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Born in Sichuan, Yuan Yang moved to the UK at the age of four. She started her career as a journalist at The Economist and spent eight years at the Financial Times, where she became the deputy bureau chief in Beijing. She was recently elected as the Labour MP for Earley and Woodley, in the south of England. Just before entering parliament, her new book, Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China’s New Social Order came out, which draws on stories she collected during her time reporting in China. We began our interview by discussing the book: what follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Q: What prompted you to write this book and why this topic?

A: The book is an exploration of the lives and coming of age stories of four women who were born in the 1980s and 90s, so millennial women similar to myself, and they straddle different class divides within China. 

The first woman whom I met was the woman called Sam — I use pseudonyms to protect all of the women’s anonymity and safety. Sam was born to a middle-class, urban household in one of China’s big cities, Shenzhen, and she had a high-flying, privileged academic life, up until the point where she decided to give away that privilege by becoming a labor activist. 

I covered the stories of Sam and some of her colleagues in the labor movement during the crackdown on students and labor activists in 2018 and 2019. Around that time I started to think about the motivations of people who decide to do such difficult things against their own narrow self interest in an authoritarian society. I really wanted to bring out a psychological understanding of what motivated Sam, what led her down this path, and what had created her as a person. That approach to writing about China was quite important to me, because as a journalist, I wrote a lot about the Chinese economy and businesses and macro trends. I really wanted to show readers China’s transformation, but at the human level.

In your preface, you write about your own background, being born in a small town in Sichuan and moving to the UK at the age of four, and how these women’s stories could also have been yours. What part of their story most resonates with you?

One feature of all these women’s stories is being the so-called “left behind children.” That phenomenon is really widespread in my generation in China. Because of the restrictions that the government sets on access to social security and public services, and in particular, state education, and also because of the economic transformation taking place in the 90s, when so many parents were moving from small villages or towns to big cities for work, a big generation of children was left behind with their grandparents, sometimes with even more tangential relatives, who may not have been fully able to take care of them in the countryside where they were born. 

I was also brought up by my grandparents and my great-grandma in Sichuan. Before the age of four, my parents were academics. At the time, they were working on the other side of China. Sichuan is in the Southwest interior, my parents were on the Eastern coast at a university there. And I really resonated with the different relationships that family structure creates. For many children, the left behind experience is another layer on top of the economic inequality and unfairness that they already experienced, because often they’re being taken care of by relatives or grandparents who haven’t completed their education, may not be able to read or write, and have a very different understanding of what education involves compared to what’s needed in the modern era in China. 

That awareness now of there not necessarily being a glittering future for you, unless there are things you do yourself to try and change the direction of the future, that’s really remarkable among the current Chinese generation.

Given so much has changed in just a space of one and a half generations in China, the difference between the world that millennials growing up in versus their parents or grandparents is similar to the difference, I would say, in the UK or the U.S., between somebody growing up in the 2000s versus somebody who was born at the start of the Industrial Revolution, a couple of centuries before that. That’s the span of the economic transformation, and also gives a sense of how different the mindsets are of the grandparents’ generation and their attitudes to the world. I was very lucky in that for my grandparents, I was the center of their world, and they were all really coming towards the end of their careers. They had a lot of time for me. They would read to me and would teach me to read stories to them. I have a very strong relationship with my grandparents as a result of that time.

How representative would you say the stories of these four women are? And what does that tell us about the situation for women in China today? 

They’re very representative in one sense: I was very careful to try and pick women who have come from a variety of different backgrounds in China. Sam, the labor activist, is actually quite atypical for her generation in that she was born in a city. Now that’s at a time, in the 90s, when around 90 percent of Chinese families are still agricultural. The other three women were all born in villages or in the countryside, and they really span the more prosperous countryside around Shanghai, in the Pearl River Delta, which was one of the first areas to benefit from the opening up of trade and the influx of investments — all the way to the southwestern interior, in the mountainside, which is very remote and has very low infrastructure connection even today, compared to other regions and the big cities.

