The Old Bradfordian community is truly international, with more than 6,000 OBs based across 40 countries. We love hearing about OB’s international experiences and used lockdown as an excuse to reach out to find out what some have been up to. To see the ‘Where in the World’ feature in its entirety, read pages 36-41 in The Old Bradfordian 2020 magazine.

Yuan Yang has been working in Beijing for the past four years, where she is now the deputy bureau chief of the ‘Financial Times’.

She writes mainly on the intersection of technology, society and geopolitics, with a particular interest in labour issues. After leaving BGS in 2008, Yuan studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford.

Her first job after university was working as a full-time representative of the Oxford University Student Union, where she was Vice-President, focusing on the problem of sexual violence on campus. After being convinced by the ongoing debate over higher education funding that economists are listened to more than philosophers, she studied an MSc in Economics at the London School of Economics. She then founded the charity Rethinking Economics, now headquartered in Manchester, and which campaigns for curriculum reform in economics. She left Rethinking Economics for an internship, writing about development economics at ‘The Economist’, and then joined the ‘Financial Times’.

Yuan has been COVID stranded in Beijing for the past year and unable to see her parents in the UK. However, she is happily able to roam more or less freely in China given the low incidence of COVID-19 cases now. She is also a member of the WeChat social messaging group ‘Yorkshire in Beijing’, and would be very happy to organise a meet-up with any Old Bradfordians who venture her way.