china revolution essay

The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Traditional Leadership Style Essay

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In the year 1966, Mao Zedong felt that the leaders of the communist party in china were leading not only the party but the entire country in the wrong direction. 1 He, therefore, decided to initiate a revolution that would lead the country back to its traditional leadership style, where power is not with the bourgeoisie but with the people. His call was for the youth to eliminate all the foreign and new elements in Chinese society and bring back the spirit that had won them the civil war decades before. 2 With the help of other radical leaders such as Lin Biao, he mobilized the youths to form paramilitary groups, which they called the Red Guards, to fight against the bourgeoisie mentality perpetrated by the then leaders of the CCP, Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping. 3

The Red Guards formed by the youths later disintegrated into different factions, all of which fighting for supremacy. This forced Mao to bring in the army to help in restoring order in the country. The army pushed all the youth paramilitary groups to the rural areas, subduing the movement. 4 Out of these groups, there emerged a radical group that envisioned a new thought of the revolution. They called themselves Shengwulian and were based in Hunan Province. 5 They were opposed to both the ideologies of Mao and the other leaders of the party. According to them, the revolution was about one class overthrowing the other. 6 They also added that “the revolution had turned the relationship between the people and party leaders from that of leaders and the led to that of rulers and the ruled and between exploiters and the exploited.” 7

I think Mao’s intentions were good but his approach was dictatorial. He envisioned a nation where all the citizens are equal. He detested the leadership that was in power at the time for their bourgeoisie spirit and wanted all the citizens to live as one equal community. However, his use of the military in the suppression of the Red Guards was uncalled for. That was very autocratic.

He should have listened to all their grievances and consolidated them into a philosophy that would help him lead them as a united group. Worse still, his betrayal of a former ally, Liu Biao, portrayed him as a very selfish individual whose only interest was power. He interpreted Liu’s actions as a way of usurping his position. As a result, he decided to go after him, causing his death. Liu was involved in a fatal plane crash while fleeing from Mao.

Mao’s course was both ill and well-intentioned. His good intentions are seen in his struggle to rid the country of capitalistic and bourgeoisie mentality. According to him, the country was better off with communism, where they lived as one community with no superior and inferior citizen, and not with a set up where leaders want to get rich at the expense of the majority of the citizens.

He wanted the change to happen in the shortest time possible. Hence, he had to use radical means to ensure that this happened as fast as he wanted it. However, a critical view of the revolution shows that he might have used the revolution as an avenue to restore his power and influence, having lost it six years earlier. 8 Besides, the use of the army in suppressing the Red Guards and his former ally, Liu, shows that his interests were not in the equality he claimed to stand for, but in getting power.

Blum, Susan Debra, and Lionel M Jensen. China off Center . Honolulu: University of Hawai Press, 2006.

Wu, Yiching. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, London: Harvard University Press, 2014.

• Yichang Wu. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, London: Harvard University Press, 2014, 146.
• Ibid., 147.
• Ibid., 148.
• Ibid., 149.
• Ibid., 152.
• Ibid., 166.
• Susan Debra Blum and Lionel M Jensen. China off Center . Honolulu: University of Hawai Press, 2006, 120.
• Ibid., 125.
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2020, July 25). The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Traditional Leadership Style. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-chinese-cultural-revolution/

"The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Traditional Leadership Style." IvyPanda , 25 July 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/the-chinese-cultural-revolution/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Traditional Leadership Style'. 25 July.

IvyPanda . 2020. "The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Traditional Leadership Style." July 25, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-chinese-cultural-revolution/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Traditional Leadership Style." July 25, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-chinese-cultural-revolution/.

IvyPanda . "The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Traditional Leadership Style." July 25, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-chinese-cultural-revolution/.

