WOMEN IN THE NEW CHINA

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. Limited to one or two children by China’s population control policies, parents sometimes aborted or abandoned their baby girls.

Young women such as Liu, a bright-eyed 24-year-old whose hair hangs in two long, girlish braids, had few choices but early marriage, followed by grinding farm work in their husband’s village.

And so, 10 years ago, when China’s market reforms freed people to work outside their hometowns, provincial farming villages figured that they had nothing to lose by allowing their dispensable young women to join men migrating to China’s coastal boomtowns.

Now, from those scattered seeds, villages across China are reaping an unexpected windfall. The earnings of “excess” young women are helping pull the countryside out of poverty. The money they send home also gains them new status and respect in their communities and allows them a margin of independence they didn’t have before.

The result: Women once thought worthless are at the forefront of a social and economic revolution.

“I think it’s the single most important element transforming Chinese society,” said Stephen McGurk, a Ford Foundation program officer in Beijing overseeing a study of the phenomenon. “The migrant workers are the channel of China’s rapid urbanization, the source of its increased production and economic vitality. It’s happening on a scope that is unprecedented worldwide, and it means radical, revolutionary changes for women.”

This transformation is as unwitting as it is momentous. Young rural women are not setting out to create a revolution. The chance to work “outside,” as they say in Sichuan, is mostly about survival but also a bit about adventure.

“I know I could be busy every day on the farm,” Liu said. “But every day would be the same. I wanted to see what it was like outside.”

When she turned 20, Liu followed a steady stream of women and relatives away from the corn rows and cotton fields of Lianhuacun, which means “Lotus Flower Village,” on a 1,500-mile trek to Shanghai to labor in a factory making cigarette lighters. The $70 she sent home every month was nearly six times her family’s profits from their farm, and it allowed them to buy enough seeds and pesticide to stay one step ahead of starvation.

Their single luxury sits atop a battered wooden table in her parents’ thatch-roofed farmhouse: a dust-coated black-and-white television.

By the time Liu returned in August, four years after she left, she had not only helped secure her family’s survival, she had earned respect, admiration and even a touch of envy.

“It’s always better to make money than to spend it,” said her mother, 45-year-old Zhang Yixiang, her hands a blur as she plucked puffs of cotton from ripened pods, a harvest that her daughter’s money helped secure.

“She has helped loosen the tightness of family expenses. Now,” said her mother with a smile, “I think girls are better than boys.”

Internal Migration on a Massive Scale

Across China, an estimated 85 million people have left their home province in search of work. About half are women, but their significance is magnified by the fact that such “working sisters” typically earn more and save more than do the men, who tend to do heavy manual labor.

Families, towns and entire provinces have come to rely on migrating women. In Sichuan alone, migrant workers--men and women--sent home $2.34 billion in 1996, equaling the earnings of the entire province.

In China’s drive toward a more competitive, market-driven economy, the countryside has long lagged behind the cities and special economic zones. Unleashing rural labor is the government’s roundabout way to share the wealth. The flow of village women to and from the boom areas allows them to catch up with their urban sisters, who already have benefited from half a century of industrialization.

But as the changes offer new opportunities for rural women, they are taking a toll in the city. The shift away from a government-controlled economy means that unprofitable state-run industries, where most urban workers have labored all their lives, are cutting back or shutting down. And as they do, it is city women far more than men who are losing their jobs.

Although the rural workers are not immune to the downturn, they tend to end up at newer, more profitable private factories and joint ventures in special economic zones. Because most plan to work for only a few years, they settle for lower wages and few health and housing benefits.

For women like Liu, though, the most important benefits are the changes their earning power brings to their homes.

“Now girls can do a lot of things they couldn’t do before: go to school, travel and work, choose who they marry,” Liu said. “It’s all because of money.”

And most significant, as women become economic stalwarts, female infanticide has dropped, and suicide among young women is dwindling.

“A whole generation has learned that women have value and girls have a choice,” said Xu Ping, the director of the Sichuan Province Women’s Research Center, who has been tracking the return of migrant women for three years and who noted a connection between women’s economic contributions and people wanting to keep their baby girls. “When they have a girl, they will feel differently toward her than their parents and grandparents did.”

In Liu’s home county, Jintang, the differences are apparent. A decade ago, the rough asphalt main street that slices through its largest town, Zugao, was a dirt track winding through a poor farming village.

Today the street is lined with small shops selling children’s clothing, housewares and food. Most important, more than half of these shops are owned and run by women, many of whom went to the cities and started their own businesses when they returned.

More than a quarter of the town’s 50,000 people have ventured “outside” for employment, and about 80% of them are women. Last year, Zugao’s migrant workers sent home more than $600,000.

