蓝色天使集团怎么样:Women of the revolution

Factory Girls: Voices from the Heart of Modern China 
by Leslie T Chang 
420pp, Picador, £12.99

Chinese Whispers: Searching for Forgiveness in Beijing
by Jan Wong 
320pp, Atlantic, £8.99

Lion's Head, Four Happiness
by Xiaomei Martell 
212pp, Vintage, £8.99

It is easy to spot the migrant workers on the streets of Shanghai or any other Chinese city as they return to their villages for Chinese new year - their one and only holiday. Small groups of young men and women head for the central railway station, carrying presents home in cheap, shiny suitcases or striped travel sacks. The men still have a country look about them, stopping to squat on the kerb and smoke a cigarette. The women are very different, dressed in bright, striking style, often in high heels quite unsuitable for the long journey.

Chinese-American journalist Leslie Chang rode the local buses in Dongguan, one of the biggest centres for migrant work across the Hong Kong border, and observed this sharp division of the sexes: "The young men on the bus smelled of gamy sweat, the scent of people who walked long distances outdoors ... The young women were immaculate; they never smelled, and their hair was always sleek and shiny."

Other writers have chronicled the exploitation of China's migrant workers, whose dirt-cheap labour provides most of the leisure and electronic goods which fuelled our credit boom. Chang's brilliant book Factory Girls also portrays the hard side of life for those who have left the land, but it is, above all, a tribute to the determination of China's "factory girls" to make a better life for themselves. The "boys", most of whom work in the construction industry, show rather less drive and initiative.

There is a good reason for this disparity. China's internal migrants are believed (there are no reliable figures) to total some 120 million - perhaps one-seventh of the country's adult working population. More than a third of these are women from a still very traditional rural society. And unlike the men, Chang explains, the women have no permanent home to go back to. They have broken away from a life where rural daughters are supposed to marry and move to live with their in-laws. Migration liberates them from the village but it has also dropped them, literally, in a "no-man's land". No wonder they are more motivated than the boys to dress smartly, try to impress the boss, and to "value migration for its life-changing possibilities".

When I first visited Dongguan in the early 1980s, the city and large rural area under its jurisdiction had a combined population of about one million. The Dongguan that Chang knows now has a population of 7.5 million, of whom 5.8 million are migrants. It has high-rises, international hotels, super-highways and more than 100 industrial districts and technology parks. Economic growth over the past two decades has averaged 15% a year; it makes 40% of the magnetic heads used in PCs around the world and 30% of their disk drives. Two-thirds of the workers are women, employed for their dexterity on the production line and perhaps because they are thought to be easier to bully.

The two young women whom Chang got to know well, and through whom we see the life of a migrant worker, may be more independent-minded than the average: it probably takes some nerve to befriend a foreigner, even one who looks and speaks Chinese and dresses for the part.

Wu left her home in rural Hunan at the age of 17, tired of peddling fruit and vegetables. Lured to a job near the Hong Kong border in a "hair salon", she realised it was a brothel and ran straight out, leaving her documents behind her. Eventually she found an abandoned ID card and started again.

She learned to speak standard Chinese to get rid of her provincial accent (Hunanese have a "country hick" reputation) and Cantonese to talk with the bosses. She started to keep a diary with self-motivating entries: "I have no time to be unhappy because there are too many things I want to do"; "We can be ordinary but we must not be vulgar."

Wu went into direct sales, hawking Tibetan medicine and funeral plots - city dwellers often buy rural plots of land located with auspicious views for the afterlife. She made a lot of money, set up a small business and lost it all, then found another job selling paint.

Chang first met her at the Dongguan Making Friends Club where migrant boys and girls look for partners. Chang accompanied Wu on a blind date, shared the romantic ups and downs and sat in on business meetings. She learnt about the fake licences, kick-backs and other forms of petty corruption. Through Wu she also learnt about the psychology of the Chinese male boss. Arrive late for meetings, look bored, read the newspaper, say as little as possible and leave it to your subordinates.

Chang's other friend was Min, who left her village in Hubei province at the age of 18. She too had daunting reversals and her own self-sustaining philosophy: "Happiness makes a person shallow. It is only through suffering that we grow up." Min switched jobs several times to better her prospects or escape from bad bosses. After a year and a half she lost all her money and her mobile phone - the most essential possession for any migrant worker, with all the numbers of friends and job contacts. Sometimes a girl will signal her interest in a boy by offering to pay his mobile phone bill.

Min met Chang "to see what an American looks like", and took her home for Chinese new year. She brought as gifts for the family a down jacket, a box of traditional medicine whose principal ingredient is donkey hide, a pink purse made by her factory, Nestlé milk powder, a box of cookies, two men's shirts, a plastic heart-shaped box of candy and 1,000 yuan (£100) folded into a tight square. During the visit she tried to "civilise" her family, buying a hot water dispenser and urging her dad to stop smoking. More traditionally, she paid her respects to her ancestors, visited the local temple and prayed for a good marriage.