There is a very important sense in which they’re all unrepresentative and atypical, too, which is that these are all women who’ve made tremendous changes in their lives. I won’t say too much to spoil the story, but they all start off in a very different situation to where they end up. When writing stories of heroism and amazing feats, it’s really important to emphasize the fact that these women have made some part of their dreams come true, but there are also women who face so many obstacles that prevent them from doing the same. In a typical life, there is a much stronger mix of obstacles and stumbles. I try to bring that out in the stories that I write about, the systemic problems that they come up against and the ways in which they fail as well as they succeed. I wanted to make sure that their stories are connected to the broader context of what’s going on, what things are hindering them, and what things are also supporting them, because we’re never simply individualized heroes or villains. We all exist in the context of our societies.

Their cases definitely show the many battles a woman has to fight in China, in different facets of the system and in their personal and family life. How would you describe the broader picture of gender equality in China right now and how can things change?

This is a very fraught topic, and in China, as with many other East Asian societies, the shift of gender awareness among the younger generation has happened at really different paces for women and men. That’s really clear. If you ask women in South Korea, for example, what they think the biggest obstacles are to getting married, they give you a very different set of answers to what young men in South Korea will say. That divergence between young men and young women is really fascinating in itself. 

One theme that the work brings out is how women who are born in patriarchal, particularly rural settings, already have the sense that there is nothing for them in the countryside. They have to really fight to make something of their own lives. There’s nothing that will be handed to them in the same way that their brothers say, may inherit the family farm — and not just material wealth, but also the respect that comes with being a son. 

That attitude, possibly for many Chinese women, and women growing up in patriarchal societies around the world, does lead us to be more open to social change. It leads us to consider what it is that I can do that will change my own life, and therefore, to be more embracing of the need for feminism and also the need for social shifts. Young men in those societies have less impetus for that kind of embrace. That divergence in attitudes, where feminism arrives much earlier for Chinese women, and for East Asian women as a whole, than for men in those societies, brings a real challenge.

The book’s title is Private Revolutions. Do you think this is happening to a lot of women, and what does this mean for China? 

I chose this title and really wanted to emphasize the private nature of what is happening, because from the perspective of somebody who’s reading about China only through reporting and news media, it’s difficult to get a sense of what people who are living and growing up in China are actually feeling about the macro shifts that we can see from far away. It’s really important to me to emphasize the lived experience of people in China who are remaking their own lives in quite radical and unexpected ways.

The difficulty of writing about any activist or protest movement or social change in China, is to try and differentiate what is done from what happens at a very intimate and personal level, purposefully hidden from a macro view. In democratic societies and in the West, we tend to think of visible protest and organizing, and political coordination, as the roots of social change. It’s very difficult to map that same level of change within China, which has a highly-censored online space, very tight police controls on mass gatherings and so on. So it’s really trying to bring out the fact that there will be lots of people questioning the rules of society in China, but they express that in different ways to what we’re used to seeing in the Western world. Certainly, the language and the humor, the irony, the sarcasm that takes place in Chinese social media is much more opaque to a Western observer, compared to the outright protest that you see on social media in the English language sphere, for example.

In terms of what that means for China, it’s very difficult to draw conclusions because there have been instances in the last few years of really explicit, overt protests. For example, the white paper movement [a series of rallies in late 2022 in which people held up blank paper in protest] was a backlash against the censorship during the COVID lockdowns. It spread very quickly, and then it was really cracked down upon by the police. Those movements do leave generational memories for those involved. It’s really interesting what collective experiences imprint on the generations that go through them, and how that really shapes their worldview beyond.

What I find really remarkable about the 90s and beyond generation is that there has been an understanding that the social contract has shifted for them, that they, and certainly their children, may not face as easy a time as their grandparents had. You see that kind of shift in the UK: the lower expectation of, say, home ownership and of social mobility that children have nowadays compared to their parents’ generation. There’s a really big gulf there and that can be very disruptive for society. The end of optimism is always a very difficult moment for any society to move through. 