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Cultural Revolution in China

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The Chinese Cultural Revolution Essay

The Cultural Revolution, formally the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement that took place in the People’s Republic of China from 1966 until 1976. Set into motion by Mao Zedong, then Chairman of the Communist Party of China, its stated goal was to preserve ‘true’ Communist ideology in the country by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society, and to re-impose Maoist thought as the dominant ideology within the Party. The Revolution marked the return of Mao Zedong to a position of power after the Great Leap Forward.

The movement paralyzed China politically and significantly negatively affected the country’s economy and society. The Revolution was launched in May 1966, after Mao alleged that bourgeois elements had infiltrated the government and society at large, aiming to restore capitalism. He insisted that these “revisionists” be removed through violent class struggle. China’s youth responded to Mao’s appeal by forming Red Guard groups around the country. The movement spread into the military, urban workers, and the Communist Party leadership itself.

It resulted in widespread factional struggles in all walks of life. In the top leadership, it led to a mass purge of senior officials, most notably Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. During the same period Mao’s personality cult grew to immense proportions. Millions of people were persecuted in the violent struggles that ensued across the country, and suffered a wide range of abuses including public humiliation, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, sustained harassment, and seizure of property.

A large segment of the population was forcibly displaced, most notably the transfer of urban youth to rural regions during the Down to the Countryside Movement. Historical relics and artifacts were destroyed. Cultural and religious sites were ransacked. Mao officially declared the Cultural Revolution to have ended in 1969, but its active phase lasted until the death of the military leader Lin Biao in 1971. After Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, reformers led by Deng Xiaoping gradually began to dismantle the Maoist policies associated with the Cultural Revolution.

In 1981, the Party declared that the Cultural Revolution was “responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic”. Background Great Leap Forward In 1958, after China’s first Five-Year Plan, Mao called for “grassroots socialism” in order to accelerate his plans for turning China into a modern industrialized state. In this spirit, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, established People’s Communes in the countryside, and began the mass mobilization of the people into collectives.

Many communities were assigned production of a single commodity-steel. Mao vowed to increase agricultural production to twice 1957 levels. In the meantime, chaos in the collectives, bad weather, and exports of food necessary to secure hard currency resulted in the Great Chinese Famine. Food was in desperate shortage, and production fell dramatically. The famine caused the deaths of millions of people, particularly in poorer inland regions. The Great Leap’s failure reduced Mao’s prestige within the Party.

Forced to take major responsibility, in 1959, Mao resigned as the State Chairman, China’s head of state, and was succeeded by Liu Shaoqi. In July, senior Party leaders convened at the scenic Mount Lu to discuss policy. At the conference, Marshal Peng Dehuai, the Minister of Defence, criticized Great-Leap policies in a private letter to Mao, writing that it was plagued by mismanagement and cautioning against elevating political dogma over the laws of economics. Following the Conference, Mao had Peng removed from his posts, and accused him of being a “right-opportunist”.

Peng was replaced by Lin Biao, another revolutionary army general who became a more staunch Mao supporter later in his career. While the Lushan Conference served as a death knell for Peng, Mao’s most vocal critic, it led to a shift of power to moderates led by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who took effective control of the economy following 1959. By 1962, while Zhou, Liu and Deng managed affairs of state and the economy, Mao had effectively withdrawn from economic decision-making, and focused much of his time on further contemplating his contributions to Marxist-Leninist social theory, including the idea of “continuous revolution”.

This theory’s ultimate aim was to set the stage for Mao to restore his brand of Communism and his personal prestige within the Party. Sino-Soviet Split and anti-revisionism In the early 1950s, the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union were the two largest Communist states in the world. While they had initially been mutually supportive, disagreements arose following the ascendancy of Nikita Khrushchev to power in the Soviet Union after the death of Joseph Stalin.

In 1956, Khrushchev denounced Stalin and his policies and subsequently set about implementing post-Stalinist economic reforms. Mao and many members of the Chinese Communist Party were opposed to these changes, believing that it would have negative repercussions for the worldwide Marxist movement, among whom Stalin was still viewed as a hero. Mao believed that Khrushchev was not adhering to MarxismLeninism, but was instead a revisionist, altering his policies from basic Marxist-Leninist concepts, something Mao feared would allow capitalists to eventually regain control of the country.

