise pigs.
It is about Siyue, ranked second-to-bottom of her English class, who decides to prove her teachers wrong.
And it is about Sam, who becomes convinced that the only way to change her country is to become an activist – even as the authorities slowly take her peers from the streets.

With unprecedented access to the lives, hopes, homes, dreams and diaries of four ordinary women over a period of six years, Private Revolutions gives a voice to those whose stories go untold. At a time of rising state censorship and suppression, it unearths the identity of modern Chinese society – and, through the telling, something of our own.

Critics 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
Sunday Times
An engrossing new book that meticulously reports on a country in the throes of change, using the lives and choices of four women . . . What sets the story told in Private Revolutions apart is the speed and magnitude of this upheaval, captured by Yang with palpable admiration for the women negotiating these seismic shifts one day at a time
Guardian
Private Revolutions interweaves the stories of a quartet of women born in the wake of China’s Cultural Revolution, from Leiya, a garment factory worker in Shenzen, to Sam, a middle-class schoolgirl turned Maoist revolutionary. The prose is as powerfully intimate as it is politically incendiary, tackling the censorship and economic voraciousness plaguing China today head on
Vogue
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'
A revelatory, moving and tender tale of hopes, fears and change. A real eye-opener about life in contemporary China
Peter Frankopan
This is a book of delights. Yuan Yang shows us the real China in all its complexity — the rich, detailed, often brutal life of the villages and cities. Anyone who wants to understand what China and the Chinese are like will find great pleasure, and sometimes pain, in reading it
John Simpson
Acute and moving – a frank, unsparing, yet tender portrait of young women searching for happiness and purpose in a fast-shifting world
Tania Branigan, author of 'Red Memory'
A powerful and sometimes heartbreaking picture of the making of modern China. Brilliant
Tim Harford
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
Through the eyes of a quartet of women who were born in China in the 1980s and 1990s, Yang provides a fascinating portrait of womanhood and society in a rapidly evolving – and increasingly repressive – global superpower
Waterstones, Best Books of 2024

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