Yuan Yang

Yuan Yang is the first ever MP for the newly created seat of Earley and Woodley. Born in Ningbo, China, in 1990, she came to the UK aged four with parents who arrived "with very little", started primary school not speaking English, and grew up in Earley, where she still lives, so the charge that she is a parachuted national recruit rather than a local does not hold.

She went from Bradford Grammar School to read Philosophy and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford, took an MSc in Economics at the LSE, and studied at Peking University. During the 2008 financial crisis she was a founder of Rethinking Economics, a charity now active in over 100 universities. She began in journalism at The Economist and joined the Financial Times, becoming its first ever Europe China correspondent and spending six years in Beijing, where she rose to Deputy Bureau Chief and briefly ran the bureau during the pandemic, served as Vice-President of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China defending press freedom, and won awards for human rights investigations. She is a regular BBC contributor and the author of "Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China's New Social Order" (Viking/Bloomsbury, 2024), on social mobility in reform era China.

She was elected in 2024 with 18,209 votes and a majority of just 848 (1.9 per cent), sits on the Treasury Committee, and contributes to IPPR research on global trade.