Relations between the two governments subsequently soured, with the Soviets refusing to support China’s case for joining the United Nations and going back on their pledge to supply China with a nuclear weapon. In 1963, the Chinese Communist Party began to openly denounce the Soviet Union, publishing a series of nine polemics against its perceived revisionism, with one of them being titled On Khrushchev’s Phoney Communism and Historical Lessons for the World, in which Mao charged that Khrushchev was not only a revisionist but also increased the danger of capitalist restoration.

Yao boldly alleged that Hai Rui was really an allegory attacking Mao; that is, Mao was the corrupt emperor and Peng Dehuai was the honest civil servant. Yao’s article put Beijing Mayor Peng Zhen on the defensive. Peng, a powerful official and Wu Han’s direct superior, was the head of the “Five Man Group”, a committee commissioned by Mao to study the potential for a cultural revolution. Peng Zhen, aware that he would be implicated if Wu indeed wrote an “antiMao” play, wished to contain Yao’s influence. Yao’s article was initially only published in select local newspapers.

Peng forbade its publication in the nationally-distributed People’s Daily and other major newspapers under his control, instructing them to write exclusively about “academic discussion”, and not pay heed to Yao’s petty politics. While the “literary battle” against Peng raged, Mao fired Yang Shangkun – director of the Party’s General Office, an organ that controlled internal communications – on a series of unsubstantiated charges, installing in his stead staunch loyalist Wang Dongxing, head of Mao’s security detail.

Yang’s dismissal likely emboldened Mao’s allies to move against their factional rivals. Luo’s removal secured the military command’s loyalty to Mao. February Outline Having ousted Luo and Yang, Mao returned his attention to Peng Zhen. On February 12, 1966, the “Five Man Group” issued a report known as the February Outline . The Outline, sanctioned by the Party centre, defined Hai Rui as constructive academic discussion, and aimed to formally distance Peng Zhen from any political implications.

However, Jiang Qing and Yao Wenyuan continued their denunciation of Wu Han and Peng Zhen. Meanwhile, Mao also sacked Propaganda Department director Lu Dingyi, a Peng Zhen ally. Lu’s removal gave Maoists unrestricted access to the press. Mao would deliver his final blow to Peng Zhen at a high-profile Politburo meeting through loyalists Kang Sheng and Chen Boda. They accused Peng Zhen of opposing Mao, labeled the February Outline “evidence of Peng Zhen’s revisionism”, and grouped him with three other disgraced officials as part of the “Peng-Luo-Lu-Yang Anti-Party Clique”.

On May 16, the Politburo formalized the decisions by releasing an official document condemning Peng Zhen and his “anti-party allies” in the strongest terms, disbanding his “Five Man Group”, and replacing it with the Maoist Cultural Revolution Group. Early Stage: Mass Movement The May 16 Notification In May 1966, an “expanded session” of the Politburo was called in Beijing. The conference, rather than being a joint discussion on policy, was essentially a campaign to mobilize the Politburo into endorsing Mao’s political agenda.

The conference was heavily laden with Maoist political rhetoric on class struggle, and filled with meticulously-prepared ‘indictments’ on the recently ousted leaders such as Peng Zhen and Luo Ruiqing. One of these documents, released on May 16, was prepared with Mao’s personal supervision, and was particularly damning: Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and various spheres of culture are a bunch of counter-revolutionary revisionists. Once conditions are ripe, they will seize political power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

Some of them we have already seen through; others we have not. Some are still trusted by us and are being trained as our successors, persons like Khruschev for example, who are still nestling beside us. This text, which became known as the “May 16 Notification,” summarized Mao’s ideological justification for the Cultural Revolution. Effectively it implied that there are enemies of the Communist cause within the Party itself: class enemies who “wave the red flag to oppose the red flag. ” The only way to identify these people was through “the elescope and microscope of Mao Zedong Thought. ”

