LIANHUACUN, 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 elderly parents. 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 husbands' village.

So, 10 years ago, when China's market reforms freed people to work outside of their hometowns, provincial farming villages figured they had nothing to lose by allowing their dispensable young women to join men migrating to China's coastal boom towns.

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.

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 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 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 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 not only had helped secure her family's survival, she also had earned respect, admiration and a touch of envy.

"It's always better to make money than to spend it," said her mother, Zhang Yixiang, 45, 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," Zhang said with a smile, "I think girls are better than boys."

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, 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 of sharing the wealth. The flow of village women to and from the boom areas allows them to catch up with their urban sisters, who have benefited from a half-century of industrialization.

Changes, opportunities

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

While 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.

However, for women such as Liu, the most important benefits are the changes that their earning power brings back home.

"Now girls can do a lot of things they couldn't do before," Liu said. "Go to school, travel and work, choose [whom] they marry. It's all because of money."

Most significantly, as women become economic stalwarts, female infanticide has dropped, and suicide among young women is declining.

"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 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 Jintang County, 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 straddled by small shops selling children's clothing, housewares and food. More than half are owned and run by women, many of whom went to the cities and started businesses when they returned.

More than a quarter of this town's 50,000 people have ventured "outside" for employment, and about 80 percent 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 away to the coast.

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

"The demand for women laborers fit our situation perfectly," said Deng Dingjie, 67, a retired official 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."

From trickle to torrent

The first faint trickle became a torrent: In 1988, Jintang County promised 50 women workers. This year, it is 50,000.

Yang Xiaohua, 22, left Zugao five years ago to make shoes in a factory in Guangdong. 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, and then 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 storefront with no sign, the aroma from steaming baskets of dumplings her only advertising.

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

"I don't want to make working in a factory my career," Yang said, carrying an armful of dumplings to the steamer basket. "But I may have to go back to the city."

Maggie Farley wrote this article for the Los Angeles Times.

Pub Date: 11/29/98