Review | Other Rivers and Private Revolutions

Charlie Hore reviews two new books that highlight the changes in Chinese society through the lives of young people who are the children of rural migrants.

In the last thirty years, China has gone from being a mostly rural society to an urban one. The sheer speed and scale of the social and economic changes involved can be difficult to grasp. These two valuable but very different books use individual stories to convey some of the impact of this transformation. 

Peter Hessler is a journalist who went back to China in 2019 as a university lecturer in the southwestern province of Sichuan. He had previously taught at a different college in Sichuan in the 1990s, and wrote one of the best journalistic accounts of modern China outside the big cities in River Town, (London: John Murray, 2002). Throughout Other Rivers he contrasts the lives and fortunes of his previous students (many of whom he had kept in touch with) to those of the present generation. 

Yuan Yang went in the opposite direction. Born in Sichuan, she came to Britain as a child, then went back to China as a journalist for the Financial Times (and is now a Labour MP). In Private Revolutions, she follows the lives of four women, all daughters of migrant workers, born in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Siyue, June and Leiya grew up in the countryside, brought up by their grandparents while their parents were away working in the cities. Sam was born in Shenzhen to migrant worker parents and grew up in the city.  

Neither Hessler’s students nor Yuan Yang’s subjects are in any way ‘typical’ – they are among the minority who have prospered most in China’s booming economy. But nor are they the children of privilege; Hessler’s students, rather younger than Yuan Yang’s subjects, are mostly the children of rural migrants. None of their parents were officials or CCP members, and their stories illustrate how quickly and profoundly everyday lives have changed.

For instance, Yuan Yang notes that when Sam’s mother started work on an assembly line in Shenzhen at 18, she was paid more than the village officials back home. But the villages were changing too:

When June came back from her first year of university, there were street lamps dotting the road; after her second year, her home had an internet connection. But what stunned her most was the water tap that was installed during her third year of university. From the age of four, June had spent hours each week bringing water to the house, carrying on her soft shoulders a pole with a bottle swinging from each end.

Other Rivers is an account of Hessler’s family’s time in Sichuan, so his students’ stories are threaded through their other experiences. His account of his daughters’ time in primary school is particularly valuable for giving a rare insight into the reality of primary education in China. He also gives a very different perspective on Covid-19 in China from accounts that focused on the bigger cities, though one that carefully balances the CCP’s successes and failures. 

While both authors are recording huge social advances for their subjects, they are careful to avoid any boosterism. Hessler concludes that: 

…the students could be brutally honest about themselves, and they entertained few illusions about the Chinese system. It was vastly different from my experience in the 1990s, when the people in my classroom generally came across as young and naïve…the students at Sichuan University. They knew how things worked; they understood the system’s flaws and also its benefits.

And he later notes that ‘For the Reform generation [those born after China’s opening up to the world economy in the late 1970s], even the most spectacular success stories were often accompanied by some kind of sadness or loss’.

Both books are overshadowed by the growing authoritarianism under Xi Jinping, but still record what forms of opposition remained possible. Students at Hessler’s university (almost all women or gay men) produced an online unofficial journal called Common Sense, the name taken from Tom Paine’s famous pamphlet. One of Yuan Yang’s subjects worked at a migrant workers’ support centre, before leaving to found a community centre for working women, while another became a student Maoist before having to go abroad to study. 

Private Revolutions is more explicitly feminist, though Hessler is alive to the huge changes in women’s horizons that the Reform era has opened up, and most of the former students he quotes at length are women. For many migrant workers, the experience of going from the village to the cities has been both alienating and liberating. Both books capture well the profound contradictions that successive generations of migrants have had to contend with. 

China’s rise to a world power this century has been very well documented, but there has been far less written about what it has been like to live through that, and how everyday lives have been transformed in such a short time. These two books don’t give anything like a full picture, but that’s not their authors’ intentions. They have set out to tell the stories of particular individuals they got to know well, and have succeeded in bringing them to life. Anyone with an interest in how China is changing will learn much from both of them. 

Charlie Hore is the author of The Road To Tiananmen Square – order from this site for £10 +postage

Peter Hessler’s Other Rivers: A Chinese Education is published by Atlantic BooksYuan Yang’s Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China is published by Bloomsbury