The charges against esteemed party leaders like Peng Zhen rang alarm bells in China’s intellectual community and among the eight non-Communist parties. Early mass rallies After the purge of Peng Zhen, the Beijing Party Committee had effectively ceased to function, paving the way for disorder in the capital. On May 25, under the guidance of Cao Yi’ou – wife of Maoist henchman Kang Sheng – Nie Yuanzi, a philosophy lecturer at Peking University, authored a big-character poster along with other leftists and posted it to a

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Argument: Xi Believes China Can Win a Scientific Revolution

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Xi Believes China Can Win a Scientific Revolution

Beijing’s techno-nationalist policies are more geopolitical than economic..

• Science and Technology

In early March, global investors turned their eyes toward Beijing, where 2,977 delegates from across China had gathered for the annual session of the National People’s Congress. Here, Chinese Premier Li Qiang would deliver the annual “Report on the Work of the Government.” Here, the priorities that must guide the activities of the Chinese state over the coming year would be proclaimed. Here—or so financiers at home and abroad badly hoped—the Chinese government would declare its plan to rescue China’s economy.

But there were few comforting signs. The 2023 report had placed “expanding domestic demand” as the top priority for that year, responding to the damage done by zero-COVID policies , a bureaucracy paralyzed by purges and confused by an unfavorable economic environment, and a property bubble too large to pop . The 2024 report did not follow suit. Instead, it laid out a road map not for economic recovery but for wider, and more aggressive, targets.

Ahead of “expanding domestic demand,” the new report prioritizes two other goals. First, the Chinese government must “[strive] to modernize the industrial system and [develop] new quality productive forces at a faster pace.” Second, it must “[invigorate] China through science and education and [consolidate] the foundations for high-quality development.”

Put in blunter language: The central task of the Chinese state is to build an industrial and scientific system capable of pushing humanity to new technological frontiers.

This strategy has left Western observers incredulous , struggling to understand how any techno-nationalist industrial policy could engage with any of the economic problems they identify. To understand the Politburo’s plans, one must first understand the historical narrative that informs them. This narrative is downstream from several sources: the historical materialism of Karl Marx; attempts by early 20th-century “New Culture” intellectuals to explain why China had fallen victim to imperialism; triumphal propaganda accounts of China’s modern rise; and a close study of Western scholarship on the rise and fall of great powers.

Endorsed by President Xi Jinping and popular among Chinese policy elites, this set of ideas argues that there are hinge points to human history. In these rare moments, the Chinese leadership believes, emerging technologies can topple an existing economic order. Grand changes mean grand opportunities: The British Empire and the United States rose to global hegemony because each pioneered a global techno-economic revolution. Now the past repeats. Humanity again finds itself on the precipice of scientific upheaval. The foundations of global economic growth are about to be transformed—and Xi is determined that China will lead this transformation.

Since the 1920s, Chinese Communists have hoped to “ save the nation ” with science. For most of China’s modern history, this meant playing catch-up. In recent years, ambitions have grown larger. In the words of a 2016 top-level planning document , China now aims to be the “leading scientific power in the world.” Xi explained the logic behind this goal to a gathering of Chinese scientists held that year. He presented technological strength as a choice that begins with a moment of historical recognition. There are points in history when “major technological breakthroughs” promise to “greatly enhance humanity’s ability to understand and utilize nature” as well as to increase “societal productivity.” Xi argued that “historical experience shows that [these] technological revolutions profoundly change the global development pattern.” Some states “seize” this “rare opportunity.” Others do not. Those who recognize the revolution before them and actively take advantage of it “rapidly increase their economic strength, scientific and technological strength, and defense capabilities, thereby quickly enhancing their composite national strength.”

