Women Need Not Apply.(factory closings and layoffs in China's northeastern cities)

Xiao Wang's eyes well up with tears as she tells her story in a Beijing coffee shop. In 1999 the young beautician left her home in northeast China for the bright lights of the Chinese capital. Three years and a string of low-paying jobs later, the 23-year-old Changchun native is unemployed and broke. Her meager savings were drained by a kidney ailment, daily expenses and an impetuous decision to invest 800 yuan in acting classes that led nowhere. Alone and lost, Wang does not know what she will do next. But one thing is certain: as bad as things get for her in the big city, she has no plans to return to the northeast. Things there would only be worse. "I have no plans to return to my old home," she says. "If I did, there would be nothing for me to do there."

The gritty cities of China's northeastern rust belt, once the proud pistons of old communist China, are in crisis. Major state-owned enterprises here--a mix of steel mills, oil wells and manufacturing companies--have been forced to stand or fall under their own weight. And the brunt of this economic crunch--with its factory closings and massive layoffs--has fallen most squarely on the shoulders of women. Unskilled, untrained and often in the bottom-rung jobs, the rust-belt women have been hit hardest by the sudden shift to a market economy. "Everyone in Harbin has several female relatives who are out of work," complains Liu Chinshu, a resident of Heilongjiang's provincial capital who has been laid off twice in recent years. "At least one third of the women I know are unemployed." Chen Lanyan, northeast Asia adviser for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), says that spouses often work for the same company, and that the management believes it's easier to lay off the wife, who can then tend to the family while the husband remains the breadwinner. There is also a more practical explanation, says an NGO field researcher: "Factories think a lot of men laid off could pose a threat to society." So it's little wonder that every day more young women like Xiao Wang strike out on their own in hopes of finding a new life in some other corner of China.

But not everyone leaves. The rising tide of female unemployment is on display in downtown Harbin on almost any afternoon. In a park along the Songjiang River, dozens of unemployed women crowd under Nestle and Coke sun umbrellas peddling soft drinks and snacks. Scores of others hold up cheap trinkets or handicrafts, beckoning tourists to take a look. They are all over 40, which has become the de facto--albeit involuntary-- "retirement" age for women in northeast China. "I never even thought of looking for a job," says Xia, who lost her factory job one year ago and now sells light sticks and rings in the park. "If you're over 40 and have no skills and no diploma, no one wants to hire you." Many women will accept almost any ...