Private Revolutions

Reviews

Praise for Private Revolutions:

“A portrait both sweeping and intimate — as much a study of a radically changing society as of four very different people.” —The New York Times

“The riveting book that results from Yang’s persistence is a powerful snapshot of four young Chinese women attempting to assert control over the direction of their lives, escape the narrow confines of their patriarchal rural roots and make it in the big city . . . Yang’s reportage offers up raw human stories . . . because she documents each woman’s journey from childhood, including encounters with casual sexism, intermittent personal violence and the impossible weight of parental expectations, we can appreciate just how far they have come as adults — and just how far they have to fall.” —New York Times Book Review

“The prose is as powerfully intimate as it is politically incendiary, tackling the censorship and economic voraciousness plaguing China today head on.” —British Vogue

“A moving work of reportage, whose scale toggles between the global and the personal.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice

“An engrossing new book that meticulously reports on a country in the throes of change, using the lives and choices of four women from her own generation as a lens.” —The Guardian

“[Private Revolutions] is the tale of a unique time and an intimate picture of what it was like to live through, and learn to navigate, the storm.” —Isabel Hilton, The Guardian

“[Yang] knows how to tell a story and how to capture attention. Each of these interwoven tales is studded with fascinating details.” —The Times

“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.” —The Los Angeles Review of Books

“Yang’s book captures the contradictions and nuances of modern China.” —The New Statesman

“Yang offers a fresh interpretation of the ongoing nature of China’s many upheavals, the actual effects of its oft-discussed policies, the cost of its meteoric economic growth, and the role a new generation of women is poised to play. [Private Revolutions is] a highly revealing, human-centered cultural inquiry.” —Kirkus (Starred Review)

“This engaging effort follows four women from childhood to the current day as they navigate city life and establish careers, documenting their struggles with school admissions and quotas, educational scams, unsafe working conditions, forays into social activism, and family and corporate intrigues…This very readable account offers rare and unblinking insights into modern China.” –Booklist (starred 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.” —The Sunday Times Best Books of 2024

“Yang provides a fascinating portrait of womanhood and society in a rapidly evolving—and increasingly repressive—global superpower.” —Waterstones Best Books of 2024

“A powerful and sometimes heartbreaking picture of the making of modern China. Brilliant” —Tim Harford, author of How To Make The World Add Up

“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 revelatory, moving and tender tale of hopes, fears and change. A real eye-opener about life in contemporary China.” —Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads

“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

“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

“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, author of Money
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