For Xi, as for most Chinese, the Qing dynasty is the paradigmatic example of a great power that refused to see the revolution unfolding before it. “Due to various domestic and foreign reasons, our country has missed technological revolution time and again,” Xi said in 2016. The result was what Chinese nationalists call the “ century of national humiliation ,” a period when China was victimized by imperial powers and fractured by contesting warlords. By failing to seize the opportunities presented by emerging technologies, China was “transformed from a world power into a semi-colonial, semi-feudal country subject to bullying.”

If the Qing dynasty stands in for any powerful state that falls behind in the technological race, the United States is a living symbol of technological potential. Ever since Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping formally identified the United States as the benchmark for China’s modernization, Chinese thinkers have seen it as the embodiment of scientific strength. Wang Huning, the fourth-ranking member of the Politburo Standing Committee and Xi’s favored court intellectual, made this point repeatedly in his 1991 book, America Against America . Shocked by the “ awe-inspiring material civilization ” he found in the United States, Wang insists that “if the Americans are to be overtaken, one thing must be done: surpass them in science and technology.”

These ideas are explored in some depth in a recent textbook written by analysts from the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR). CICIR is staffed and run by China’s premier intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security. The book, titled National Security and the Rise and Fall of Great Powers , is one in a series of titles intended to distill the consensus views of China’s civilian security analysts into a curriculum for Chinese undergraduates who aspire to a career in state security. Rise and Fall promises to reveal to these students the “general laws” that determine the destiny of nations. In this account, the most important factor in the rise of a superpower is science and technology.

How did Britain and the United States secure “their status as unprecedented global superpowers”? The CICIR analysts insist that it is neither strategic genius nor diplomatic acumen that leads to hegemony. Instead, they point to London’s and Washington’s “outstanding advantages … [in] scientific innovation” and “their respective leadership of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions.”

Favorable demographics, natural resource stocks, and geographic locale are all foundational to national strength, but under modern conditions, power comes from holding “the dominant position in economics, science, and technology.” Under this schema, “scientific and technological innovation … serves as a crucial indicator of the actual strength of a great power.” Thus, the rising great power must first integrate itself with the “center of global markets and core technologies,” then become a “major manufacturing power,” and finally “take the initiative in innovation” and “lead in high-technology industries” if it wishes to rise to the top.

On this count, the authors concede that “China still has a not insignificant gap to close with the United States in the fields of science and technology.” They are confident, however, that China has an “opportunity to become the center of global science and technology and the world leader in techno-scientific development.” This is because “a new round of techno-scientific revolution and industrial transformation is currently fermenting.” Leadership of the coming industrial revolution will allow the Chinese economy to play the same role in the economic order of the 21st century that the U.S. economy played in the 20th century.

The phrase “new round of techno-scientific revolution and industrial transformation” is a stock slogan in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) speak. It is tied closely to another of Xi’s favored phrases: “ great changes unseen in a century .” When Chinese leaders and propagandists speak about once-in-a-century changes, they are suggesting that the world has entered a historical period similar to that of the early 20th century, when the Soviet Union and the United States came to displace the European colonial empires as the most important world powers.

These “changes” are often associated with populist disruptions in the West and the growing prosperity of the “rest.” But for many Chinese analysts, they also include the revolutionary potential of emerging technologies. These analysts point to three previous waves of industrial transformation—steam-powered mechanization in the 18th century, electrification in the 19th, and digitalization in the 20th—as forming a pattern that the future will follow. The difference this time, Renmin University professor Jin Canrong notes , is that “the competition for the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be held between China and the United States.” As previous contests for industrial supremacy occurred only between Western powers, “this is a great change unseen in five centuries.”

In Xi’s eyes, this new industrial revolution is “rapidly progressing.” As he declared in a 2021 address to Chinese scientists and engineers, “scientific and technological innovation has accelerated exponentially, with emerging technologies represented by information technology and artificial intelligence at the forefront.” This has caused “paradigm shifts in humanity’s understanding of nature.” These revolutionary advances are “rapidly being translated into social and economic life.”

