Xie Lihua’s parents wanted a boy. On the day Xie was born in a poor village in China, her mother wept in anger as she had given birth to a second daughter. She slapped her new baby. The year was 1951.
Today, Xie is a fierce activist for women’s rights, is 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 Rural Women magazine, a critical emotional outlet for 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.
Three of four Chinese women still live in the countryside, where rigid social customs breed loneliness and abuse.
Domestic violence rates are high. Each year, 1,50,000 women commit suicide in rural China.
Along with her 14-year-old magazine, Xie founded the Cultural Development Centre for Rural Women, China’s first nongovernmental organisation focused on women living outside the city.
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.
Xie’s critics say she embarrasses China. Before one international trip, Xie was warned about bad-mouthing her homeland. But Xie is unbowed. She first realised that widespread changes were possible in China during the 1960s Cultural Revolution. 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.
She got her first chance to speak out while working for China Women’s News. She profiled 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 because she had been taught that it was her destiny to serve men. Her story challenged what she called “feudal ignorance”.
In 1993, China Women’s News 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. The first months were difficult.
Xie wrote and edited the first two issues 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.
Government officials criticised 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.
Still, her hotline workers discourage women from seeking divorce, counselling them to be realistic about their husbands.
Los Angeles Times