These are impressive stories of determination and courage but they also show the limits of this new kind of liberation for so many Chinese rural women. Alongside the ambition there is a sense of fatalism, and in three years in Dongguan, Chang never heard a single person express anything like a feminist sentiment.

We don't know of course how her two friends are faring today in an environment which is much harder as the recession hits China's export trade. We leave Min doing well: on her next visit home she took a new TV, a DVD player and 5,000 yuan (£500) in cash. Wu, after another venture into direct sales (selling bee pollen and other "health cures"), had slid down again, earning less than a fifth of what she did before. But she still hoped to meet the right man, have a child and "make a contribution to society".

Chang's lively, perceptive and well-researched work has an additional strand, for she has woven into it the story of her own Chinese-American family. Her grandfather was a migrant to the US, although he went back to China and later died in murky circumstances in 1946 at the start of the civil war. I am not entirely sure whether this improves the book or is a distraction from what is already a rich and complex narrative. At any rate she tells the story sensitively and without over-dramatising her own role.

Jan Wong is another Chinese-North American (her grandfather emigrated to Canada) journalist who has done excellent work reporting from China, and has a fascinating but more personal story to tell. In 1972, during the cultural revolution, Wong was one of a handful of foreign students in Beijing and, at the age of 19, already an ardent Maoist. One day a young Chinese student called Yin naively told Wong and another friend that she wanted to go to America and asked for their help.

Shocked at this betrayal of the Chinese "workers and peasants" who through their selfless labour were supporting Yin's studies, the two foreigners reported her to the college. Yin promptly disappeared. Wong went back home to Canada to organise a Maoist takeover of the McGill University Chinese Students Society.

Wong has returned to Beijing hoping to find Yin and seek forgiveness - somehow she had suppressed the memory while working in China during the 1980s and 90s. She has another motive too: to try to understand "why I threw myself so enthusiastically into the cultural revolution". That's a very good question for all of us who became so excited then by Mao's vision of a new socialist society.

It takes 240 pages for Wong, with her husband and two sons in tow, to track down Yin during a hot summer in Beijing, and to hear her story. It turns out that Yin was sent to the countryside but - perhaps because her father was an army officer - did not suffer a worse fate. She returned to Beijing in the improving political climate after Mao Zedong's death and persuaded the university to exonerate her. Smartly deciding to study law, after graduation she made the even smarter decision to join the army as a lawyer.

Then, in the early 90s, Yin joined the many thousands of upwardly mobile Chinese who "took the plunge" into business, selling wine and tobacco wholesale. She had a car by 1994. Five years later she finally visited the US - her brother was living there. Now Yin is married to a university professor, lives in a "heritage home" (once occupied by the writer Bing Xin) on the Beijing campus, has three other properties and a fluffy white cat.

This is a very different sort of Chinese migration story - equally engrossing, but told with rather less sensitivity than Chang's account of the Dongguan workers. So many pages are spent describing the quest to find Yin that it becomes much less her tale, and much more that of the Wong family in Beijing. We learn at some length that Chinese toilets are greatly improved, that the Beijing traffic is dreadful, that the capital has a restaurant for every 400 people, that the massive silk market, famous for its counterfeit designer goods, has moved to an air-conditioned building, and that there is a water cooler in Citibank's ATM lobby.

The central question as to why Wong (and many millions of Chinese) threw themselves into the cultural revolution with so much enthusiasm is never properly addressed. Wong is "forgiven" but she, and we, understand no more than before.

Xiaomei Martell's gentle account of her childhood in China, Lion's Head, Four Happiness, is a reminder that politics was not everything (though she was only a young child during the revolution). Some of her most lyrical passages recollect the delights of food. Chinese rationing brought out the creative side because the cook had to plan so carefully: she can still remember the joy of getting two eggs for her birthday. But life was often more serious than that: Xiaomei's father died when she was four and her mother had to struggle. Neighbours kept at a distance, saying that to mix with a widow would bring bad luck; but kind uncles helped out, one of them making "lion's head" meatballs for supper - very finely chopped pork, with ginger, spring onion and garlic, mixed with egg and deep-fried until golden brown.

Xiaomei had good teachers at her school in Huhehot, the provincial capital of Inner Mongolia. She scored highly in the national exams and studied English in Beijing, where she fell in love with the works of Chaucer and Jane Eyre - as well as with Peking duck. In a quieter way, hers too was a memorable migration.

• John Gittings's books include The Changing Face of China (OUP). Hit the links to order Factory Girls for £11.99, Chinese Whispers for £8.99 or Lion's Head, Four Happiness for £8.99, all with free UK p&p from the Guardian bookshop