The best books about women in China

In Factory Girls, former Wall Street Journal reporter Leslie Chang documents the stories of young women who have left rural hometowns to work in China’s factories in the southern industrial conurbation of Dongguan.

The girls sleep 12 to a room, have gruelling work schedules seven days a week, and get little in the way of salary. But the opportunity to leave behind stifling rural village lives offers these girls a liberating, independent future and an opportunity to change their fate. Chang follows the stories of two young women in particular, documenting their lives with both compassion and humour, using their journeys to explore the societal changes brought about by China’s economic revolution.

First published in 2008, this groundbreaking book challenged conceptions of China’s factory workers in the West, and still offers a rare insight into the lives of millions of young female migrants.

Despite claims regularly made in state media, 21st-century women in China are seeing a subtle but relentless rollback of many hard-won rights, argues Leta Hong Fincher. The pressure to marry, put property deeds into the husband’s name, a lack of female political representation and an absence of many legal protections mean that women’s rights are being steadily eroded.

This book considers predominantly the plight of educated, urban women in China, who are often left in a worse position after marrying, both financially and professionally. With tales of hasty marriages, domestic violence and financial discrimination, Hong Fincher’s book is both convincing and overwhelming, complete with first-hand accounts, careful analysis, and an underlying anger about the abuses faced. Not to be missed.

The stunning true story of a woman whose life was torn apart by China’s political headwinds. In 1966, Nien Cheng is working as an assistant at British company Shell, one of the few international companies that maintained an office in China after the Communist revolution. A London-educated academic, Cheng and her daughter enjoyed a lifestyle that few could boast in China in the 1960s, and she is in the extreme minority of Chinese women holding an important corporate position. But as the Cultural Revolution dawns, Cheng is taken from her home and accused of being an ‘enemy of the state’ – arrested and beaten, she spends the next six years in solitary confinement.

When she is released in 1973, Cheng discovers an unrecognisable Shanghai, where her worst nightmares have come true. Cheng’s riveting story remains quietly dignified throughout her ordeal, pressing ahead with one woman’s sheer determination to survive.

Although Lotus is a novel, this fascinating work of fiction is based largely on facts and first-hand interviews, prompted by the revelation that the author’s own grandmother had been sold to a brothel in the 1930s. The eponymous character is a migrant worker in Shenzhen who was originally a factory worker, then a prostitute, easily out-earning all her relatives in the village and saving to support her brother’s university education.

Lotus might be a novel, but most of the characters’ experiences and details are true, based on a vast well of research. It is humorous, perceptive and sobering, following women caught in the conflict of China’s traditions and modern demands, and portraying three-dimensional women with complex hopes and dreams. This is a darker version of Factory Girls, the bitter side of life for those migrant workers who fall out of the factory and into brothels. 

Once Upon a Time in the East is a raging, passionate examination of the author’s early life. Originally given away as a baby to a peasant couple, Xiaolu Guo is given back when they can’t feed her and passed on to the care of her grandparents in a crushingly poor fishing village, where her illiterate grandmother suffers tremendous cruelty at the hands of her husband.

Startlingly frank, Guo’s book details her early childhood as a poor villager, life with her parents in a communist work unit, her experience in the city as a teenage victim of sexual abuse, and the whirlwind of student life at the prestigious Beijing Film Academy in the turbulent 1990s. The huge breadth of her experience as a woman in China is staggering and offers a unique and personal viewpoint on life in China since the 1970s. Guo’s memoir is also an unashamed call for greater rights for women and broader creative freedoms.

At the start of this collection of true-life stories, Xinran is working as a female radio presenter in Nanjing in the late 1980s when she receives a letter from a young boy pleading for help – an old man in his village, he says, has kidnapped a young girl and is keeping her tied up with an iron chain. Reluctant police eventually track down the girl, aged only 12, but for saving her, Xinran receives only accusations of 'stirring up the people'. She asks herself in shock – what is a woman’s life worth in China?

This narrative is Xinran’s mission to discover the answer to that question, opening up her radio show to allow listeners to anonymously leave their stories, and travelling the country to speak with women about their experiences. She pulls no punches, with accounts of rape, forced marriage and abuse at the hands of husbands and official figures. The strength of Xinran’s work is in her compassion for the characters in her stories, the personal, unpolished text, relating intimate and often shocking details of unbelievably difficult and painful lives.

Harrowing, shocking and heartwarming in equal turns, Wild Swans is truly a modern classic. Following three generations of Chang’s family, the book documents the dramatic changes in Chinese society as witnessed by a trio of women.

Chang’s grandmother, who has bound feet, is given as a concubine to the chief of police in the warlord government in Peking. When he lies dying, she flees with her infant daughter. Chang’s mother later joins the Communist’s People Liberation Army and marries the Communist Party official Wang Yu, who has been on the Long March. Chang’s own family life is shattered when her parents are arrested during the Cultural Revolution. Since being published in 37 languages, Chang’s extraordinary, intimate work is fully deserving of its international renown.