Yuan Yang

Yuan Yang

Yuan Yang was born in 1990 and is currently 36 years old. Yuan Yang was born in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China. Yang attended Balliol College, Oxford where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree and London School of Economics where she received a Master of Science degree in economics.

Yuan Yang is a Labour Party politician, journalist, and economist serving as Member of Parliament for Earley and Woodley starting in 2024.

Yuan was the UK-based Europe-China correspondent for the Financial Times. She’s the first Chinese-born Briton to get elected to the UK Parliament, and the second of Chinese ethnicity after Alan Mak.

As a child, she became very passionate about writing, and explained that her passion was encouraged by her teachers and a group called The Yorkshire Writing Squad that she joined as a teen.

In 2008, amid the 2007-2008 financial crisis, she co-founded Rethinking Economics, a non-profit that she described as coming from the thinking that students should be able to select among different schools of thought when it came to economics education. She expressed the hope this campaign would provide a space for kids wanting to address real world economic issues, broader questions about economic justice and reforming the actual economy.

Yuan wanted to become a poet originally yet pivoted to journalism by accident. She began her journalism career as a Marjorie Deane intern in the economics section of The Economist magazine.

Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China’s New Social Order is an intimate yet sweeping portrait of modern China told through the lives of 4 ordinary women striving for a better future in a highly unequal society.

As she served as the deputy Beijing bureau chief of the Financial Times, Yuan Yang started noticing common threads in the lives of her Chinese peers: women born during China’s turn toward capitalism during the 80s and 90s, who, despite all the country’s enormous economic gains in their lifetimes, were coming up against deeply entrenched barriers they were looking to achieve financial stability.

As the result of 7 years of intimate and in depth reporting, this transporting book traces the journey of 4 such women while they try making better lives for themselves and their families in this new Chinese economy. Siyue and June are among the few in their villages to graduate high school. Just like Siyue, Leiya lives with her grandparents in their village as her parents send money back home; yearning for a totally different life than those of the women she sees all around her. Sam, born to an urban middle class family, is outraged once her eyes get opened to the poor treatment of the workers, and becomes a labor activist, increasingly under threat by authorities.

While the women battle government policies which threaten their businesses, their kids’ access to education, their choice where to make their home, and their lives (in Sam’s case), this vivid, damning, and urgent portrait emerges of the previously unseen human cost of China’s rising economic tide, and bravery and perseverance of those that have been caught in the swell.

Yuan Yang: Awards & Accolades

Yang's book, Private Revolutions was nominated for the Women's Prize, For Non-Fiction, in 2025.

Yuan Yang: F.A.Q