Holding up half the sky

"The man beat me three times all over my body and I was pain all over. Now the pain still unbearable and I was still afraid. But my family still tried to persuade me to go back, told me not to be a disgrace for the family. At the time, I have decided to divorce. I hate the man. But my family did not agree at all. My crying face thought and thought but could not work it out. Why it was like this? ... I beg you sisters, give me help."

The writer was almost illiterate, but her story was all too familiar. At the end of last year, Li Zucui, a young village girl in China's central province of Hubei, was the victim of an arranged marriage. "My elder sister knew a man. The man gave sister 2,300 yuan [pounds 177] as marriage present. Then without a marriage certificate, I was taken in a truck to the man's family home. I never met the man before. Didn't know him," wrote Li Zucui. "I knew it wasn't legal without a marriage certificate. Sister told me that our family needed money. I found that the man was ill-tempered. I had to obey him or got beaten often."

In the letter, dated 28 July, Li Zucui describes how she fled back to her family, only to be told there was no money to repay the man. The family threatened to disown her if she left him. "What should I do? I wanted to go to the court, but I was afraid that I could not succeed. I was also afraid about paying back money to the man," she wrote.

Somehow, perhaps with the help of a friend, Li Zucui managed to send her letter to Rural Women Knowing All, a monthly Chinese magazine set up in 1993 by a single-minded woman, Xie Lihua, with the aim of providing help and practical information to young country women. In a culture where rural females are often treated little better than commodities, the magazine is trying to reach a generation of younger women who are struggling against age-old prejudices. Circulation has now reached 160,000.

China's hosting of the Fourth UN World Conference on Women and a 36,000- strong parallel non-governmental forum, which starts tomorrow in Peking, has turned the world's spotlight on the difficulties confronting Chinese women. Half a century after Mao Tse-tung famously announced that women "hold up half the sky", most of the country's 600 million women are still facing discrimination and poverty.

In China as a whole, one-third of all women are illiterate, women do 60 per cent of the farming work, and women's salaries are significantly less than men's. Women's traditional place as second-class citizens and the age-old Chinese preference for sons means that female foetuses are commonly aborted, thanks to the arrival of the ultra-sound machine. In rural areas, young women may be tricked, often by someone they know, into being sold as brides, or, more commonly, simply trapped in the marriage payment system. In cities, divorce rates have soared, leaving many women to fend for themselves and their families without state help; prostitution, effectively stamped out by old-style Communism, is again rife. In the workplace, two-thirds of employees laid off by state enterprises are women. In government, Mao's dictum has certainly failed; in 1954, 5 per cent of the first National People's Congress Standing Committee were women, and now the percentage is a miserable 12.3. And getting back to basics, a national survey conducted by China Central Television and published last week found that women typically spent three hours and 15 minutes per day doing "house-chores" - compared with a man's 11 and a half minutes.

In the Nineties, China's women face a bewildering array of challenges. Some are the legacy of centuries of feudalism and traditional discrimination, but others are the result of a 16-year economic revolution in which the country has abandoned old-style Communist central planning for market- driven reforms. It is a situation in which it is impossible to generalise. Nor is it by any means a totally bleak picture. On one hand, the Chinese government admits that 65,000 women and children were rescued from kidnapping between 1990 and 1994 (which means actual abductions must be very much higher). At the same time, however, China's cities and towns are now full of independent small businesswomen determined to carve their niche in modern China, even if their main obstacle is a male-dominated society.

Xie Lihua's Rural Women Knowing All project points to both the best and worst aspects of what is happening in China today. The operation, run under the auspices of the official China Women's News, is one of a growing number of non-governmental organisations which manage to maintain an arm's- length relationship with the tightly controlled state bureaucracy. The independence of their activities would have been unthinkable 10 years ago.

Stuffed into cardboard boxes on the floor of the magazine's office in north Peking are the hundreds of letters that have been received in recent months. Rural women comprise about 70 per cent of China's female population and their problems are varied. A random selection of six letters produced the desperate case of Li Zucui's forced marriage, a village woman in Henan province who needed advice on farming frogs, a 24-year-old lesbian who had been forced to marry a man, a township girl in Zhejiang province whose work-unit leaders were trying to make her divorce, an unemployed young woman in a destitute rural family in Hubei province, and a girl from impoverished Yunnan province who had sent a 5 yuan (40 pence) money order to support the women's conference.

