And the F.F.N. Truly incredible things are happening in China. And gradually we in the West are seeing more and more of them.

The huge rise of internet connectivity across the country has meant that you can now see literally

billions of fragments of Chinese life online.

These fragments scarcely add up to a coherent picture

of this Estonia complex country.

And such as scattered an algorithmically picked view

risks being both shallow and orientalizing.

And we've certainly not always been able to see into China so easily.

In one of the most arresting moments of recent global history, when the Chinese government ordered its COVID

lockdowns, almost all foreign journalists were expelled.

Yuan Yang remained, one of the few journalists writing in English left in the whole country.

As Deputy Beijing Bureau-Trief for the Financial Times, she remained documenting an increasingly

authoritarian government, as well as its undeniably vast achievements.

Now she's back with a book, Private revolutions, which tells the stories of four young women coming of age in a China transformed.

It's a richly textured history of the present, written in that often missing ground between the abstraction of statistics and the arbitrariness of anecdotes.

She's also the Labour Party candidate in the upcoming election for the new constituency of Early and Woodley.

My name is Richard Ames,

and on this episode of our FM,

you hadn't told me about the long scars of the Cultural Revolution,

how the dream of becoming rich, became contagious contagious and why the left's romanticization of China is a dead end.

Yoyang, welcome to Novara F.

Thanks for having me.

...