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Yuan Yang
MP
Yuan Yang MP
杨缘
	Yang in 2024
Member of Parliament; for Earley and Woodley
	Incumbent
	Assumed office ; 4 July 2024
Preceded by	Constituency created
Majority	848 (1.9%)
Personal details
Born	1990 (age 33–34); Ningbo, Zhejiang, China
Political party	Labour
Alma mater	Balliol College, Oxford (BA); London School of Economics (MSc)
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	楊緣
Simplified Chinese	杨缘
Hanyu Pinyin
Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu Pinyin	Yáng yuán

Yuan Yang (Chinese: 杨缘; born 1990)^[1] is a British-Chinese Labour Party politician, economist and journalist serving as Member of Parliament for Earley and Woodley since 2024.

Yang was formerly the UK-based Europe-China correspondent for the Financial Times. She is the first Chinese-born Briton to be elected to the UK Parliament, and the second of Chinese ethnicity after Alan Mak.^{[citation needed]}

Early life and education

Yang was born in Ningbo in China,^[2] growing up in the southwestern Sichuan province.^[3] She was raised by her maternal grandparents in a work unit (danwei).^[4] At the age of four, she moved to the north of England with her parents - moving between Manchester and Leeds.^[3] Yang became "very passionate about writing" as a child, and explained that her passion was "encouraged by my teachers and by a group called The Yorkshire Writing Squad that I joined as a teenager".^[3]

Yang was educated at the fee-paying Bradford Grammar School, graduating in 2008.^[5] She studied for a bachelor's degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 2011 with first-class honours.^[6] She was the sabbatical Women’s Officer in the Oxford Student Union.^[7]

In 2008 amid the 2007–2008 financial crisis, she co-founded Rethinking Economics, a non-profit campaign that Yang described as coming from the belief that "students should be able to choose among different schools of thought" with regards to economics education.^[8]^[9]^[10] Yang expressed the hope that the campaign would provide a space for students wanting to address "real world economic issues, broader questions of economic justice and reforming the real economy."^[11]

Yang attended the London School of Economics from 2012-2013, studying for an MSc in Economics. Yang studied abroad at Peking University in 2013 as part of a government sponsored programme.^[3]

Journalism career

In a 2021 interview with Quartz, Yang noted that she initially intended to become a poet but pivoted to journalism by accident.^[12]

She began her journalism career as a Marjorie Dean intern in the economics section of The Economist magazine.^[13]

In 2016, she returned to China as an economics correspondent for the Financial Times.^[14] She has served as deputy Beijing bureau chief for the FT, and covered China's technology sector and economy. Yang is also a regular contributor to BBC News.^[9]

In May 2024, Yang's book^[1] Private Revolutions was published by Bloomsbury Publishing.^[15] The book is about the coming of age of four women born in China in the 1980s and 1990s, in a society about to change beyond recognition.

Political career

In December 2023, Yang was announced as the Labour Party candidate for Earley and Woodley^[16] in the 2024 general election.^[17] Her family had lived in the area for 14 years prior to her selection as a candidate.^[18] Yang explained that part of her motivation for standing as a candidate derived from witnessing "the damage austerity has done to our community" in the area.^[18]

In July 2024, she won the newly created constituency with 18,209 votes, beating the Conservative party candidate who received 17,361 votes,^[19] and becoming the UK's first Chinese-born MP. Before she was an MP, Yang backed the rights of Hongkongers in the United Kingdom and was critical of the Chinese government's 2020 Hong Kong national security law.^[20]

As Yang is a Quaker,^[21] she was sworn in to parliament by taking a solemn affirmation on 10 July 2024.^[22]