There are over sixty million “left-behind children” in China at present. These children have been “left behind” by parents who moved for work, or sometimes school. Most left-behind children grow up in rural villages, while their parents sojourn in China’s megalopolises. The phenomenon has touched the lives of Chinese families across generations, but especially since the market reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era. One left-behind child of the 1990s was Yuan Yang, the author of Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China’s New Social Order. While her parents pursued higher education, Yuan Yang spent her earliest years living in rural Sichuan Province with her maternal grandparents. Then, at the age of four, she reunited with her father and mother in England, where she would later naturalize as a British citizen.
Yuan Yang returned to China in 2016 as a Financial Times correspondent, “just before the door to the outside world started closing.” While working out of Beijing, she conducted in-depth interviews with Siyue, June, Leiya, and Sam, the subjects of Private Revolutions. Through the lives of these four women, who came of age during China’s economic rise, Yuan Yang illuminates a country riven by inequalities, particularly those perpetuated by an urban-rural divide that makes migrant laborers—those who leave children behind for the sake of work—second class citizens in China’s cities.

As a child, Siyue (all names were changed by the author) did not excel in school, and so her mother took her to the riverbank and told her “Why don’t you go and die right now? Your grades are this bad, why don’t you just die?” Shuttled between Shenzhen and her home province, Siyue stumbled through upper middle school and attended a sham private college in Beijing. From this unpromising start, the resourceful Siyue launched a successful English-language tutoring company catering to a new generation of anxious parents and students. Tutoring was big business in China.
Like Siyue, June found her way from a rural village to Beijing and a career in the tutoring industry. For both Siyue and June, China’s much discussed Covid-response hardly impacted their lives, which were instead upended by the government’s abrupt policy change, in 2021, that banned private tutoring. The state was acknowledging the social ills caused by perpetual cramming, but the ban on tutoring didn’t address the underlying social pressures that would push a parent to tell a child, you might as well die if you can’t get good grades.
For those who don’t attain higher education in China, factory work has been the ticket out of rural villages. Leiya left school as a teenager to migrate to Shenzhen in 2001, joining the wave of young women who supplied the cheap labor that made China the factory of the world. As a factory worker, Leiya would experience the problems posed by the household registration, or hukou system, from a parent’s perspective:
The cities wanted rural workers to fuel their factories, but they were only wanted as labour, not as humans. Leiya and her fellow workers were expected to go back to their ancestral villages for health care, for retirement, and for their children’s education. For them, the city was a place of labour, not of living.
But Leiya didn’t see things this way: she belonged to the city now, and she wanted her daughter to belong, too.
Leiya assiduously fought to keep her daughter with her in the city, and recognizing the shared challenges faced by migrant working mothers, she founded a non-profit community care center. Through Leiya’s striving, her daughter Xinling was not left behind. She attended school in Shenzhen, but did not excel as a student, causing Leiya to agonize about her grades and commitment to study. When Xinling buckled under pressure and exclaimed she would “rather die” than study, Leiya brought a knife to her bedroom in an echo of young Siyue’s trip to the riverbank.
Leiya reminded her daughter that “Anyone can become cheap labour.” The further implication is that life in China is extraordinarily difficult for those relegated to providing cheap labor, more so because of the poor working conditions and shady managerial practices that have made companies like Foxconn, an iPhone manufacturer, notorious. Reversing the trajectory of Yuan Yang’s other interviewees, Sam grew up in a middle-class Shenzhen family, but she applied for factory work after university out of a sense of solidarity with the struggles of workers. Disgusted by worker exploitation and drawn to neo-Marxist ideology, Sam edited a left-wing blog and committed to labor activism. This made her a political target of a state founded on Marxist principles, but weary of present-day workers’ movements.
Yuan Yang weaves together the stories of these four women with aplomb, mostly withholding explicit commentary, so that connections and insights emerge from the storylines organically, without the author telling you what to think. Some of the writing is striking, particularly when it conveys the sensory experiences of life in China. At the very opening of the book, for instance, the author talks about her parent’s generation:
My father had enough to eat, so long as what he wanted to eat was sweet potato. Every year, in the waning days of winter, he would get sick of their creamy caramel-orange hearts, the cloying mouthfeel that stuck no matter how they were cooked. He would start dreaming of the watermelon crop, two seasons away. But by the dog days of summer, sleeping with a hoard of watermelons under his bed, he would tire of their watery emptiness and long for sweet potatoes again.
I wished for more passages like the above as I followed the stories of Siyue, June, Leiya, and Sam. Just as school and work can consume one’s life in a hyper-competitive environment, school and work so dominate the book that we sometimes lose sight of other life experiences. In the Preface, Yuan Yang speaks of her ambition to capture the intimate stories that might convey “what it felt like to live through such rapid dislocation.” But as the book follows four women from their childhoods in the 1990s through the early 2020s, we hear more about what they did and less about how they felt, especially insofar as feelings involve multi-sensory experience. Life in a changing China, one ascertains, has felt mostly like a grind. It’s no wonder, then, that a keyword in contemporary China is “involution”, a term that refers to the experience of putting ever greater effort into school and work for ever diminishing returns.
Yuan Yang’s book provides a compelling snapshot of “Generation Involution”, and the reader is left wondering what’s next for these women, their families, and their country, still buffeted by a maelstrom of change, as doors start to close.
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