WUNRN
Chris Hyde / For The Times
‘THEY
JUST NEED OPPORTUNITIES’: Women’s
rights activist Xie Lihua visits a midwifery class at a school outside
Fervent
activist and magazine editor Xie Lihua aims to convince maltreated wives and
daughters that they are men's equals.
By John M. Glionna
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 2, 2008
BEIJING
Xie Lihua's parents wanted a boy. But on the day Xie was born in a poor village
in rural Shandong province, her mother learned she had given birth to a second
daughter.
She wept in anger. And she slapped her new baby.
"Another girl!" she cried.
The year was 1951. Girls were considered a worthless commodity in an agrarian
society that relied upon the strength of young men to flourish. Xie grew up
knowing her place -- as a handmaiden to her younger brother.
"My sister and I knew that all the good food went to him -- when he was
done, then we could eat," she recalled.
Decades later, the plight of women in rural China is in many ways even worse.
The world's most-populous nation enforces a strict one-child policy to control
its population growth. With more limited opportunities to have children, boys
are more idolized than ever.
But the little girl once groomed as a second-class citizen is tired of such
insults.
Today, Xie is a fierce activist for women's rights, working to inspire a quiet
revolution. She wants to show a dominant male culture that the nation's women
deserve respect, and are equals.
As important, she is trying to convince the women themselves.
Xie is the founder of the groundbreaking Rural Women magazine, a crucial
emotional outlet for generations of peasant women. Each issue includes a
lengthy series of readers' letters, a sort of chat room for far-flung villagers
too poor to own computers.
Although urban women have made strides toward equality, thanks to better
education and opportunities within a growing white-collar workforce, rural
women are often stuck in a harsh lifestyle unchanged from an earlier era.
"I tell them their life is the equal of any man. They were not born
unequal -- society made them this way," Xie said. "They just need
opportunities to obtain their rights."
Three of four Chinese women -- more than 450 million -- still live in the
countryside, where rigid social customs breed loneliness and abuse.
Domestic violence rates are high. Each year 150,000 women commit suicide in
rural China -- the only place on Earth where more women kill themselves than
men, according to the World Health Organization.
Xie's readers are country women taught to refer to male spouses not as husbands
but masters. They inhabit a world where the emphasis on bearing sons is so
strong that women bear names such as Zhaodi ("looking for a little
brother") and Aidi ("loving a little brother").
Along with her 14-year-old magazine, Xie founded the Cultural Development
Center for Rural Women, China's first nongovernmental organization focused on
women living outside the city.
She has sponsored programs in literacy training and suicide prevention, as well
as some aimed at increasing women's political participation. She dispenses
micro-loans for enterprising rural women.
These days, she focuses on the plight of China's largest underclass -- the
millions of women who leave the countryside as migrant workers -- and
especially on abduction and trafficking schemes that enslave women as
prostitutes.
She runs a hotline for battered spouses and women unfairly laid off from jobs
and has pressured the government to devise more specific legal protections from
sexual harassment. She seeks a minimum salary and basic insurance for domestic
workers who are not covered under the nation's labor laws.
Her efforts have empowered multitudes, including rural women who have sought
their fortunes in the city, such as the factory worker who challenged her
company after it stopped paying her, and the physically abused waitress who
sued her employer.
"Xie Lihua's magazine was the first that gave rural women any real
voice," said Joan Kaufman, a former Ford Foundation program director in
China who is now at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "She and
others helped put the issue of domestic violence out there for people to begin
talking about."
Xie's critics say she embarrasses China. Before one international trip, Xie was
warned about bad-mouthing her homeland. "There's no minor thing in
diplomacy," a party official warned. "You will be responsible for
anything you say abroad."
But Xie is unbowed. At 56, she wears traditional Chinese blouses along with
Western bluejeans. She continues talking to the Western press and anyone else
who will listen. She has risked much with her fight, including the harmony in
her own marriage.
"If I am a troublemaker, then so was Deng Xiaoping and his open-door
policy," she said. "If there is no change, even though it is painful,
then there is no progress."
