The largest annual migration in the world takes place not on the plains of East Africa, with millions of wildebeest travelling in search of new grazing, but in the train stations and “hard-bench” railway cars of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Each lunar New Year sees up to 200-million Chinese migrant workers going home for the festivities, which end with the Lantern Festival a fortnight later.
There is less to celebrate in this, the Year of the Ox. Although China overtook Germany as the world’s third-largest economy earlier in January, the global recession means that the PRC will be hit hard. Declining consumer demand for goods from China — effectively the factory to the world — brings unemployment and a return to rural poverty for tens of millions of the PRC’s migrant workers.
None of that is likely to diminish the interest of publishers and readers in China. Not so much a bandwagon as a juggernaut, titles on China proliferate on both the fiction and non-fiction shelves. Western journalists based in China have been quick off the mark, if not always the irresistible force to the immovable object of Chinese reticence. By far the best of these accounts of contemporary China has been Rob Gifford’s China Road (Bloomsbury, 2007, reviewed on these pages at the time).
Almost as gripping, if narrower in focus because of its single subject, is Inside the Red Mansion by Oliver August (John Murray). 
Beijing bureau chief for The Times of London from 1999 to 2005, August recounts his efforts to track down the most wanted man in China, Lai Changxing. Part thriller, part detective story, August’s book offers a fascinating cross-section of Chinese society, from boatmen on Xiamen bay to street-market traders, night-club dancers and middle-class wannabes to Lai himself, an archetype of late 20th-century China (and something of an analogue of Aristotle Onassis): an unlettered peasant who became a shipping magnate.
A companion volume of sorts, though far more deeply researched and felt, is the irrepressible Xinran’s China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation (Chatto & Windus). Xinran uses the approach she followed in The Good Women of China, gathering acutely detailed, sensitively elicited personal testimonies. Her subjects here are elderly people who have lived through China’s astonishing 20th century. Included are the life stories of news singers in the tea houses of Linhuan, the 2 200-year-old village on the Grand Canal, the lantern-makers of Qin Huai, the shoe-mending matriarch of Zhengzhou and a retired policeman from the same city.
The book is a corrective to media-sponsored ideas, misconceptions and prejudices about China. As Xinran pungently writes in the chapter on lantern-makers: “— perceptions of China in the world today are like those of a tiny baby’s first impressions — limited to mother’s milk”. Her book takes readers to a mature understanding of much of the past and some of the present of the PRC.
Xinran’s work can be heartbreaking, but a palliative is popular fiction set in the distant Chinese past or thrust into its present hurly-burly. Lisa See’s first novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, made the New York Times bestseller list. Her memoir On Gold Mountain is even better and achieved both high sales and critical kudos.
Her latest, Peony in Love (Bloomsbury), is at one level a telling of the profound passion of its eponymous protagonist and at another a dialectical delight about women’s scholarship and Chinese opera aesthetics. Set in the brief but indelible time just after the fall of the Ming dynasty, when the Manchu conquerors of the Qing dynasty are beginning to assert their control of the country, it is notable for the “lovesick maiden” literary phenomenon when women made homeless by choice or circumstance took not only to the roads but also to ink, brush and scroll to write thousands of poems and prose works, only a fraction of which survive today.
Memoir and fiction seem to be naturally twinned in the writing lives of Chinese writers. Diane Wei Liang followed her memoir, Lake with No Name, by launching into detective fiction with her PI Mei Wang in The Eye of Jade. The second Mei adventure is Paper Butterfly (Picador Asia). Old and new, past and present jostle and fret in Beijing as Mei tries to find missing starlet Kaili. There is much here to learn about Beijing and contemporary China.
The butterfly of the title exerts an almost totemic effect on the action and in some ways reminds one of the unicorn figure in Blade Runner. As far as the genre goes, it is tempting to think of Wei Liang, her female protagonist Mei Wang and the setting of Beijing as an Eastern counterpoint to Sara Partesky, her female investigator VI Warshawsky and Chicago. A word of warning: don’t read the blurb at the back of the book, which inexcusably reveals quite a bit of the plot.