China’s Women Pay Cost of Change : Rights: Economic reforms are allowing some females to prosper. But many others feel gains they made 20 years ago slipping away.

Shen Huiqin, 41, sits idly in a storefront clothing stall, chatting with a friend about the good old days when they were young women at the forefront of China’s Cultural Revolution two decades ago.

“I was a Red Guard then, and we had power. I led political demonstrations, and my words meant as much as a man’s, sometimes more,” she says. Later, she found a steady job in a state textile factory where she received free health care and child care and a solid salary until she was abruptly laid off three years ago--because she is a woman.

“We worked hard for the modernization of the country,” she says. “But now we’re being deserted.”

Things have changed since the founder of Chinese communism, Mao Tse-tung, declared, “Women hold up half the sky” and “What a man can do, a woman can also do.” Now, as communism gives way to capitalism, in many ways women are bearing more than half the burden of change.

China’s economic reforms allow many women a chance to capitalize on their strengths: The number of female entrepreneurs and small-business owners is growing. But as China moves toward a market economy, increasing the distance between rich and the poor, some fear that reforms will magnify existing gender gaps in the same way, hurting rather than helping the majority of women.

Studies by scholars such as USC professor Stanley Rosen conclude that most of the gains achieved by Chinese women were made during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. Now, in economic equality, political participation and social status, women are going backward rather than forward--a reversal likely to be discussed among the thousands of delegates to the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women, which begins here Monday, and the Non-Governmental Organizations Forum on Women, which started Wednesday in Huairou, about 35 miles north of Beijing.

For the women who came of age during the Cultural Revolution, political and economic participation reached nearly 100%. “It was a time when people tried to be gender neutral--probably the closest any country has come to that kind of equality,” says Peng Xizhe, a sociologist at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Not that being Red was purely rosy.

Ao Qiru, a 40-year-old carpet cleaner in Beijing, spent her early 20s in the countryside cleaning pigsties and clearing fields. It was backbreaking work, but she feels her status has regressed since then. “I felt then I was stronger than men. We were judged by our work and our ideology, and I was the one selected to go to political conferences in the cities.”

But, like many, she felt that equality had its price. “We didn’t have beautiful clothes. We just wore Mao suits in three colors--black, gray and army green.”

Worse, she says, was the suppression of sexuality. “Back then, young people felt ashamed to fall in love with each other, to be alone together and . . .” Her round face turns crimson, and she covers her mouth with a manicured hand.

Now, women have more freedom to choose a job, select a husband and find ways to express their individuality. In the last few years, taboos have fallen and sex has become a popular topic. More and more women are working. But left to the free market, experts say, women are being pushed into jobs with the fewest skills and the lowest pay. They are the last to be hired and the first to be fired.

Recent government studies of state-owned enterprises forced to streamline when faced with free-market competition show that 70% of laid-off workers are women. And even though women’s retirement age--50--is already five years earlier than men’s, some women are being forced to quit work at the ripe old age of 45.

“Women are costly,” says the owner of a Beijing electronics factory, who asked to be identified only by his last name, Li. “You have to pay them for maternity leave, give them time off to feed their babies during the workday. And they’re not as strong.

“I try to avoid hiring women at all, and if I do, I look for single ones,” he says, conceding that he ignores government mandates for equal opportunity. “But even then you have to worry about helping them find a husband.”

Many industries in China’s special economic zones are booming, however, because they’ve found that young female migrant workers will labor longer for less. Managers find that women--who make up nearly half of the so-called floating population streaming to China’s coastal and southern regions--are usually single, docile and easily replaceable.

At a Taiwanese joint-venture shoe factory in Guangdong, women in their early 20s work 16-hour shifts making plastic sandals for export. Their pay--800 yuan, or $98.40, a month--is on the low side for a special economic zone but still nearly twice as much as they would make farming.

“I’m so tired I can barely wake up each morning,” says Tang Weiling, brushing long bangs from her puffy eyes. She concedes she is worked longer than labor laws allow, lives in a firetrap and endures sexual harassment, but she wants to make all the money she can before returning to her village in Hunan.

“I’ll go home in two or three years,” she says. “Then I want to start a small business.”

“It’s difficult work, and shocking how little regard there is for the women’s health,” says Zheng Guizhen, an associate professor at Shanghai’s Women’s Studies Center. “But many women find freedom and self-value in the city. The money that they send and bring home raises their status and may cause people to treat girl babies more equally than in the past. Now, people are beginning to realize women can support families too.”

China’s economic reforms may increase women’s value in more ways than one. Today’s newfound affluence has revived the notion of women as property, leading to an upsurge in prostitution, concubinage and the abduction of women for forced marriages.

While their mothers wore Mao suits and no makeup, members of China’s new generation of women are finding that their youth and beauty are their most valuable assets. China’s developing service industries provide more job opportunities, although feminists fear that women will be trapped in front-counter or hostess-type positions.

And then there are those like Li Yoe, an elegant 25-year-old who opened a swish art gallery in Guangzhou and portrays herself as a new breed of businesswoman.

“I can’t tell you where I got the money--that’s a business secret,” she says of the initial investment of 1 million yuan ($123,609).

“I’ll tell you this, though. I didn’t borrow it. I didn’t steal it,” she says, smiling coyly. “I earned every bit.”

But not everyone can adapt so well to the changes transforming the country. Rural women, in particular, must still struggle with Confucian traditions that have endured both the Communist Revolution and the current economic one. An old woman squats on the pavement near one of Shanghai’s busiest crossroads, holding a tin cup with her head bowed. An illiterate farmer from Henan, Sun Guangyun, 63, is a symbol of the intersection of China’s tradition and modernization--and of the worst of both worlds for women.

When her husband died, their farm and savings went straight to her son, even though there are laws protecting women’s inheritance rights. She relied on him to care for her, the way sons have been doing for centuries in China. But he and his wife, desperate to have a son to take care of them in turn, had four daughters before they conceived a boy.

Under China’s one-child policy, they paid heavy penalties for their “surplus” children and could no longer afford to care for the mother. “Daughters are useless. Old women are useless,” Sun whispers.

The feeling that women don’t measure up can haunt even women who are the portrait of success. Feng Wei, 43, the head of her own advertising company in southern China and a millionaire, says that until recently she wished that in her next life she would return as a man. “Now I don’t,” she says with a knowing smile. “I have realized that there are advantages to being a woman.”

She says her contacts in advertising, “a very social industry,” are eager to work with women, and she better understands how to market to China’s new consumers--mostly housewives holding the family purse strings.

Another advantage is freedom, she says, though of a double-edged sort: “If I’m successful, everybody is surprised. If I fail, people will say, ‘She’s just a woman.’ That’s a license to experiment, which can be harder for men.”

Her sister, who is also her business partner, found that success brought a bittersweet freedom. “She divorced because her husband couldn’t stand her working so hard,” Feng says.

The company’s top executives are all women whom she and her sister met during their years spent banished to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. “The reason I’m a millionaire now is because I learned then how to work hard and how to be patient,” Feng says at the company headquarters in Guangzhou.

“And I know I can rely on these women in business because we have all suffered together and struggled together. Now, given the opportunity to work for ourselves, we are succeeding together.”