Join Yuan Yang as she discusses her new book, Private Revolutions

Told through the lives of four ordinary women, each striving for a better future in an unequal society. Yuan has spent hundreds of hours interviewing these women over six years, bearing witness to their lives and becoming their friend and confidant. The result is a remarkable collection of untold stories that challenge how we see China’s identity and embody the hopes, fears, dreams and resilience of its people. These are stories of migrant workers establishing foundations to send children to better schools, university drop-outs facing the class anxiety of the ruling elite, women taking control of their choices in the face of social judgement and rebels fighting for change despite governmental condemnation.

Yuan Yang was born in 1990 in China, where she lived with her grandparents for four years before her parents brought her to the UK. She returned to China as an adult, posted there as a correspondent for the Financial Times; after the mass expulsion of journalists from China in 2020, she was one of the few journalists writing in English left in the country. She moved back to the FT's London headquarters as their first China-Europe Correspondent. Yuan also co-founded Rethinking Economics and is a former poet. She now lives in the UK, with Private Revolutions being her first book.