Ahead of my first ever trip to Beijing next month, I'm trying to catch up on some recent books about China and just finished Leslie Chang's excellent Factory Girls: Voices from the Heart of Modern China. It's the best kind of reportage. Chang, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, spent months living in Dongguan talking to the young women flooding out of the countryside for the economic opportunity and personal freedom offered by even the most dismal jobs in the city. She meets many and becomes close friends with two whose lives – along with Chang's own family history of exile from China – form the main narratives of the book. The first half of the book covers life in Dongguan. The second turns to visits to the countryside from which the current generation is escaping.

Each personal story is gripping in their own right, and a summary wouldn't do them justice. The personal also casts light on the changes occurring in Chinese society as a whole. One of the main dynamics is the way the struggle to escape from the tradition of maintaining harmony with others above all else, and certainly above individual choices. Lying to get a better job, cheating, taking and offering bribes – none of these things causes the people Chang talks to any moral qualms – but they can be made to feel guilty about diverging from the group.

There are also loads of other interesting insights. That China's massive cities don't have big shantytowns – in contrast to India or Brazil – because of the strong links migrant works retain to the family farm. If all goes wrong in the city, they move home. That traditional Chinese culture has a reverence for learning (albeit a static and often rote kind) and so one facet of the brutality of the Cultural Revolution was that schools and colleges were the focus of humiliation and torment. That there is a gender divide being created by mass migration to cities, with young women's expectations for themselves running far ahead of young men's expectations of what a wife will be like. I was strongly reminded of George Gissing's marvellous (and under-rated) novel of women's emancipation through the tumult in late 19th century England, The Whirlpool.

Above all, though, that this extraordinary social and economic phenomenon in China can no more be unravelled than a new down duvet can be stuffed back into its shrink-wrap packaging. I hadn't really appreciated the scale of the movement, the biggest human migration in recorded history. Factory Girls has certainly whetted my appetite to read more. I've lined up some of the books recommended by The Browser, but other recommendations gratefully received.