Delving into the inner lives of women in neoliberal China

Yuan Yang is what migration academics call a “1.5 generation migrant” – meaning she was born in her country of origin and then migrated to another country as a child.

She belongs, too, to what Chinese people call jiulinhou – the generation of people born in the 1990s. As a writer, she is interested in the experience of individuals like her – young women eager to make something of their lives.

A journalist who reported on China as a correspondent for the Financial Times, Yang knows firsthand the editorial constraints of China reporting. In fact, a new study finds the vast majority of articles published in British media outlets between 2020 and 2023 framed China negatively, sometimes strongly so. For myriad, complex reasons, the dominant image of China constructed by foreign correspondents is largely one-dimensional, simplistic, and increasingly conforms to a Cold War editorial framework.

Increasingly, China is portrayed as an economic powerhouse, an authoritarian regime and a security threat. Some foreign correspondents, after a stint there, feel they know enough about China to write books. Some claim to have found the ultimate “truth about China.” Consequently, the Chinese population is mostly imagined by Western readers as a monolith and faceless crowd: divided into those who are victims of a repressive Chinese regime and heroic individuals who dare to defy the system.

Ordinary Chinese people living their mundane, unremarkable everyday lives are persistently missing. While Western media do report on the phenomenon of rural-to-urban migration in China, the cultural and emotional lives of rural migrants – their hopes and aspirations, worries and frustrations in private life, especially in intimate, familial relations –