Xie Lihua first realized that widespread changes were possible in China during
the 1960s Cultural Revolution. But she believed the Red Guard armies that beat
intellectuals got it all wrong.
As head of her secondary school Red Guard committee, she balked at flogging her
teachers in public. By then, she had left her village and moved to Beijing, and
she began thinking about how to refocus the misplaced zeal of Mao Tse-tung's
new revolution.
Mao had proclaimed that "women hold up half the sky," meaning they
were capable of performing their share of work. Xie believed women also
deserved equal rights as part of the bargain.
Years later, she got her first chance to speak out.
While working as a reporter for a publication called China Women's News, she
traveled to Hebei province to profile a woman who cared for her older disabled
husband.
The woman had been cited by the government as a rural role model. But Xie found
a young wife treated like a slave, who endured her situation because she had
been taught that it was her destiny to serve men.
"This woman wasn't a role model," she said. "She was a
victim."
Her story challenged what she called "feudal ignorance." The piece
triggered a storm of letters and a debate over women's role in rural culture
that raged for months.
In 1993, the China Women's News managers encouraged staffers to start their own
magazines dealing with women's issues -- ventures that could be
self-sustaining, without government aid.
Xie founded Rural Women Knowing All magazine. She later shortened the name. She
charged 40 cents, about the price of a bowl of noodles, but made it free to the
poorest women.
Her peers ridiculed her, referring to her project as a "rustic ugly
duckling" for its name and content.
The first months were difficult. Xie wrote and edited the first two issues by
herself. Her husband questioned her devotion to rural female strangers.
But her ugly duckling not only thrived, it also broke new ground.
Readers discussed sex, love and marriage. Trapped women wrote that they longed
for divorce and wanted to start their own businesses.
Xie published a collection of letters detailing love stories and fantasies
harbored by readers. She called it "The Emotional World of Rural
Women." Men bought the magazine as well. Some even wrote letters,
explaining the male viewpoint on certain issues.
The magazine highlighted the harsh realities of rural China, where the suicide
rates are triple that of the city. About 80% of the deaths are the result of
conflicts between husbands and wives, she says.
In 1996, the magazine offered readers the equivalent of $12 for accounts of
women who had killed themselves.
Xie ran regular profiles of the suicides, along with a psychiatrist's analyses.
Research showed that many victims swallowed pesticides out of despair over
abusive marriages or hopeless lives with domineering in-laws, with whom many
come to live after marriage.
They also endured forced abortions. Chinese law allows rural families to have a
second child if the first is female. Women who become pregnant with a second
girl face overwhelming pressure to abort in a country where such procedures are
legal.
Government officials criticized the magazine, saying its campaign was
overblown. But Xie would not let up, and the government backed off, allowing
her to become a voice for women.
Today, the publication offers tips on having safe and fulfilling sex, and how
to find jobs in the city. Columns exhort women to report spousal abuse.
"The rural thinking is that it's a woman's fault if she is beaten,"
Xie said. "She's not trying hard enough to please her master."
Still, her hotline workers discourage women from seeking divorce, counseling
them to be realistic about their husbands. "Women can't expect too much
from their husbands," she said. "The more they expect, the more
disappointed they will become."
For a time, Xie's own home life reflected that philosophy. Tensions grew with
her husband, who wanted a more traditional wife. Xie wanted more support. They
fought.
Xie is lucky. In time, her husband came around. "He said the biggest help
he could give me was not standing in my way," she recalled.
Today's China, she says, has become more tolerant of women charting their own
destinies, "something we couldn't have imagined even 10 years ago."
There are setbacks. Like the former country girl who committed suicide after
she was raped by a man who employed her as a domestic worker. Xie blames
herself for the tragedy.
"Sometimes I think maybe I am a troublemaker," she said. "If
that girl had stayed in her village, she would still be alive. Maybe it's not
good to encourage everyone to come to the city."
The moments of self-doubt are few. Xie is too busy.
"Rural women in China are everyone's somebody," she said.
"They're somebody's wife, somebody's mother, somebody's daughter-in-law. I
encourage them to follow one simple rule:
"You are yours. You are not anybody else's."
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