In addition to artificial intelligence, the CCP identifies the fields of materials science, genetics, neuroscience, quantum computing, green energy, and aerospace engineering as pillars of this revolution. Xi argued in 2021 that China “has the foundation, the confidence, the belief, and the capability to seize the opportunities presented by the new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation” in each of these fields. “We are poised to rise with this tide and achieve great ambitions.”

For Xi, this revolution occurs at a critical moment. In 2018, he told party cadres that the “the new round of techno-scientific revolution and industrial transformation coincides with the transformation of China’s development model.” Xi has long urged the CCP to orient itself around a “ new development concept ” that emphasizes higher-quality growth over the infrastructure spending that powered the Chinese economy in the years after the Great Recession. High-tech manufacturing promises an alternative engine of growth. These are the “new quality productive forces” referenced in the 2024 work report.

As a recent essay in the CCP’s flagship theory journal explains, “new quality productive forces represent the [direction of] the new round of techno-scientific revolution and industrial transformation. Accelerating the formation of new quality productive forces means obtaining a leading position in the progress of these productive forces … and gaining the initiative in a fierce international competition” over the “commanding heights” of the emerging global economy.

Much of Chinese policy over the last few years—from the decision to elevate industrial technocrats to positions of high leadership in the party to the 14th Five-Year-Plan’s commitment to construct a “ whole-of-nation system ” for technological innovation—only makes sense in light of this larger narrative. Already, these efforts have borne some fruit: China is now the world leader in electric vehicle sales. Huawei’s industrial chain is building advanced chips . Bloomberg Economics estimates that by 2026, the high-tech sector’s contribution to the Chinese economy could outpace real estate’s. If forecasts about the explosive growth potential of AI are remotely accurate, it is plausible that advancing technology might just provide China with the alternate growth engine it needs.

Yet this is a risky gamble. The Chinese strategy rests on two bets: first, that the world truly is on the cusp of an economic transition comparable to the Industrial Revolution in scale, and second, that if this new technological revolution occurs, China will lead it. Neither bet is certain.

Here, the fate of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc should stand as a warning to Beijing. This is not the first time a communist regime hoped that investments in new technologies and industrial processes might reverse slowing growth. The communist parties of Europe made a similar set of bets in the mid-20th century . The Soviet Union hoped to lead the computer revolution; the Eastern Bloc as a whole aimed to become the world’s greatest high-end manufacturing hub. These bets did not pay off. New industries were not successfully developed , new technologies did not successfully diffuse , and new products were not price competitive with their counterparts in East Asia or the West. Soon, the bills came due. By the 1980s, one communist regime after another was forced first into austerity and then to outright collapse.

In the CCP’s telling, the fall of the Soviet Union is part of a very different narrative—a story about the perilous threat posed by internal corruption, liberal ideology, and foreign subversion. Chinese propagandists have little to say about economies that floundered because their leaders put too much hope in technology’s latest wave. The story of the “new round of techno-scientific revolution” is not a story about those who floundered. It is a story about those who won. Time will tell which story the Chinese leadership should have been paying most attention to.

Tanner Greer is the director of the Center for Strategic Translation. Twitter:  @Scholars_Stage

Nancy Yu is  a research assistant at  the Center for Strategic Translation.

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Private Revolutions by Yuan Yang review – an intimate account of how China is changing

A social and economic revolution observed through the lives of four women in their 30s

Y uan Yang, the former Financial Times China correspondent, has written 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.

Leiya, Sam, June and Siyue, born in the late 80s and 90s, all hail from different regions and social classes – but they share the trait of being “unusually accomplished idealists”. Lieya, who drops out of school to work in a factory, later goes on to run a childcare collective. Sam, “born into a special sliver of her generation: the urban middle class”, is drawn into the world of labour activism after interviewing an injured factory worker for a university sociology course. June is just 13 when her mother is killed – crushed on a conveyor belt in a coal mine. She becomes the only one of her village primary school classmates to make it to high school, and then university. Headstrong Siyue’s stressful childhood is characterised by the rising and falling fortunes of her parents, who try their hands at various business ventures (repairing Nokia handsets, for example). Later, as a single mother, she is adamant about parenting her daughter differently – and giving her own mother (who she tricks into going on her first ever holiday, to Bali) a new outlook on life, too.