When Ms Xie explains her project, she differentiates between the most deprived "30 per cent" of rural China, such as Yunnan, Guizhou and Shanxi provinces, and the more average "70 per cent". It is in the poorest regions where women's education and prospects are worst, and where the scourge of kidnapping brides is most serious. Last week, for instance, police in Guizhou province said that in May and June this year alone, they had rescued 2,000 kidnapped women and children. Often, says Ms Xie, the girls are "cheated" by men promising jobs, who then sell them to farmers who cannot afford the traditional marriage payment. The traffic in women is usually from the poorest provinces to less deprived rural areas. "When they have been sold, the buyers lock them inside the home. Some of them have found a way to ask for our help," says Ms Xie.

The target readership of the magazine are women in Ms Xie's "70 per cent" average areas. In such villages, about half the women over 50 are illiterate, but 70 per cent of the females under 30 will have graduated from junior high school. Rural Women Knowing All focuses on these 16- to 30-year-olds. "I want to give them education and information and practical training, to teach them some professional skills," she says.

Practical and legal advice is central. Most unmarried village girls nowadays want to join the wave of dagong mei (unskilled women) who drift to the cities in search of work. "They all think their mothers work so hard for so little, and to them the city is attractive," says Ms Xie. "But they do not have skills. They can only do cleaning, baby-sitting, or work in state factories." The magazine explains how to avoid the pitfalls of city life.

Health and agricultural skills are crucial for married rural women, many of whom are now in charge of the family home and farm because their husbands are working in the cities. "The biggest difference between rural and city women is that rural women have no medical welfare. They have to pay," says Ms Xie, who last year produced and distributed a special edition on health and hygiene. Meanwhile, farming tips for women in the latest edition of the magazine covered calf-raising, apple trees and insecticides.

Legal advice on the marriage and divorce laws is essential because of the transactional nature of most rural marriages. A marriage payment from the man to his future wife's family is still "very common" in China, says Ms Xie, even when it is a happy union. In Chinese custom, after the marriage the girl has no responsibility to her own family and they must therefore be recompensed for the cost of her upbringing. "It can often be at least 5,000 yuan [pounds 400]," says Ms Xie. She estimates that up to one-third of rural women in the average regions are unwilling brides and, like Li Zucui, are forced by their families into arranged marriages to raise money.

In the cities, China's women lead very different lives from their rural sisters, and face new problems thrown up by the huge social changes over the past 16 years. Employment and housing are no longer guaranteed by the state, and loss-making state industries have cut staff, with female workers usually suffering disproportionately. Chen Yiyun, a professor at the Institute of Sociology, says: "Now, with the market economy, women have to struggle for equal opportunity."

It is emotional problems, however, which cause the most grief. In spring 1993, Professor Chen set up the Jinglun Family Centre in Peking to offer counselling to distressed women. In the past five months the centre has offered guidance to 800 women by phone, and since May a further 250 women have arrived for face-to-face discussions. In a cubby-hole room nicknamed the "room for warmth", women are offered advice by volunteer counsellors, mostly other sociologists.

Almost all the calls for help are from 35- to 50-year-old women, and in nearly two-thirds of the cases the husband has taken a mistress. For many middle-aged Chinese women, changing sexual mores seem threatening, and they are at a loss when their husbands take up with a younger woman. Yang Jing, one of the centre's counsellors, says: "From a traditional Chinese marriage attitude, the wife should be sexually passive. But the mistress is active and more attractive to the man. So we will persuade the wives that they can also be sexually active."

A record number of marriages are failing. Divorce in Peking last year hit 24.5 per cent, more than double the rate four years earlier. The majority of divorces are initiated by women, many of whom are glad of the new freedom to escape intolerable marriages. But women still pay a far higher financial and social cost than men, and the Jinglun centre spends a great deal of time helping women with the legal problems of sorting out a financial settlement for themselves and any child.

Last year a separate telephone hotline was set up for victims of domestic violence, which has "really got worse", according to Professor Chen. She blames the new market economy rat-race.

"Many men feel inferior to their colleagues, or feel failures, or cannot make a lot of money, or lose money on the stock exchange. Then they take it out on their wives," she says.

Like Ms Xie, Professor Chen will be a delegate to the non-governmental forum which starts tomorrow with up to 36,000 foreign participants. Also attending will be up to 5,000 Chinese delegates. "The forum will enable an exchange of views, and to see what is happening outside China with the women's liberation movement," says Professor Chen. "We can use the opportunity to find out our common goals."