For the chief cleaner of the new city courthouse, service is all she’s ever known. Serve the parents. Serve the pigs. Serve the future. Serve the family.  Right now Xiao Zhang is serving the people with a feather duster, carefully working round the gold stars on the crimson emblem of state above the judge’s high-backed chair.

Across the empty courtroom, her husband is perched on a window ledge, polishing the glass that looks out on to iron bars, security gates and a city street that 10 years ago was an expanse of shimmering green rice paddy.

Xiao Zhang does not miss that greener past. For her, there was nothing romantic about life on the land.  She’d started helping with the farm work almost as soon as she could walk and when she was 11, she dropped out of school.  “Every family was poor but we were poorer,” she says.

When I started coming here 10 years ago to chart the transformation of White Horse Village into a city, Xiao Zhang was already complaining that change was too slow.  Amid all the anguish of elderly farmers forced to give up their fields and move into tower blocks, she was impatient, longing for the day the government would demolish her home and concrete over her fields.

Women like Xiao Zhang’s position are making sure their duaghters have every educational opportunity the sons do.  They want their daughters to be able to be teachers and doctors and business people.  And CHinese girls are taking advantage.