Yang is herself a product of this period but brings an outsider’s perspective. Born in 1990, she spent the first four years of her life living in the company town, or danwei , of the factory that employed her maternal grandparents in China’s mountainous south-west. She grew up hearing the national anthem blasted on a loudspeaker each morning and bathing in the “bountiful hot water” of the danwei ’s communal showers (they had no running hot water at home). “My grandparents expected their danwei to take care of them, and it did,” Yang writes. But this would not hold true for the generations to come. In the decade after 1993, 50 million workers were laid off during the programme of “Reform and Opening Up”, which saw state-owned enterprises privatised. By then, Yang had left for the UK with her parents.

Returning to China in 2016 as a journalist, she saw a country anxious about its own transformation: “Before I went back … I knew the optimistic giddiness of my parents’ generation, where they could expect to out-earn their parents no matter what, so long as they got out of the village.” What she found instead were rural families who feared that the gap between village and city living standards had grown insurmountable, while their urban counterparts worried that their own financial security was only attributable to “luck and timing and an unrepeatable economic boom”. How could they ensure their children would enjoy the same opportunities?

Many of these fears – of “falling off the ladder” and the feeling of precarity that comes with it – aren’t unique to young people living in China. “Back in the UK, my friends shut out of London call themselves ‘Generation Rent’,” Yang writes; meanwhile, her friends in Beijing are “Generation Involution” – a tag that uses a term from anthropology to invoke “a system which absorbs ever more effort for ever less return”.

What sets the story told in Private Revolutions apart, however, is the speed and magnitude of the upheaval, captured by Yang with palpable admiration for the women negotiating these seismic shifts one day at a time. “Any mass transformation of society requires, and results in, massive change at the level of individuals, friendships and families,” Yang writes. “Yet it is also easy, at a time of such breakneck change, to lose sight of what it feels like to be alive.” Private Revolutions takes care to keep Leiya, Sam, June and Siyue’s individuality in focus without forgetting the broader stakes. As Leiya reminds herself: “I’m not the only one in this situation.”

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Guest Essay

This Isn’t the China I Remember

By Gish Jen

Ms. Jen, an American novelist whose family hails from Shanghai, wrote from Shanghai.

In 1979 my mother pulled out a Band-Aid in a Nanjing hospital. The nurses clustered around it, amazed. “The West has everything!” they said.

We were on a family visit to China, where my Shanghai relatives were similarly wowed by our excellent teeth and ample body fat, not to mention our descriptions of American dishwashers, refrigerators and air-conditioning. And with the general awe came V.I.P. treatment. Hosts broke out bottles of expensive orange soda that they freely mixed with expensive warm beer. We could not escape drinking this any more than we could escape our government-assigned “guide,” whose job was to strictly monitor visitors like us. Relatives or not, we were foreigners.

I returned to teach English at the Shandong Mining Institute in 1981. My students were coal mining engineers preparing to study abroad, so that they might bring back safer mining techniques. I was their “foreign expert.” As such, I had not only a sit-down toilet in the apartment provided to me, but also running hot water, an unheard-of luxury. My ayi, or housekeeper, would make a fire under a vat of water on the roof and, when it was ready, turn the faucet handle in my bathtub.

After class, my students would bring stools out to the basketball court where, each facing a different direction, they would sit and study for hours on end. Loving their country and wanting to make it strong, they were grateful for Westerners like me. Foreign as we were, we were a help.

