Xie Lihua talks about a micro-credit program with women in a rural village. (By Steven Mufson – The Washington Post)

During Xie's visit to this rural community about a five-hour drive east of Beijing, it was not marriage but money that was on the minds of the local women. Scores of them jammed into the village family planning office for their monthly micro-credit meeting, a session that was part repayment obligation, part social event and part motivational meeting.

Women stood to deliver testimonials about what they had done with the small loans Xie had arranged and how the loans had changed their lives. One woman bought material and started to make and sell clothes. Another bought a small refrigerator and began to sell ice cream.

Cao Huiyuan, 36, was part of a group of five people that had borrowed $120 in June last year. She used her share to buy three hogs, which she raised and sold later for $290 each. By late April, her group had met all the monthly loan payments, covering interest and repaying all but $20 of the initial loan. The extra income was welcome for Cao, mother of two and wife of a coal miner.

"My husband always said he was the breadwinner in the house, but now I made more money than he did. We're on an equal footing," said Cao.

Because the government, state banks and Women's Federation did not have any interest in starting a micro-credit scheme, Xie started the lending program with the help of Bing Xin, one of China's most famous writers. Xie chipped in $1,000 in prize money she had received from an international organization for her earlier work with rural women. The $12,000 pool is split evenly among five rural counties and parceled out in amounts of $120 each. Interest rates are set at the prevailing commercial rate. Because the central bank won't give a banking license to this sort of scheme, it's run as an informal venture of the magazine.

"The loans provided through this are very small, but it's very serious stuff," Xie says. "My role is to sell cadres that this is the way to help these poor women. I'm hopeful that in the not-too-distant future some bankers would recognize the need and realize that these loans can be repaid."

It's the sort of risk Xie has taken before. When she started Rural Women Knowing All, the Women's Daily loaned her $7,250. It gave her just three years to prove the magazine commercially viable or close it down. In three years, Xie paid back the loan, covered her taxes, paid the salaries of six people from the newspaper and made some extra money besides.

"I took a risk setting up the magazine," Xie says. And it paid off. Circulation stands at 230,000 and is rising steadily. Xie promotes it at every village she visits.

Readers often turn to the publication as their only friend. One reader wrote in earlier this year that her abusive father was having an extramarital affair and had an illegitimate 2-year-old son. "I know I shouldn't air my family's dirty laundry in public, but my mother struggles hard day and night and I am afraid that if she finds out she will not be able to withstand this blow," she wrote. She was torn between her desire to leave home and her concern for her mother.

The truth cannot be hidden indefinitely, the magazine advised. Your mother "has the right to stand up to your father herself." The magazine added sympathetically, "Be brave. In life there are always these difficult and unavoidable issues, but in the end there is always a solution." Signed: "your friend."

The upheaval and disillusionment of the Cultural Revolution made many people like Xie leery of new political movements and their leaders. Although she and her husband knew many people who participated in the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement in 1989, she said, "if they ran the country it wouldn't be any different" – least of all in the countryside "where heaven is high and the emperor far away," as the Chinese saying goes.

Lately Xie has turned to the plight of urban unemployed women, especially those around the age of 40. Perhaps no group is more crushed by the changes in contemporary China. "This group is the most difficult," Xie says.

They are the first targeted for layoffs at money-losing state-owned enterprises. Too young to get pensions, they get minimal subsistence payments. Housing reforms are pushing up their previously nominal rents and fees. Aging parents have increasing medical costs at a time when insurance companies are trimming coverage. School-age children face rising tuition costs.

A group of about 20 women came to Xie's offices – where a sign reads "welcome home" – one day in early May to unload their troubles. Xie's reply was one part compassion, one part anger at the system and one part a motivational self-help message.

She criticized the banking system, which lends to those who need it least. "Money is easy to give to rich people," she said. "Money is very difficult to give to poor people." And she took a swipe at the government for not fulfilling its responsibility. "If the government did help, it would be politicized. And don't even talk about corruption. The money wouldn't be put to good use," Xie said.

But she did not let the women off the hook. "Depending on yourself is the best," she said. "The important thing is to take action."

She held herself and her magazine up as an example. She said, "I'm almost 50 and I still want to do more."