Profile: Veteran fighter for “ugly duckling” that
serves rural women

In 1993, Xie Lihua launched a magazine, Rural Women , that has spawned numerous sideline projects, including a Practical Skills Training School and a Rural Women's Culture and Development Centre. These ventures together now employee 43 full-time staff, and the Culture and Development Centre alone had an income of more than CNY 2.5 million (USD 313,000) in 2005, making it a large operation by the standards of China's ‘grassroots' NGOs. Tina Qian and Nick Young trace the long and winding road of personal and institutional connections along which this restless social entrepreneur has travelled.

The China Women's News is housed in a utilitarian, low-rise block from the era of Soviet aid and influence—the kind that is now being gradually obliterated in Bejing's Olympic modernisation drive. A couple of women keep an eye on the main door from a reception cubicle, checking on visitors, but not too officiously. The building's long, bare corridors have the intangible but unmistakable feel of the official work unit, ticking over without exerting itself much.

In her rather plain office on the second floor, Xie Lihua (谢丽华) serves her visitors boiled water from a Thermos flask. She has a pleasant, down-to-earth manner, like someone's kindly aunt, but this outward ordinariness conceals a very determined interior.

Born in Changyi (昌邑), Shandong, in 1951, Xie was one of China's laosanjie (老三届) generation who missed out on university because the campuses were closed by the Cultural Revolution. Instead, when she graduated from high school in 1969, she was assigned to a People's Liberation Army communications division stationed in Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province. A PLA posting saved her from the notorious rustification (上山下乡) programme that sent educated urban youth to join rural communes for a decade or more.

?Fourteen years in the army also gave her experience and confidence operating in a male dominated world, she says, recalling the years with evident pride. She was appointed head of the section where she worked, and in 1976 she married a fellow soldier, a few years younger than herself, who saw active service during China's 1979 war with Vietnam. She gave birth to a daughter in 1981.

When Xie took off her army uniform in 1983 she was assigned to the general office staff of the All China Women's Federation, but found the working style “extremely inefficient . . . there was very little sense of achievement.” The following year she was moved to the Federation's newly established China's Women News where she served for ten years as a reporter, studying part-time for three years at the China Journalism College and then rising to become Director of the newspaper's Marriage and Family Department. In this capacity, she says, “I commissioned debates on many cutting-edge topics with a gender perspective. For example, are quota systems for women's political participation helpful, or are they just another kind of discrimination? How should women's career development be balanced with family life? Should women whose husbands are unfaithful resort to divorce or is saving a marriage in the best interests of women?”

But she still felt unfulfilled, wanting, she says, “to demonstrate her own abilities.” She and a group of friends had set up an informal club to arrange recreational activities for older single people (大龄未婚青年)—an innovative idea in those days—and in 1993 she went to the leader of China Women's News with a proposal to create a new magazine aimed at this market. At that time, government and party cadres were being encouraged to “jump into the sea” (下海) by creating entrepreneurial opportunities (创业) outside of the state system, and it was quite common for senior work unit staff to propose their own ideas.

Xie's boss told her she would have to make a formal application for an official periodical number (刊号), and there was no guarantee she would get it. However, under China's state controlled publishing system, China Women's News had already been assigned a number to start up a magazine aimed at rural women; would Xie like to take this on?

No-one else on the paper was ready to touch the project, believing there was little future in a readership of poor, semi-literate women of ‘low quality.' But Xie was more optimistic—overly so, she now feels—reasoning that “There are three or four hundred million rural women in China, if just a third of them became our readers, it would be a huge market!” Moreover, she believed, the national Women's Federation network, reaching down to township and village level cadres, offered a potential distribution network. So Xie took on the job, with an initial investment from China Women's News of just CNY 60,000 (then around USD 10,000). The parent newspaper also offered her a safety-net: they would cover her salary for the next three years, and she could have her old job back if the new venture failed. Colleagues and friends, she recalls, still thought that she was crazy.

Re-connecting with the rural roots

As soon as she made up her mind, Xie returned to her Shandong birthplace, which she had not visited for nearly 40 years, to learn about rural women. She had left Changyi aged just five, after a family tragedy that provided an early lesson in the trials of life for rural women. Her maternal grandfather had taken a second wife in the hope of producing a male heir, but wife number two, like Xie's own grandmother, bore only girls. In the ensuing family strain Xie's grandmother committed suicide. Xie's mother then left the village, taking her daughter Lihua with her (but leaving behind an older daughter), to join her husband in Beijing, where he had been working as an accountant. Xie was thus among the first generation of rural-urban migrants in Communist China, also experiencing the division and separation of families that migration all too often causes.