The exodus was not an accident. In 1988, with the county mired in poverty brought on by decades of calamitous national policies, backward technology and stultifying tradition, local leaders decided that their salvation lay in sending women to the coast.

The officials, some of the first in China to see the benefits of exporting labor, visited a handful of factories in Guangdong province near Hong Kong and landed contracts with several labor-hungry industries to provide nimble-fingered, compliant women workers.

“The demand for women laborers fit our situation perfectly,” said Deng Dingjie, 67, a retired official dressed in a gray short-sleeved Mao suit who helped organize the migration. “This is a poor area. The soil needs the heavy labor of male workers. So the men stayed home and the women went away to work. We turned spare labor into active moneymakers.”

Female officials traveled to Guangdong and set up a “Little Jintang” to reassure families that their daughters would be safe. The first faint trickle became a torrent: In 1988, Jintang County promised 50 female workers. This year it is 50,000.

Complex Changes for ‘Working Sisters’

With a wide smile revealing a missing front tooth, Deng told the story of a family named the Wangs.

Mrs. Wang had three daughters, and her next-door neighbor had three sons. Mrs. Wang constantly complained about her bad luck and certain poverty. But her daughters were in the first wave to migrate in 1988, and all three found work in a Guangdong dress factory. With the money they sent back, the Wangs built a new brick house. The neighbors, whose sons stayed home on the farm, still live in a house made of mud and straw.

“Now she thinks girls are more useful than boys,” he said with a laugh.

Just as important, young women themselves have come to recognize their own worth and alternatives. Among the 50,000 or so people who live around Zugao, 24 women killed themselves between 1985 and 1993, but there have been no reported cases since then, Deng said.

“Women used to feel helpless, completely dependent on their families and fate,” Deng said. “Now they have choices.”

Although women have long labored hard at home and on the farm, their productivity was not always recognized or rewarded, and men handled decisions about money. Now, cash in hand, the value of women’s work is tangible.

Most of that money is sent back to families. But the young women also have a little money to call their own, and the power to decide what to do with it.

Yang Xiaohua, 22, left Zugao five years ago to make shoes in a factory in Guangdong. Over the years, she worked her way up to become the captain of a production team, earning $120 a month. She sent money to her family until they were living comfortably; then she started to save for herself.

Five months ago, she returned home and opened a small restaurant on Zugao’s main street: six tables in a signless storefront, the aroma from steaming baskets of dumplings her only advertising.

“My thinking has changed a lot,” Yang said as she deftly folded dumpling skins around minced pork, pinching the edges shut. “At the factory, I learned to become very independent . . . I liked being the boss.”

Now, as her own boss, she makes less than half as much as she did at the shoe factory. She is in no hurry to marry, and in no rush to go back “outside” either. However, most other young workers have deserted Zugao, so business is slow, as well as the night life.

“I don’t want to make working in a factory my career,” Yang said, bundling an armful of dumplings over to the steamer basket. “But I may have to go back to the city.”

Song Meiya, an editor of a Beijing-based magazine called Rural Women Knowing All, describes case after case of women surprised that their sojourn to earn money actually has made life more complicated. “Though attitudes in the village are changing,” Song said, “the ‘working sisters’ realize that they have changed much more.”

In less progressive towns, many “working sisters” find that the money they have sent back is used to build a house for the family or a brother or to pay for his education rather than theirs.

Heartaches for Absentee Mothers

Divorce has shot up as couples are separated, sometimes for years at a time, and women no longer rely on their husbands for money. Children are left behind in the care of grandparents. “Women often tell me, weeping, that when they finally come home, their children don’t really know them anymore,” Xu Ping said.

For those who are unmarried, finding a husband can be harder because local men are wary of the women’s independence. Other women who try to start a business find that the local economy won’t support it, their fathers are against it, or local officials make it harder than they thought.

But the transformation of rural China--gradual in some places, dramatic in others--has turned traditional expectations on their heads.

“Boys are less responsible,” Liu said. As she helped her mother sort cotton, most of the local men were down the road in the village’s only teahouse playing mah-jongg and cards. Her cousin, a young man, and his friend plucked at the pods for a while, then retired to smoke and swat at swarms of biting gnats.

“The boys don’t take care of their parents as well as the girls,” she said. “They spend their money on cigarettes and gambling and just think of themselves.”

Liu walked through the four-room house, slightly embarrassed to show her simple bedroom with its single lightbulb, dirt floors, and the family toothbrushes stuck neatly in a crack in the mud wall.

“There’s always work to do here. But there’s nothing to talk about with the girls who have stayed behind, and I don’t want to marry someone who hasn’t been out to see the world,” she said. “As soon as I hear of another good job, I’ll go out again.”

The cousin and his friend in the courtyard perked up when they heard this. “She has to go back soon,” one joked. “We need a better TV.”