SPIRIT OF SISTERHOOD

By JAMES WALSH

The food was unpalatable. the toilets stank. Bathrooms flooded, and accommodations were cramped. Delegates in wheelchairs found themselves assigned to upper-floor, walk-up meeting rooms. Confusion prevailed over the times and places of workshops. Shuttle buses appeared and vanished erratically. Meanwhile, the ever-present Chinese security agents, in plainclothes or uniform, acted with all too much efficiency. They tailed visitors, photographed gatherings, searched rooms and bags, confiscated documents and videotapes, stopped peaceful protests, detained some journalists and on the whole created an intimidating atmosphere. To top things off, even the heavens glowered, sending forth rain that churned up mud, mud everywhere.

Perhaps the United Nations could have chosen a worse host than China, but participants at the Fourth World Conference on Women were hard pressed last week to think of one. As the official U.N. event opened in Beijing, more than 30,000 delegates to a parallel, nongovernmental conclave in the remote northern suburb of Huairou were still contending with all manner of inadequacies and harassments. Just why China should have put on such an unseemly display for all the world to see was a consuming puzzle, but at least the International Olympic Committee had cause for relief. Two years ago this month, Olympics mandarins came within a whisker of awarding the 2000 Summer Games to Beijing, only in the end to name Sydney, Australia, instead.

In view of the way Beijing has handled the women's conference, faith in China's ability to play by international rules has suffered mightily. The sometimes unfriendly, not to say surly treatment of guests from more than 180 countries so dominated foreign news dispatches that conference leaders despaired of communicating their serious business: relieving the plight of women worldwide who suffer worse things than searches and bad plumbing. Into this welter of conflicting concerns stepped one visitor who seemed to bring it all together--to issue a ringing call against abuse and discrimination in their universal forms as well as their particular manifestations at the conference.

Hillary Clinton, whose appearance was in doubt until China released the jailed human rights critic and U.S. citizen Harry Wu last month, spoke out against the host country's behavior in terms that the U.N. organizers could not quite manage. Without naming China outright, she delivered a rebuke to the way it denied perhaps as many as 10,000 visas to prospective delegates and quarantined the Huairou forum in slapdash quarters 30 miles north of the capital. As her audience thumped desks and applauded loudly, Clinton declaimed, "It is indefensible that many women in nongovernmental organizations who wished to participate in this conference have not been able to attend or have been prohibited from fully taking part."

Alluding to China's one-child policy, which has resulted in many coerced abortions, she also remarked, "It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will." In general, the star visitor's theme that "women's rights are human rights" played to the grievances that delegates had about their own voices at the conference. "Let me be clear," she said. "Freedom means the right of people to assemble, organize and debate openly. It means respecting the views of those who may disagree with the views of their governments."

Back in the U.S., Wu applauded Clinton's statements, which also effectively pre-empted Republican criticisms of President Clinton for allowing his wife to visit what remains in many respects a police state. By the time she spoke, the Chinese government had begun to figure out how seriously it had embarrassed itself. As the controlled domestic press relegated Hillary Clinton to one line at the bottom of a People's Daily report, the regime lightened up considerably in maintaining "order" at Huairou. Undercover cops--who had videotaped arrivals, showed up in dark glasses at workshops, impounded Chinese-language lesbian manifestos and harried Tibetans in exile--began to back off.

An attempt to halt a silent march by the Women in Black, a sisterhood that protests violence against women, ended in pathetic failure when demonstrators simply took circuitous routes around police. In an unwittingly self-damning boast, Liu Jianyu, a top Chinese security official, declared, "There have been lots of protests these past few days. We are acting like police in any other country."

Then disaster struck again, albeit inadvertently, when Clinton ventured north to honor the Huairou delegates. Her speech was supposed to take place on the paved-over playing fields of Huairou's Middle School No. 1, a venue set aside to accommodate up to 10,000 of the visitors. Rain that morning ruled the site out, though, and a late U.S. request to move the assembly indoors created chaos. The new venue, a converted cinema, was built to hold only 1,500 people, but early arrivals packed it with twice that number. One delegate who got in commented in relief later, "It was quite dicey. A stampede for whatever reason could have led to death."

Clinton, after arriving to some cheers of "Give 'em hell, Hillary!," paid tribute to the activists as the real foot soldiers in the struggle for women's rights. "You will be the key players in determining whether this conference goes beyond rhetoric," she told them. Outside, meanwhile, thousands of drenched women strained against grim-faced security officials who had locked arms. U.S. Secretary of Health Donna Shalala pushed forward in the crush for some time alongside Winston Lord, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, until the two were finally admitted, sopping wet, through a side door. Clinton's press secretary, Lisa Caputo, did not get in for the speech, and neither did Betty Friedan, the godmother of America's modern women's liberation movement. Shoved against a wall at one point, she exclaimed, "What's going on here?" Loudspeakers outside blared that all blame lay with the U.S. for shifting sites, but critics faulted the Chinese. Touring Huairou later, Shalala remarked, "They will never get another international conference again."

For a rapidly modernizing power that wants to join the World Trade Organization, the conference designed to pave the way turned instead into a public relations mudhole. As for what delegates themselves hoped to achieve, the one-fifth of their Platform for Action that dealt with such issues as reproductive freedoms, gay rights and sex education remained under debate when the Huairou conference ended Friday. Bride burning, female infanticide, rape and economic discrimination came in for round condemnation, but how and to what extent a call to action might end those practices remained in doubt.

Nonetheless, for most of the women who had come from far corners of the earth to express their solidarity, even a damp sojourn under a heavy official hand proved exhilarating. If Clinton did not impress a delegate, perhaps Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto did, or Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi, who appeared in a specially recorded videotape that was smuggled out of Rangoon.

"I'm just really distressed that the media are sending back trivial information about the rain and the buses," said Rosalie Bertell, a Canadian epidemiologist. "There is other, substantive stuff going on here." Observed Janice Engberg, an American who teaches at China's Xiamen University: "Some people have had incredibly horrible experiences, while some people are absolutely elated to be here. This is the most exciting 10 days in their lives." A reminder of the old, often misquoted Chinese curse: May you live in exciting times.

--Reported by Jaime A. FlorCruz and Mia Turner/Beijing

With reporting by Jaime A. FlorCruz and Mia Turner/Beijing