Growing up in the city, her life diverged completely from that of her rural relatives. In those days, city life was by no means free of either hardship or gender inequity. Xie remembers the three years of “natural disaster” that followed Mao's Great Leap Forward, when food was desperately short even in Beijing. “My mother gave priority to my younger brother, the only son of my generation in the family, feeding him first; and I too went along with this.” Her later years with China's Women News gave her plenty of insight into gender discrimination. But still, she frankly admits, “For a long time, I didn't think there was any real link between me and China's vast rural areas.” Today she still sees China's rural-urban divide as a huge challenge. “Educated urban women enjoy the right and capacity to choose their life, while the overwhelming majority of rural women barely finish junior high school, with no skill or trade, and can hardly find a job, let alone live the life they want.” Rather than being a national sisterhood, she says, many urban women in China still turn a blind eye to this glaring disparity.

?Rural women, Xie came to feel after her return visit to Shandong, are “like a gold mine that hasn't been exploited.” She saw the magazine as a way to help realise their potential by providing practical information on subjects such as farming, health, hygiene and education, in language that would be accessible to women with limited reading ability.

It was with this hope that, joined by one other Beijing colleague and by a migrant woman from Anhui who had no college education or journalistic experience, she began to work on the new magazine from a 10 square metre apartment loaned by the Women's Federation. To reflect the breadth of information it hoped to capture, the magazine was called in Chinese 农家女百事通—literally, ‘Rural Women's Almanac' although at first it sailed under the English name Rural Women Knowing All , suggested by Xie's father in law who, she says, has proved very supportive.

?But after publishing just two issues the magazine ran out of cash. Distribution through the Women's Federation was initially disappointing, failing to make the 30,000 sales per issue that was the threshold of cost recovery.

“I couldn't accept the failure,” says Xie, but she did not know where to turn. A private investor offered CNY 500,000 capital on condition that the publication target better-off rural households and serve as a vehicle for delivering advertising; but Xie did not want to go down that road. Dozens of commercial magazines now target white-collar urban women, using cover pictures of models to attract readers. By comparison, Xie knows that her magazine is “a rustic, ugly duckling” (土的丑小鸭), but she is unwilling to sacrifice the content and approach to profit-driven market growth.

Making international connections

It was at this point that Wu Qing (吴青), a well-connected teacher at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, introduced Xie to the Ford Foundation.

Xie recalls her shock, on meeting the Foundation's then Reproductive Heath Program Officer in China, Mary-Ann Burris, at also encountering for the first time the Chinese phrase生殖健康 ( shengzhi jiankang ). This has since become widely used to translate the notion of ‘reproductive health' but, to the uninitiated Chinese ear, it blurs an all-important distinction between animal and human reproduction.

Xie nonetheless found Burris sympathetic. “She listened to my story for an hour and a half. I was impressed because she was the first person at that time who was really willing to listen to me.” Moreover, the Foundation agreed to pay for 8,000 magazine subscriptions for women in sites where it was funding other projects, if Xie would add a health column, drawing on the work of other Ford grantees, such as the Yunnan Reproductive Health Research Association. Xie left the meeting, she says, feeling that “We were saved.” Ford has been a major supporter ever since.

?The Foundation also paid for Xie and several other Chinese women to attend a Women and Media workshop in Bangkok. This was the first time she had traveled outside of China. “There I saw so many active and dynamic women's groups, and newsletters and publications they compiled, and I suddenly felt that our Rural Women was one of them.” The 1995 Beijing Women's Conference, a milestone in the history of NGO development in China, further strengthened international linkages and the sense of being part of an international movement. “We were seen as a window to learn about the situation of China's rural women. [International organisations] preferred visiting us rather than the Women's Federation because we could offer lively, personal stories.”

?With international support, the magazine thrived for a while, with circulation peaking at 230,000 in 1997. Distribution via Women's Federation networks, however, was a double-edged sword. Magazine staff estimated that two thirds of the copies went to lower ranking officials and Federation cadres, with only a third reaching the real, target readership. It is the individual, rural readers who have proved most loyal and appreciative, says Xie, responding to her monthly editorial column with moving letters, personal stories and appeals for advice. A selection of these was published in book form in 2003.

But in the late ‘90s, says Xie, with mounting tensions in the countryside, central authorities were looking for ways to reduce the burden on rural people, and one small consequence was a cut in the number of publications that local governments and Party agencies were required to buy. The Women's Federation occupies a relatively weak position in the administrative hierarchy, so its publications were among the first to go. As a result, Rural Women 's circulation dived to around 60,000 at the turn of the century, gradually picking up again to some 70,000 now.

Growth and diversification

Even as circulation difficulties loomed, however, Xie was busy diversifying. The magazine provided an umbrella for rural women's literacy, income generation and microfinance projects, as well as action research efforts on issues such as domestic violence and suicide. This work was supported by international donors ranging from Oxfam Hong Kong, which has been a major contributor to migrant worker training projects, to the International Republican Institute, which recently supported a small training programme on women's political participation.

Why, given that the magazine was struggling to maintain circulation, did Xie not concentrate on developing its quality and reach, rather than branching out into other activities? “Farmers need very practical support,” she replies. “Through projects they can get to know the magazine and became our subscribers.” Engaging with rural women in this way also brings sharper insights into the target readership's needs and perspectives. And, Xie points out, international donors “are more willing to support new projects, such as suicide prevention and political participation, rather than supporting a magazine year after year.”

