Beijing ? Xie Lihua’s parents wanted a boy. But on the day Xie was born in a poor village in rural Shandong province, her mother learned she had given birth to a second daughter. She wept and slapped her new baby.

“Another girl!” she cried.

The year was 1951. Girls were considered a worthless commodity in an agrarian society that relied upon young men to flourish.

Decades later, women’s plight in rural China is in many ways worse. The world’s most populous nation enforces a one-child policy to control its runaway population growth. With more limited opportunities for children, boys are more idolized than ever.

But the little girl once groomed as a second-class citizen is tired of such insults.

Today, Xie is a fierce activist for women’s rights, working to inspire a quiet revolution. She wants to show a dominant male culture that women deserve respect and are equals. As important, she is trying to convince the women themselves.

A magazine for women

Xie is the founder of the groundbreaking Rural Women magazine, a critical emotional outlet for generations of peasant women.

Although urban women have made strides toward equality, thanks to better education and opportunities within a growing white-collar work force, rural women are often stuck in a harsh lifestyle unchanged from an earlier era.

“I tell them their life is the equal of any man. They were not born unequal – society made them this way,” Xie said.

Three of four Chinese women – more than 450 million – still live in the countryside, where rigid social customs breed loneliness and abuse. Domestic violence rates are high. Each year, 150,000 women commit suicide in rural China – the only place on Earth where more women kill themselves than men, according to the World Health Organization.

Xie’s readers are country women taught to refer to male spouses not as husbands but “masters.” The focus on bearing sons is so strong that women bear names such as Zhaodi (“looking for a little brother”) and Aidi (“loving a little brother”).

Aiding the underclass

Along with her 14-year-old magazine, Xie founded the Cultural Development Center for Rural Women, China’s first nongovernmental organization for women living outside the city. She has sponsored programs in literacy training and suicide prevention, as well as some aimed at increasing women’s political participation. She dispenses micro-loans for enterprising rural women.

These days, she focuses on the plight of China’s largest underclass – the millions of women who leave the countryside as migrant workers – and especially on abduction and trafficking schemes that enslave women as prostitutes.

She runs a hot line 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 who are not covered under labor laws.

Her dream has empowered multitudes, including rural women who have sought their fortunes in the city.

“Xie Lihua’s magazine was the first that gave rural women any real voice,” said Joan Kaufman, a former Ford Foundation program director in China who is now at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

‘Troublemaker’

Xie’s critics say she embarrasses China. Before one international trip, Xie was warned about bad-mouthing her homeland.

But Xie is unbowed. At 56, she wears traditional Chinese blouses with Western blue jeans. She has risked much with her fight, including the harmony in her own marriage.

“If I am a troublemaker, then so was Deng Xiaoping and his open-door policy,” she said. “If there is no change, even though it is painful, then there is no progress.”

In 1993, the managers of a magazine, 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. She charged 40 cents, about the price of a bowl of noodles, but made it free to the poorest women. Her peers ridiculed her, referring to her project as a “rustic ugly duckling” for its name and content.

Overcoming obstacles

The first months were difficult. Xie wrote and edited the first two issues by 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.

The magazine highlighted the harsh realities of rural China, where the suicide rates are triple that of the city. About 80 percent of the deaths are the result of conflicts between husbands and wives, she says.

Government officials criticized 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.

Today, the publication offers tips on having safe and fulfilling sex, and how to find jobs in the city. Columns exhort women to report spousal abuse.

There are setbacks, but the moments of self-doubt are few. Xie is too busy.

“Rural women in China are everyone’s somebody,” she said. “They’re somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother, somebody’s daughter-in-law. I encourage them to follow one simple rule: ‘You are yours. You are not anybody else’s.'”