Tart view of China's sexual dishonesty

TIMES CHANGE AND so do the images of Chinese women. Jiu Dan, dressed all in black and wearing heavy mascara, is the latest young Chinese author to portray the mainland's new generation as calculating tarts and gold-diggers.

Semi-autobiographical books about women in pigtails and Mao suits caught up in Chairman Mao Zedong's revolution are being overtaken by a wave of new accounts that describe the racy lifestyles of their children.

In Crows, Jiu - the latest member of a school of young Chinese women writers - tells the melodramatic story of a pair of mainland fortune-hunters who are set loose among Singapore's rich and lonely men.

Beijing-based Jiu, 33, whose real name is Zhu Zhiping, aims to paint a realistic picture of China's 'sexually dishonest women' in a book which is soon to be released in English. She is also hard on the heels of Mian Mian and Wei Hui, authors who provoked outrage by writing up the amoral behaviour of their generation. Although some of Jiu's contemporaries have called her a 'prostitutes' writer', she responds by saying she is just a camera, a neutral observer.

'I want to present readers with a real picture of Chinese women as they are today. Chinese girls do go abroad for prostitution,' Jiu says. 'All the others just want to blow up a false, plastic woman and say that is reality.'

Born in Yangzhou, the daughter of a retired People's Liberation Army officer, Jiu studied journalism in Chongqing, before she worked on a number of prestigious television documentary series like Deng Xiaoping And China's Economic Reforms and Xiaoping, Ni Hao. She worked as an independent producer before she started to write novels and then in 1995 travelled to Singapore for two years to study English. In the past, Chinese women went abroad to study so they could return and help save their motherland.