In China, again, going back to the Industrial Revolution analogy: There’s been two and a half centuries of change compacted into the space of two generations, and that speed of change is very difficult. That awareness now of there not necessarily being a glittering future for you, unless there are things you do yourself to try and change the direction of the future, that’s really remarkable among the current Chinese generation.

Did writing this book give you a new understanding of China’s demographic crisis? 

I spent quite a lot of time when I was reporting this book traveling in the countryside, which I hadn’t done as much when I was writing news for the FT. In the countryside, the demographic question is very different. There are still much larger families and a much higher propensity to have children. The demographic slowdown is much more pronounced in the big cities. 

That leads to a different challenge. Scott Rozelle, the Stanford economist, estimates that seven out of ten children are born in the countryside, but the educational resources are super concentrated in the cities. So there is the first order challenge that you describe, which is this demographic change. The bigger problem behind that is the uneven distribution of educational and healthcare resources to take care of the children [in the countryside].

You mentioned how Chinese interviewees are increasingly suspicious of foreign media. In what ways have you noticed the decline of China’s press freedom during the period you were in Beijing, and how did it affect your work? How can journalists adapt to that?

It’s a huge challenge, and it’s something that gathered pace after 2018. The arrival of U.S. trade tariffs and sanctions on Chinese tech companies accelerated a more explicit U.S. versus China, us versus them mentality, which had existed in different parts of Chinese politics and society for a long time. What happened in 2018 and 2019 made it burst out into the open. The pandemic and the crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong then reinforced that sense of suspicion and divide. 

…too often governments have a very compartmentalized set of relationships with China, where, for example, concerns over human rights or consular protections for British nationals in China are taken quite separately to considerations over investment and trade.

I was involved very heavily with the Foreign Correspondents Club of China. We tracked the decline of press freedoms in our annual reports over a number of years. I would say that one of the biggest threats, particularly during the pandemic era, came from online surveillance and cyber intrusions. Because people couldn’t move around as freely anymore, we relied a lot more on video calls and the internet. That’s also obviously true for journalists who are outside of China. Cybersecurity between the journalists and the source obviously has two parts, and it’s down to the behavior of the source as well as the behavior of the journalists. But it’s very important to be part of initiatives and support the general spread of cybersecurity awareness in China and for journalists more widely. 

There has been lots of really interesting data-driven and public source-driven journalism. For example, last year, my FT team and I were part of a visual investigation into both the demolition and reconfiguration of mosques across China to take out what were deemed Islamic traits to them, like minarets and domes. That was done through interviews with Chinese sources, but also the bulk of the visual work was done from satellite imagery, which can be used to powerful effect. There are more and more tools that journalists are developing to make the best use of those public sources.

China obviously changed a lot in the six years you were based there. What most stood out to you? 

The biggest difference was that shift in openness and interest in the outside world. 2016 was quite a good time to arrive as a journalist, because there was still a level of optimism and curiosity, and keenness to engage with the outside world. By the pandemic era, so many business people and investors were feeling extremely worn down and concerned about whether they would become political targets, because the understanding of what was sensitive had evolved beyond the usual boundaries of sovereignty, such as Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan, those obviously geopolitical issues, into so many different spheres of business and the economy that previously had been seen as completely normal and neutral to talk about. The broadening of what was politically sensitive was the biggest shift that I saw.

You also covered China-Europe relations for a year at a time when that relationship was going through a significant shift, and the trend of decoupling, de-risking really started to emerge. Do you see that as a step in the right direction?

I came back from Beijing in 2022 and I became the Europe-China correspondent at the FT here in the UK, which is a role they created, partly for me to transition back. That was a time where there was a big shift both in the EU-China relationship and individual European countries’ relationships with China. 

