Li Biying's hands tell you she's left the farm behind.
Her long, tapered fingernails pinch apart pieces of gauzy fabric at the underwear factory that is her ticket out of rural poverty. They wouldn't last long in the fields where her parents coax corn, potatoes and greens from terraced plots.
The 20-year-old Li has no plans to go home. Unlike older migrant workers who came to earn money for a few years before returning to their villages, the new generation intends to stay, envisioning a life in the neon-splashed cities.
For China, the shift presents a challenge: how to integrate the new arrivals into already overburdened cities. An agrarian society for thousands of years, China is on the cusp of having more urban than rural dwellers for the first time.
"People my age think, what would I do in the countryside? I don't know how to do anything!" Li says in the simple dorm room she shares with two other women in Dongguan, a southern coastal boomtown near Hong Kong. Frilly underwear is draped in a corner and hair clips hold back makeshift privacy curtains on the bunks.
"I remember once we were growing wheat at home, it had just sprouted and it looked just like grass. I couldn't tell the difference so I pulled it out," she recalls. "My mom was so mad, she said, how could anyone not tell the difference between wheat and grass?"
Li started working in factories at 14, dropping out of seventh grade to help support her parents, sister and brother.
In a long concrete room above an Internet cafe, she and about 60 others toil under bare fluorescent tubes, occasionally calling out to each other in their singsong Sichuanese dialect above the din of clacking, thumping sewing machines.
She sews lining into unfinished bra cups, earning 20 cents for every 12 pieces. In a good month, she'll make about $225 that's roughly 14,000 pieces sewn during shifts that begin at 8 a.m. and don't end until 10:30 p.m.
The workers, almost all women, get one day off a month, the day after payday so they can send money home. After that, they might browse at a nearby department store.
Of an estimated 150 million migrant workers in China, 90 million are under 30 and they are driving one of the most significant demographic shifts in the country's history.
The government forecasts that China will be majority urban by 2015. About 47 per cent of Chinese, or 622 million people, were living in cities at the end of 2009, up from 36 per cent in 2000. Some estimate the number could rise to 1 billion by 2030.
"Traditional migrants were like migratory birds, and felt like both a farmer and a worker," says a report released last year by China's official trade union umbrella group. "They identified themselves as visitors in the city."
A 2008 survey of migrants under 30 found that 56 per cent planned to buy a house and settle in the city where they worked, according to the China Youth Research Center.
"They are more accustomed to urban life than rural life," the trade union report says. "They've never been hungry, never felt the cold and never had to worry about food or clothing. They can't 'eat bitterness' like their parents."
In Dongguan, older migrants stick out with their sun-beaten faces and shabby work clothes, toting their possessions in fertilizer bags and plastic buckets hung on bamboo poles.
In contrast, it's hard to distinguish young migrants from their urban counterparts. Li sports short black shorts over black tights, working the pedal of her sewing machine with high-heeled boots trimmed with faux fur. She has two red studs in one ear, cuffs with thin chains on the other. A silky scarf peeks out from under the collar of her puffy red coat, which keeps her warm in the unheated factory.
"My parents say I've been working in the city for so long that I don't look like a country girl anymore," Li says. "I tell them, people learn and they change. You want to become a better person and keep moving forward."
China's cities still treat migrants as second-class citizens. Under the country's "hukou" registration system, for example, migrants are considered residents of their rural hometowns. So as "visitors" to a city, they often face higher medical and school fees and can be cut off from subsidized housing and other social services.
"Society should give equal opportunities to people of all levels," says Wang Chunguang, who studies migrant issues at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "Bill Clinton became the U.S. president; a Chinese migrant worker should also be able to become a top cadre, a president, a government minister. It shouldn't be that the children of migrant workers can only become migrant workers."
The alternative, he warns, is growing social pressure from a marginalized class of poorly-educated, poorly-paid workers unwilling or unable to return to the countryside. "Americans talk about the American dream ... China needs the Chinese dream," he says.