In the 1990s, Xie became preoccupied by the rising tide of rural-urban migration, and in 1996 she started a club to offer mutual support, recreation, and informal education opportunities to migrant women (打工妹) in Beijing. This was followed in 1998 by a Practical Skills Training School in an outlying district of Beijing, registered as a non profit organisation (民办非企业单位), with Professor Wu Qing serving as the Principal. The school provides vocational training for young women from all over the country and has so far completed 147 residential courses for nearly five thousand women. The migrant club, meanwhile, continues to operate under the auspices of a Rural Women's Culture and Development Centre, established in 2001, that now also serves as an umbrella for other research and training programmes in rural areas. Professor Wu is the Centre's ‘legal person' (法人).

As they develop these independent initiatives, Xie and her colleagues often refer to the All China Women's Federation as their niangjia (娘家—the family a woman grows up in before marrying out into the world.) They readily acknowledge the value of links with the Federation, both in terms of providing legitimacy in official circles, and in opening an administrative channel that reaches down to rural areas.

But Xie is frankly critical of the Federation's bureaucratic working style and top-down approach, arguing that “it should talk about problems, not just successes.” She believes the Federation should change its cadre assessment system so that their performance is measured by how well they serve women's needs rather than by how well they satisfy their leaders; and she also argues that Federation cadres should be elected rather than appointed by higher levels. (Hebei's Qianxi County [迁西县], she points out, has experimented with election of cadres by women's representative assemblies [妇女代表大会]) She believes, moreover, that the Federation should concentrate more of its efforts on serving marginalised women's groups. The great hope, she says, lies with younger women cadres, whose energy and drive may be able to transform the Federation.

?Exemplary of the grassroots leaders who Xie would like to see invigorate the Federation is 37 year old Zheng Bing (郑冰). She attended a Rural Women training workshop in Beijing in 2003 and is now collaborating with Xie Lihua in a new, outreach effort.

?Zheng once taught as a rural minban (民办, that is, not formally qualified) teacher. In 1999, she left to join her husband's small business selling fertilisers and pesticides. For two years she arranged bi-monthly lectures on agricultural technology, and at the end of 2001 she formed a women's activity centre in one village, arranging dancing and debating contests and study groups to read newspapers and official documents.

After attending the Rural Women training workshop Zheng founded the Puzhou Farmers' Association in Yongji, Shanxi Province (永济市蒲州镇农民协会). Since registering with the local Civil Affairs Bureau in June 2004, the Association has grown to 3,800 members from 35 villages, and is using Rural Women as an information source and study aid in “entertainment-study-cooperation” (娱乐-学习-合作) sessions. Local officials and cadres, according to Zheng, previously thought it was “an impossible task” to organize farmers, who are in a state of disunity after de-collectivisation of agriculture. Xie and Zheng are now discussing with international NGO, Plan, the possibility of exporting this marketing and informal education model to Plan's project sites in Shaanxi Province.

Service provision versus advocacy

Xie's work has been widely recognised by international donors and women's organisaions, and has won accolades in China too. The Cultural Development Centre was recently awarded a prize by China Newsweek (新闻周刊) as one of the ten “best NGOs of 2005.” Xie is now planning, she says, to step down as Secretary General of the Centre, retaining a seat on the Board, and devoting more of her time to the magazine.

As she prepares for a more back-seat role, Xie Lihua is far from complacent about her achievements. The kind of opportunities she has been able to create for rural women, she says, can make a big difference to individuals' abilities and self confidence; but this in itself is not much if wider society does not also provide better opportunities. For example, she says, the Practical Skills Training School may help rural women find a job as maid, cook or hairdresser, “but this hardly changes their fate fundamentally!” Labels such as ‘migrant worker' (外来务工人员) or ‘rural labourer' (农民工), she points out, already mark these women out as second-class citizens; and their ‘migrant children' (打工子弟) start out in life equally stigmatised.

Yet, asked if she hopes to respond by scaling up the operations she has initiated, Xie replies that “We don't want to be very big, but to do things well.” In Bangladesh, she argues, large NGOs have tended to replace government as service providers and have developed “bureaucratic tendencies” in the process. A more appropriate role for NGOs, she believes, is “to use their successful experiences to advocate to society, and to influence the government, which has huge resources and should bear the main responsibility for providing social services.”

?There is no shortage of material for advocacy but some issues, Xie implies, remain too hot to handle. For example, she argues, market-oriented reforms have increased pressure on women, especially from poor families, “to exaggerate their sexual characters as selling points, or in some cases to ‘lean on a money-bag' (傍大款). This is absolutely a step in the wrong direction.” But, while questioning the fairness of blaming the victims and sending female commercial sex workers into prison, she adds that “We haven't been brave enough to step into this sensitive field. But I believe that in ten year's time Chinese NGOs working on these issues will come into existence.”

Rural Women is keen to cooperate with international organisations that may help to promote the magazine through their project sites. Interested parties can contact Xie Lihua via China Development Brief.