By Benjamin Kang Lim

HUAIROU, China, August 29 (Reuter) - The foreign women are suffering from jetlag and culture shock.

Some of the local Chinese people are grumbling that the tight security the new arrivals have attracted makes it seem like their once sleepy town is under martial law.

With just one day to go before the world's biggest women's conference ever staged gets underway, the residents of Huairou and their 26,000 female guests were sizing each other up Tuesday a little warily.

"It's martial law," complained a grocery store owner called Zhang surveying the police checkpoints along the roads and the signs everywhere that read "Forbidden Zone."

"I'm disappointed," said Dorothy Nyong'o, a delegate from the Africa Regional Office of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

Nyong'o was upset because her pressure group, one of hundreds that have come to lobby the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women from a base in suburban Huairou, has too little space.

Zhang was agitated because of the hordes of delegates who have overrun the town. But what did they all expect?

"This is a huge gathering. To expect everything to go smoothly is to expect too much," reasoned Fanaura Kingstone, a delegate from the Cook Islands.

"I've met a lot of very cross and grumbling people," she said. "I think they need a little smack on the bum."

Huairou is almost an hour's drive from the center of Beijing, where the U.N. conference starts Sept. 4. The women were shunted out there after a last-minute panic by Beijing officials with visions of radical feminists running riot through their orderly capital.

Now the delegates from non-government advocacy groups are standing on street corners peering at maps and wondering where on earth they have ended up.

Many have to make do with a hard bed in $5-a-night dormitory-style accommodation. Some have taken one look at their spartan quarters and moved on. But Lesley Roden from the town of Budleigh Salterton in Britain is stoical.

"If you want The Ritz you pay Ritz prices, so you can't complain," she said. Controversy over the siting of the Non-Governmental Organization Forum on Women '95, and Beijing's refusal to allow in certain delegates, including some alleged critics from Taiwan and Tibet, has not deterred commercial sponsors.

On billboards all over Huairou, Apple Computer advertises itself proudly as the technical sponsor of the event. Hong Kong-based clothing retailer Esprit is giving away bags that say "Look At The World Through Women's Eyes."

Even Ronald McDonald has popped up to offer hamburger and french fry lunches. But the Chinese sponsors are taking no chances.

Access to areas where the pressure groups are setting up stalls is through security gates equipped with baggage X-ray machines and staffed by female body-friskers issued with white gloves.

A local taxi driver said he and his colleagues had instructions not to pick up delegates except at officially approved stands "in case they're carrying infectious diseases, like cholera."

That's not the kind of message coming across in banners hung all over Huairou carrying the official slogan of the conference "Equality Development and Peace."