BBC CHINA part 2 of 4

Air Date: 20/06/06 Release Date: 21/06/06 Video: 640 x 368 @ 25fps Audio: VBR MP3 Avg 128kb/s Source: PDTV Format: XviD Description (PART 2): Women of the Country Spend an hour with this documentary and your life will seem a whole lot better afterwards. It looks at the predicament of China's women via a series of touching portraits: a country wedding, a couple returning to their village for New Year and factory workers putting on a variety show. In the rural scenes, the raw muddy poverty is so vivid, you can almost touch it. In one wedding-day sequence, a row breaks out between in-laws as the bride's dowry (furniture, hi-fi, trinkets) is carried from the groom's village to hers. There's a farcical slanging match over how many packs of cigarettes the family members lugging the stuff should receive. It's extraordinary to witness, as are the accounts of terrible hardship delivered by peasant women, always with broad, rueful smiles. China has the highest women's suicide rate of any country in the world, and seeing what they have to put up with, it's no great surprise.