CHINA: China says it is rooting out "outmoded conventions and customs of inequality", writes Clifford Coonan in Beijing.
She's a ruddy-cheeked farmer in a headscarf, a skinny super- model on the cover of the new Chinese Vogue, a white-collar worker in the New China and a sweatshop mainstay in the booming economy's underbelly.
She's a stay-at-home mum and, if you believe Chairman Mao, she "holds up half the sky".
Chinese women are one- eighth of the world's population and make up more than half of China's rural poor, yet they also fill the glamorous shopping malls of booming Shanghai and Shenzhen.
Balancing all of these images of Chinese women in a traditionally male-dominated, post-imperial society like China is not an easy task, something acknowledged in a government white paper on gender equality released by Beijing yesterday.
"The outmoded conventions and customs of inequality between men and women handed down from China's history and culture have not yet been completed eradicated," said the 38-page white paper, published to mark the forthcoming 10th anniversary of the Fourth UN World Conference on Women in Beijing.
"Women's rights and interests are still being infringed upon to varying degrees in some areas."
However, the report had good news too and could proudly proclaim that the number of rural poor in China fell to 26 million last year from 80 million in 1994. Most of the poor in the countryside are women.
The message of the white paper was clear - that economic development is a priority - and very much in line with the government's view that feeding people comes first, while issues such as human rights and political representation come later.
Modern China's record on improving women's rights is remarkable. When the Communists swept to power, the binding of women's feet to keep them tiny, a gruesome symbol of feminine submission, was still often practised.
In imperial China, women were denied education and had little if any say in whom they married.
There is no question that increased wealth in China is improving the lot of women. One of the great barometers of this is the mortality rate of women in childbirth. The number of women who died in childbirth fell from 61.9 per 100,000 in 1995 to 48.3 per 100,000 last year.
Women are living longer - the average life expectancy for women was 74 years in 2003.
Women owners of small and medium-sized enterprises account for about 20 per cent of the national total number of entrepreneurs, but 60 per cent of them have emerged in the past decade.
The government document heralded the Communist Party's success in setting up poverty- alleviation programmes specifically aimed at women, including microfinance facilities for women and special training programmes.
Economic development and social change, however, have produced their own range of problems.
Suicide among women is extremely high, particularly in the countryside, probably about 25 per cent higher among women than men.
About a quarter of a million Chinese women kill themselves every year, with about 22 suicides for every 100,000 people, compared to a global average of 15 per 100,000. In the countryside, though, the rate is estimated at 30 women per 100,000.
The Chinese government is also trying to criminalise violence against women, but trafficking of women remains a problem. All the more so when you consider the bias towards boy children, particularly pronounced in the countryside, which has led to an average of 117 boys being born to every 100 girls, much higher than the global average.
There are nearly 13 million more boys than girls under the age of nine.
Over the past four years, Chinese police have solved about 25,000 cases of human trafficking.
About one in five members of parliament are women, while 19 per cent of Communist Party members are women.
The next big step awaits, however. There are no women sitting on the Communist party's all-powerful nine-member politburo standing committee.