In a quiet village in central China, a newborn’s first distinction isn’t name or weight: it’s where the placenta is buried.

Boys’ are placed in the courtyard, a symbol of belonging.
Girls’ go by the toilet.

It’s a small ritual, but it tells you everything about how a community decides who counts.

For generations, rural women in China have lived under rules both written and unwritten. The written ones are posted on the walls of the village office, the lines about taxes, conduct, or distribution. The unwritten ones live in everyday speech:
“Daughters are guests.”
“Fertile soil shouldn’t flow to another’s field.”

These sayings decide who receives land, who inherits, who is heard when decisions are made. They are not laws, but they govern more tightly than law ever could.

When equality meets the countryside

Liang Jun never set out to challenge any of it. In 1985, she left a university teaching job for what she thought would be an easier position at a women’s training school. “I was just looking for rest,” she later said. “Instead, I found work that never ends.”

The timing was cruelly perfect. Reform had arrived in cities, but in the countryside, women were being quietly left behind — losing jobs, land, and the fragile independence they had once held. Liang saw this gap not just as economic, but cultural: equality wasn’t failing because people lacked money; it was failing because they believed inequality was natural.

So she founded the Henan Community Research Center, guided by a simple conviction: gender equality first, rural China always.

Her team didn’t arrive with slogans or funding. They arrived with questions: How do rules become habits? And what happens when the habits harm half the village?

A fight over grain

The answer came in 2007, disguised as an argument over grain money. Zhoushan Village had stopped farming and begun receiving government compensation. When the payouts came, the village rulebook excluded married-out daughters, widows, and divorced women from collecting.

“They said it was tradition,” Liang recalled. “But tradition is just inequality repeated until it feels like order.”

At first, she tried to reason through law, quoting national land policies and constitutional equality. Villagers shrugged. “The country has its rules,” they told her. “We have ours.”

So Liang changed tactics. Instead of challenging belief head-on, she looked for a pain point everyone shared: aging. Sons were leaving for cities; daughters-in-law were overburdened; parents were scared of dying alone. “If sons can’t always care for you,” she asked, “why not daughters too?”

That question, practical, not political, opened a door.

The first village to name equality

In 2009, Zhoushan became the first Chinese village to write “gender equality” into its official village charter. What followed were years of meetings, debates, and rewrites: three full revisions, each one inching closer to balance.

The new rules recognized women’s right to land and collective benefits, outlawed domestic violence, and allowed couples to decide where to live after marriage. Liang called it marriage-residence freedom: the idea that a woman’s rights shouldn’t vanish the day she leaves her parents’ house.

Not everyone agreed. One man shouted during a meeting, “Men are the root, women are not!”
Years later, the same man stood before the village and said, smiling, “In my contest with Liang laoshi, she won, and so did the village.”

How change really happens

Progress came not through revolution, but through patience. Liang’s team practiced what she called “democratic persistence”: listening, revising, returning, never shaming. When critics argued the village couldn’t afford to share resources with women, Liang quietly pointed to male villagers who had government jobs and still drew village payouts. Instead of naming and blaming, the new charter invited voluntary withdrawal, and the Party secretary himself was first to give up his son’s benefits.

By the third revision, fights over distribution had all but disappeared. “The meetings used to sound like a market,” one villager said. “Now, you can hear the pen when someone signs.”

The changes rippled outward. Women began attending councils. New self-run groups emerged, an elderly association, a women’s art collective, even a “Bag-Making Grannies” co-op that sold crafts to nearby towns. What had started as a gender clause became a culture shift: participation replaced silence.

Beyond one village

Zhoushan’s story isn’t a miracle. Every few years, new officials test the boundaries; some clauses are questioned again. But its impact endures because it reframed what “development” means. Rural progress isn’t just about roads and roofs,  it’s about recognition.

When the outside world looks at rural China, it often sees poverty before inequality. But poverty fades when the harvest is good; inequality survives every season. What Liang and her team did was name the invisible: the quiet loss of belonging that begins the moment a girl is born.

True change, she says, comes not from louder voices, but from more listeners.

“The hardest part isn’t writing new rules,” Liang told us. “It’s convincing people that fairness is possible.”

And yet, somewhere in Henan, a new mother buries her daughter’s placenta not by the toilet, but beside her son’s: equal ground, at last.