I had a little crisis-of-age as I was reading Private Revolutions by Yuan Yang – I don’t think about my age much at all, however, this book that looked at the ‘history’ of the 1980s and 1990s made me think, gosh… that was thirty years ago!

Yang’s text examines China’s new social order through the lives of four ordinary women – June, Siyue, Leiya and Sam. Each was striving for a better future in a society that remained inherently unequal. Yang demonstrates that despite enormous economic gains, inequities in other aspects of everyday life were growing.

Two of the women, Leiya and Siyue, were ‘…’left-behind’ children’, meaning that they were raised by their grandparents in rural villages while their parents went to cities to earn money. The term ‘left-behind children’ became ‘…synonymous with educational disadvantage and emotional abandonment…’.

Leiya joined her parents in Shenzhen as soon as she was able, as an underage factory worker and ultimately forms nonprofits to help working-class women in her community.

Siyue graduated from high school and made her way to Beijing. Entrepreneurial and with a love of learning, Siyue established a successful tutoring business at the peak of the demand for urban families seeking better education for their children.

Oversubscribed primary schools demand a list of the child’s accomplishments over the six years of their life, and an interview with their parents.

Siyue’s initial success was short-lived. The government, realising that education was lucrative, changed the rules for businesses and ‘…China’s $120 billion private tutoring industry collapsed in value within a few days.’ Siyue reflects –

How can you change yourself and your children within such a system if the system stays the same?

June moved to Beijing after finishing high school and was focused solely on making money. She shifted between various factory jobs and faced numerous obstacles.

Born to an urban middle-class family, Sam was alert to the poor treatment of workers, and became a labor and Marxist activist. As the book progresses, we learn more about the threats she endured from government authorities.

What was most striking about the women’s stories was how financial security was important, but mattered little when they experienced gross disadvantage and inequity in other elements of their lives, notably health, access to education, housing, and safe and fair working conditions.

I do not believe in an inevitable march from poverty to progress. Life gets worse and better for different groups in different ways.

Although each woman anticipated that changes in China would allow them to be better-off than their parents’ generation, all faced the barriers of China’s hukou system, that permanently determines what social services a person can access (and is dependent on where a person is born).

The system has created a divide between urban and rural populations and, as the women in this book discovered, limits mobility. For example, both June and Siyue were unable to access the universities they wanted to attend because they were living out of the rural zone where they were born. Furthermore, they were unable to legally register as residents of Beijing, and therefore could not access housing and health services available to those born in the city. When they had their own children, those children were also deemed ‘illegal’, and hence the cycle continues.

Although China’s one-child policy is referred to, the focus is on gender inequality.

June’s grandma did not love her or her sister any less for being girls; she simply accepted the Chinese proverb that daughters are ‘water poured onto a neighbour’s garden’.

The policy was abolished in 2015, however for the women in this book who had their own children, access to healthcare, childcare and education remained a huge challenge.

Rather than being seen as permission to have more children, everyone saw it as a sign of looming government pressure on women to rescue the country’s plummeting birth rate.

Yang weaves the women’s stories together (occasionally I had trouble keeping track of each) but strikes a good balance of telling the personal story within the context of China’s economic boom and the associated accumulation of social problems. What was most striking for me, was their recollections of childhood, where conditions were primitive, and yet their eagerness to learn and succeed remained –

In the winters, when temperatures would drop to below freezing, each kid brought a metal pot of lit coal to put under their table to keep warm.

3.5/5

She stopped at a bakery, where she bought two boxes of green-bean cakes, freshly pressed and ringed with toasted sesame seeds.