Fast forward a few decades to a booming China. In my many visits over the years — as a teacher, as a visiting artist and as a tourist — Shanghai hotel staffers had always returned my credit card to me with two hands, a bow of the head, and a smile. But with a quarter of the world’s construction cranes said to be in the city during China’s boom years, raising skyscrapers from what had been rice paddies, attitudes had changed. My credit card was returned with one hand; the receptionist barely looked up. My relatives no longer asked that I bring American goods for them, either. “China has everything,” they said then. As many proudly proclaimed, the 20th century was America’s; the 21st was China’s.

One seldom hears that triumphalist tone today. Instead, the talk is of a loss of confidence and trust in the Chinese government. People remain proud of their city, which now boasts excellent, cosmopolitan food and spotless streets. There are huge new sports centers featuring tennis and paddle-boarding, there is an artificial beach with pink sand. The city is far greener than in years past, too. Magnolia and cherry trees bloom everywhere and even the strips under the freeways have been landscaped. And thanks to the ubiquitous security cameras, Shanghai is spectacularly safe.

Yet below the surface lurks a sense of malaise. In this famously cosmopolitan city, there are weirdly few foreigners compared to before, many having left due to the stifling policies during the pandemic or because international companies have pulled out employees, or other reasons. Clothing shops are empty and many other stores have closed. The Nanjing West Road shopping district, previously a sea of humans, is strangely underpopulated.

Shanghainese are still outraged at having been locked down for two months in the spring of 2022 to stem a surge in Covid-19 cases with little time to prepare. Such were the shortages of essentials that Tylenol was for sale by the pill. And so heavy-handed were even the post-lockdown policies that residents took to the streets in protest .

But for many, the pandemic debacle only capped a series of governmental blunders starting with Premier Li Keqiang urging young people to open their own businesses in 2014. This and other missteps cost wave after wave of people their life savings and many Chinese now blame government ineptitude and erraticism for bringing the economy to a standstill. As a Shanghainese friend put it, the government has turned China around and around until, like spinning cars, people’s engines have stalled and their wheels have locked up.

The result has been so steep and unrelenting a fall in real estate prices that elderly people, like my friend’s parents, can’t sell their apartments to pay for nursing or assisted living. And they are hardly the only ones affected by the downturn. Doctors find themselves squeezed — many patients don’t have money for operations — while businesspeople sit on their hands, unwilling to make investments in so unpredictable an environment. Many college graduates, faced with a grim job market, are essentially dropping out, or “lying flat,” as it’s called in China. Not even schoolchildren, it seems, have been spared the general despondency. As one teacher I spoke to observed, when the society is sick, the children pay the price. Too many parents know a child who has had to leave school because of depression.

Of course, for all of this the West is scapegoated — having opposed, people say, China’s rise — as is China’s other favorite enemy, Japan, whose brutal 1930s invasion and ensuing occupation of China still rankles. (One sequence of a CGI video shown in my recent Shanghai spin class featured huge coronaviruses studded with Japanese temples.)

Whoever is to blame, emigration is on the rise . According to U.N. figures, more than 310,000 Chinese left the country in each of the past two years, a 62 percent increase from the earlier average of around 191,000 per year over the decade through 2019. Those in Shanghai with the means to do so talk endlessly about “running away,” even to officially reviled countries like the United States .

This is not always an answer. One friend of mine has come back to China to stay, having spent six years attending graduate school in Boston, saying she missed the warmth of Chinese family life. And no one has illusions about the difficulty of getting established in another country. People in China speak of a whole new class of emigrants, women who have left high-powered careers to accompany their children to the United States early enough for them to assimilate — ideally, in middle or high school. As for the fruits of their sacrifice, it’s too early to say. Can the children really become Westerners? Will they — like me decades earlier — become the foreigners?

Things in China could change. Those “lying flat” are not asleep. They are watching and could someday rise up. But in the meantime, people in Shanghai are simply, as they put it, “xin lei ”: Their hearts are tired.

Gish Jen is an American novelist and the author of “Thank You, Mr. Nixon.” She is currently teaching at N.Y.U. Shanghai.

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