China Women

Organizers of a global women's forum have accepted China's controversial decision to move the event out of Beijing, but only after winning an increase in the number of people allowed to attend, U.N. sources said Thursday. About 1,300 non-governmental organizations are accredited to attend the Forum on Women from Aug. 30 to Sept. 8. In April the forum's Chinese hosts sparked an outcry in the West by moving the venue from Beijing to rural Huairou.

A pretty young woman in a short black skirt, white sweater and a damp, olive-drab jacket entered the lobby of a cultural center Sunday evening, removed a towel from her handbag and dried her rain-splattered legs. Blithely ignoring everyone around her, she delicately balanced on one leg and pulled on a stocking, shifted and put on the other, then headed into the final event of Beijing's first beauty contest since the 1949 Communist revolution.

China has the world's second-largest number of females in the military, according to the China News Service. The semi-official agency, monitored here, said the Beijing Statistics Bureau reported that more than 100,000 women are serving in China's armed forces, 80,000 of them in technical, communications, hygiene and logistics duties. It said the United States has about 220,000 female soldiers.

In Liu Chunlan's remote hamlet in the rolling hills of Sichuan, the old folks used to tell her that girls were a curse. Raising a daughter only to marry her off to another family was like fattening a hog for someone else's banquet, they'd say. Spending money on a girl was like scattering seed to the wind. Here, as in thousands of villages across China, boys were prized: They did heavy farm labor, bore the family name and cared for their parents in their old age.

Traditionally, the roles of men and women in Chinese society have been clearly defined: Men were expected to be physically strong and verbally direct and take an active role in political and military affairs. Women were expected to be submissive, charming and tactful; their place was in the home, where they ran the household and took care of the children.

Shi Meirong has time for only two meals a day at the moment. Harvest season has hit her dusty little farm here at the foot of the Taihang Mountains and her irrigated orchards are dripping fruit. So Shi and her daughter-in-law rise each morning with the sun and scoot out to the market with their produce before 5 a.m. Breakfast, a simple, midmorning affair, doubles as lunch, after which the two women pick peaches, plums and apples for the next four to five hours.

At a restored synagogue here, she admired a Torah to highlight American support for freedom of religion in China. At a medical center in Beijing, she applauded Chinese research on spina bifida and other birth defects. And in this city's modern library Wednesday, she played on the popular aphorism that "women hold up half the sky," taking aim at China's practices of forced abortion and sterilization to limit family size.

Mrs. Liu could have had three daughters by now. But the shame and legal costs would have been unbearable, so she gave her second daughter away at birth and aborted a third when an ultrasound scan showed that fetus, too, was female. In 1949, the Communist Party took power promising to end centuries of degradation for China's women. Yet hundreds of thousands of unwanted baby girls are abandoned, aborted and even killed each year. For poor, rural families, the choice is as stark as it is cruel.

He Zen's path to cosmetic surgery was fast and simple. Her mother saw an ad in a Shanghai newspaper and figured that more Caucasian-looking eyes would make it easier for her unmarried 28-year-old daughter to find a husband. She made an appointment for her daughter the next Saturday morning. When He Zen went to the clinic and saw some examples of the doctor's work, she agreed to have the $290 operation that afternoon. Shortly after enduring the two-week recovery period, she got what she'd been after: not an offer of marriage, but the offer of a coveted internship with the Shanghai office of the British banking giant HSBC, which later led to a full-time job. "A lot of people think it's not very good politics — a kind of scandal — to have these kinds of small procedures," said He Zen, a petite, confident woman who's now an HSBC manager.

China has published a guide advising women on ways to repel rapists, reflecting serious government concern over an increase in the crime and over the public's attitudes toward the victims. The Communist leadership decreed a war on violent crime in August, 1983, and singled out rape as one of the most serious offenses, raising the maximum penalty from 10 years in prison to death.