Germany was starting its China review, which took quite a long time, and was very politically fraught within the government. Now in the UK, the Labour Government has committed to conducting a review of its overall relationship with China. That’s a really important exercise, because too often governments have a very compartmentalized set of relationships with China, where, for example, concerns over human rights or consular protections for British nationals in China are taken quite separately to considerations over investment and trade. When you’re coming up with the strategy of how to engage with a country, it should be holistic, looking at all the different outcomes you want to achieve from the perspective of your own country. 

There are a lot of times when Beijing has threatened that if you do something that we dislike in one field, then there’ll be impacts on trade relations or climate talks. There’s a very interesting debate to be had about whether that actually is the case. The Chinese political system, while it’s very centralized in terms of power, it is still quite a rambling, bureaucratic and fragmented system in other ways. And there are many different objectives that different Chinese ministries are trying to achieve as well, and that China as a whole wants to achieve. 

On your question as to whether decoupling is a good trend, as the EU has said, decoupling is not the direction, but de-risking is. I don’t think it’s possible for any country to completely decouple. 

Tell us about your own pivot to politics. Why did you decide to run for parliament?

Left: Yuan Yang receives her MP nomination, June 6, 2024. Right: Yuan Yang campaigning to be elected as Labour MP for the Earley and Woodley constituency, May 2024. Yang was elected on July 4, 2024. Credit: Yuan Yang via X

I’d really enjoyed my time at the Financial Times. I was very happy there as a journalist. What I was unhappy about was seeing the long term decline of politics and of the economy in the UK. That was a really strong impetus I had, particularly also coming back to a democratic country where so much more was possible. I’d interviewed many people, labor activists, also feminist activists, journalists, all sorts of academics, even in China, who were taking huge risks in order to try to advance what they thought would be improvements in their societies. In the UK and in democratic societies, you don’t have to take these huge risks. Yes, public life has its risks and has its challenges and its drawbacks, and there’s a lot of abuse of women and ethnic minorities in political life, and that needs to change. But compared to the risks that my interviewees were taking in China, it really is on a different scale. I really felt like as a citizen of a democratic country, I have the privilege of using my voice to change that country, and I really wanted to make the full use of that.

You’re the first Chinese-born Member of Parliament. What does that mean to you? And do you see your election as having any broader significance?

It’s funny, because I had never thought about that fact, and actually didn’t know about it until after the election when I read it in the newspaper. I didn’t realize that was the case, nor did I think that was the way I would be known. 

What is important to me is that identity of being an immigrant in the UK. I was born outside the UK. My family came here when I was four years old. And the constituency that I represent, which is between Oxford and London, is very diverse in ethnicity and also in countries of origin. Celebrating that diversity and the multiculturalism of our town is really important to me, personally and also politically, and for the area that I represent. It’s also unusual for people in public life to see people who look like me. And whether that’s relatively young compared to other parliamentarians, or female, or of East Asian ethnicity, it’s really important for people to be surprised when they see their political representatives. 

In what ways has Britain’s China policy been lacking? After the review, what has to change?

What’s been most lacking in the last 14 years is simply a sense of direction of where the China policy is going. There was obviously the ‘golden era’ under David Cameron [a period when the UK sought closer economic ties with China]. Then there was a real shift in tone. And then even at the end of the 14 years, when David Cameron came back as the foreign secretary, there was a sense of, is there a direction? Are we going around in a circle? The importance of a review now is to determine that direction on a much more long term basis. 

As David Lammy, our foreign secretary, has written about quite extensively, there are many facets of what we want to achieve in our foreign policy, both in terms of trade and prosperity, climate change and climate leadership, and also championing human rights in our relationships with other countries. What needs to change is an understanding that all these objectives come together in the approach that the country has in its diplomacy; and if there are trade offs, then they have to be explicitly waged, rather than stumbled into. Too often, in foreign policy, between the UK and China, those trade offs have not been made very consciously. They’ve been made almost by kind of omission, or by mistake, or just by one department thinking we’re going to do this and another department suffering the consequences. That kind of fragmented thinking has to change.

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