By Rone Tempest and Maggie Farley

Los Angeles Times

Sept. 1, 1995

HUAIROU, China -- Undeterred by an isolated setting, strict government restrictions and rain, more than 20,000 women attending an international women's conference here Thursday managed more free expression in their first full day of meetings than has been seen in China since the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese dissident recently released after nearly six years of house arrest, set the tone in her videotaped keynote address to the Nongovernmental Organizations Forum on Women, the largest meeting of women ever.

She urged governments to spend ``less on the war toys of grown men and much more on the urgent needs of humanity as a whole.''

The forum was developing into everything China had feared.

Early this morning, 10 Tibetan women staged a silent protest against Chinese rule in their homeland. Standing in front of a main pavilion in driving rain, they tied scarves around their mouths.

Silenced voices on display

``We felt that it would be effective to tape our mouths to reflect an environment where we don't feel free to speak,'' said one, Tenki Davis of San Francisco, a member of the International Committee of Lawyers for Tibet.

More than 100 foreign women immediately surrounded the protesters and began singing songs from the U.S. civil rights movement, including ``We Shall Overcome.''

The gathering in Huairou has drawn thousands of private activists from around the world who came to China hoping to influence decisions made at the United Nations' Fourth World Conference on Women, which starts Monday in Beijing.

On Thursday, a small group of Tibetan exiles defied a government ban and showed a film depicting imprisonment of Tibetan nuns and forced sterilization of Tibetan women. When two plainclothes Chinese security agents attempted to confiscate the film ``for safekeeping,'' they were surrounded by 20 women and forced to return it.

Outside a cinema meeting hall Thursday morning, 15 foreign representatives of Amnesty International held up photographs of 12 women, including two Chinese, whom they claimed were victims of human rights abuses.

Protesters ignored police

The demonstrators, who later showed a film that included an interview with a jailed Tibetan nun and an exiled Tiananmen Square protester, ignored the megaphone plea by a Chinese policewoman to move to a designated protest ground.

Meanwhile, in a school ground meeting site, a Japanese women's group unfurled a banner and distributed petitions protesting nuclear testing by France and by China, which detonated a nuclear explosion in its western region last month.

``Somebody warned us that we could be arrested for this,'' said a smiling Toshiko Ishimaru, 41, with the Women's Democratic Club of Japan, which staged the demonstration.

Such defiant outbreaks of free speech and criticism of Chinese policy were just what officials feared when they decided to move the Aug. 30-Sept. 8 non-governmental forum to this sleepy suburb about 35 miles north of Beijing on the edge of the Great Wall of China.

But by keeping the meetings well away from the main Chinese public, the government has managed, so far, to limit the potential political spillover. For the most part, the Chinese news media has played down the women's meeting.

Buried, censored coverage

The official People's Daily newspaper noted the opening of this meeting in an article on its second page. Television, meanwhile, concentrated on the singing and dancing that accompanied the opening ceremonies.

The isolated setting and afternoon showers failed to dampen the enthusiasm of forum delegates, whose number is expected to swell to 30,000 next week. Women danced, sang, argued, embraced and generally celebrated their gender. The more contentious intramural issues, centered on abortion and reproductive rights, were reserved for later in the conference.

Instead, delegates renewed old friendships, networked for new contacts and met in hundreds of workshops on topics ranging from teen-age eating disorders to the implications for women of the O.J. Simpson double murder trial.

Mercury News wire services contributed to this report.