China, late 1986. Students are on the streets demanding democracy, private enterprise is rearing its head for the first time in a generation and Nanjing factory worker Lijia Zhang is losing her virginity on the floor of her workshop.

The location was born of necessity rather than choice but in mid-1980s China, premarital sex anywhere was a brave flouting of social mores. "Nothing less than a shameful and immoral act that can't be tolerated by our country's law," the 44-year-old journalist and mother of two jokily recalls in her new memoir, Socialism Is Great!

Bookshop shelves are heavy with tales of woe from the first decades of the People's Republic but, for most Australian readers, China's tumultuous 1980s remain a blank. Stepping into the breach, Zhang provides a lively account of love, sex and intellectual ferment growing up in Nanjing, southern China, between 1980 and 1989.

It was a time when China was being swept along by a tidal wave of economic reforms unleashed by Deng Xiaoping in the wake of Mao's death.

"Somehow that era just got lost," says Zhang, sitting in her spacious but slightly chaotic Beijing apartment. "Yet it was such an exciting time, when all the changes started to happen."

In December 1980, at the age of 16, Zhang was pulled from school by her mother and thrust into the cold world of Liming, a state-owned missile factory in Nanjing. "My mother was a worker and she never saw the benefit of education," she says.

In the factory, Zhang found her every material need catered for but her life closely monitored and choices severely circumscribed. One of her memoir's most shocking passages details how female workers had to show a blood-stained sanitary towel to family-planning staff every month before a fresh supply was doled out. Failure to provide evidence of menstruation meant a compulsory gynaecological check-up.

Chafing at the restrictions of factory life, Zhang escaped into literature and taught herself English, later shoring up her knowledge through an open university program. She also sought love in a series of increasingly fraught affairs, recalled in the book with unflinching detail.

For all the determination and spirit she shows in Socialism Is Great!, Zhang cuts a surprisingly vulnerable figure in the flesh. Bespectacled, tall, with a mane of curly hair, it's easy to picture her as a young girl standing out from the factory crowd. But despite a successful career as a journalist, co-authorship of the 1999 book China Remembers and the publication of her memoirs, she still dwells on her curtailed schooling. "I do feel sorry for myself," she says.

A desire "to be compensated" has seen her spend two periods studying in Britain, the first for a diploma in journalism from 1990 to 1992. After that she returned to China to pursue a career. She got her start in the media with Australia's ABC radio. "I helped Ali Moore, the ABC bureau chief, with interpreting and gave her suggestions and ideas. And then ABC TV hired me," she says.

Since her days in the factory, however, Zhang had harboured ambitions to write. "I got my first breakthrough with Newsweek in May 1996. I wrote about a socialist model village, Dazhai, and how it had become commercialised. Shortly after I became pregnant with my first child I gave up the full-time ABC job [in September 1996] and decided to pursue my own freelance writing. Looking back, that's probably the best decision I ever made." Her journalism has since appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Independent and South China Morning Post among other publications.

In December 2000, she wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal Asia about her experiences in the missile factory, provoking surprise among many who knew her. "Lots of my friends never knew I'd come from a worker background. They thought I was better educated. They said, 'Why don't you write a book?' I started some research and realised although the market had been flooded by China memoirs, few are set in the 1980s."

Drawing on her extensive diaries, Zhang refined her memoir while studying for a master's in creative and life writing at Goldsmiths in London. The project took nearly four years to complete.

"Writing has always been my way of making sense of my life," Zhang says.

The memoir was also born of a desire to "commemorate that bygone era, which I think deserves to be remembered. Overall, there was a lot more control then but in terms of art, people dared more, they experimented more. Today's Chinese young people are far more self-centred, far more materialistic. I was just a factory worker but we talked very passionately about China's future. People now are so busy making money everything else is just secondary."

Zhang lives comfortably in Beijing's embassy district but retains the curious air of boldness and insecurity that permeates her character in Socialism Is Great! And she continues to believe her own life and that of the nation should amount to more than just striving for material comfort.

"I just hope this is a passing phase China has to go through, where people want to get richer and get a certain material security, and then they will want more spiritual fulfilment."

If the Chinese Government would allow writers such as Zhang to publish in their own country, that would be a step in the right direction.