A TELEVISION SERIES THAT AIRED in Beijing last year offered a three-handkerchief soap opera about female perseverance--with a sting in the tale. A Woman Inferior Only to God followed the travails of a 1990s-style teacher so dedicated that she neglects her duties at home--even forgetting the birthday of her husband, who asks for a divorce. Says Zhang Lixi, a prominent women's advocate: "As we were watching the show, my husband nudged me and said, 'See? That's what happens when you go out making revolution every day.' The playwright may have intended to extol the virtues of a devoted teacher, but the message people get is, Don't ever be like her."

The message, in any case, is one that tens of millions of Chinese women nowadays can hardly miss. In a country where female liberation posted one of the speediest, most far-reaching success stories of our time, a recrudescence of age-old prejudices is eating away the gains like acid rain at a monument's base. Women who grew up with remarkably fair job and schooling opportunities are under pressure to stay at home. In state-run factories and firms they are the last hired, first fired. On farms they are shouldering a huge share of back-breaking labor. Female infanticide re mains a widespread scourge, and the status of China's distaff side in general has ebbed to a point where wife beating is on the rise and many daughters are falling prey to a modern slave trade. As the U.N.'s Fourth World Conference on Women opens in Beijing, the host country has a lot less to brag about than it used to.

Even if women are worse off, China remains far from any regression to the bad old days of foot binding, the grotesque deformation of females from childhood on to produce the dainty "golden lily" feet prized by men. A century ago, the custom so horrified overseas Victorian moralists, in their rib-crushing corsets, that it became an international badge of shame for China. It was eradicated after the 1949 Communist Revolution , and the new order strove to make good by word and deed Mao Zedong's dictum "Women hold up half the sky." Despite recent relapses, what the People's Republic has achieved for sexual equality stands head and shoulders above much--even most--of the world. If jobs for women in the command economy are scarcer, the energetic private market unleashed by Deng Xiaoping's reforms continues to open up careers and social vistas for talented, determined women.

That said, though, more and more female Chinese today are learning how quickly their pillar of the sky can crumble. As their counterparts in the formerly communist Eastern Europe have also discovered, "ladies first" applies with special force when derelict, money-losing industries slash their work forces. In the government-owned sector, which still employs more than half of all working Chinese, the decline of a womb-to-tomb welfare state has spelled extensive layoffs that have cost women 70% of lost jobs. Female university graduates also complain that male classmates get all the plum positions.

SURVEYING THIS BACKSLIDE OF egal itarianism, Zhang notes all the subtle ways in which the culture is stressing the rewards of tending kitchens and children. Zhang, an associate professor at China Women's College in Beijing, cites Women of China magazine, which in 1992 concluded that wives were better off stay ing at home in view of their dismal job prospects. The point was hammered more forcefully last year in the government-run Guangming Daily, which detailed the rigors of trying to balance a career's demands with the roles of wife and mother. Observes Zhang: "It reminds me of the postwar era in Europe, when women who had served as police or fire fighters had to go back home to give way to the returning men."

Private enterprise is still an open avenue to women with enough pluck and ability to take the plunge. Many have become outstanding business owners and managers, especially in the anything-goes economy of China's prospering southeast. The bureaucracy also remains an accessible ladder, and many female technocrats have risen to quite senior posts. Behind every showcase success, however, are countless withered opportunities. Even though many industries allow new mothers to take two-year maternity leaves, Zhang notes, "the special treatment in fact is a trap. Two years later, these women no longer qualify to return to their jobs."

In a civilization that for thousands of years vindicated the ancient precept "How sad it is to be a woman: nothing on earth is held so cheap," farm wives are increasingly performing most of the donkey work in their fields as their husbands hold better-paying jobs in the cities. Bank loans that might finance a village industry are no longer within reach, a result of sharper competition for resources and a resurgence of sex bias. According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development, female peasants in China work on average 11 1/2 hours a day, compared with 10 for males, and remain mired in illiteracy and poverty. Millions of women who migrate to cities every year are likely to end up toiling in sweatshops.

Or much worse. One of the grimmest by-products of economic liberalization has been a booming new slave trade: the abduction and sale of teenage girls. Since the late 1980s, when market reforms really began to take off, kidnapping rings have seized hundreds of thousands of young females and peddled them as wives or prostitutes. The going price today: about $500 each. Beijing has tried only feebly to curb the racket. Human Rights in China, a private monitoring organization based in New York City, criticizes the government for "failure to prosecute buyers of women, corruption and indifference among local officials, and lack of services to victims."

What makes this trade doubly macabre is its reason for existence: the extensive practice of killing girls in infancy or aborting them as fetuses, thanks to a perdurably strong Chinese preference for sons. Al though female infanticide has long been one of China's sadder folkways, especially among peasants leading a hand-to-mouth existence, it acquired fresh momentum after the People's Republic instituted its one-child policy in the late 1970s.

In theory, the policy aimed to curb the country's galloping population growth by simply discouraging couples from having more than one baby. In practice, it has proved more coercive. Whereas village commissars have not harangued mothers-to-be into getting abortions, couples who want their sole child to be a son have dumped baby girls in garbage cans, drowned them in rivers or abandoned them at hospitals and foundling homes. Simultaneously, the advent of ultrasound tests, which can determine whether a fetus is male or female, made sex-specific abortions commonplace. Human Rights in China estimates that the lives of half a million female infants and fetuses are cut short yearly.

As a result, China today has a warped demographic profile: 118.5 males for every 100 females, as opposed to nature's tendency to produce a slight majority of daughters. In what would ordinarily be a bride's market, then, victimization of females has surfaced at the other end of puberty to turn many of the survivors into chattel--targets only too plentiful in a population 1.2 billion strong. Says Chen Yiyun, founder of the Jinglun Family Center in Beijing and a well-known women's counselor: "Gender equality has had only a 40-year run. It's too short compared to the 3,000 years of Chinese history. It's too easy to go back to feudal times."

Perhaps the most telling sign that the bloom is off the lotus of women's rights is the volume of plaintive, often desperate calls that floods the Women's Hotline. Since its establishment in 1992, the service has drawn 20,000 pleas for advice and help. One day recently an anonymous caller sobbed hysterically that her husband had repeatedly beaten her, at one time breaking her collarbone. What could she do if he tried to hit her again? "We encouraged her to calm down and seek help to protect herself," explains Huang Heng yu, a psychologist and hotline supervisor. But Huang admits with a sigh, "Some questions are too difficult to answer."

For a culture deep-dyed in reticence to air family troubles in public, such outpourings of grievances by wives--many of them in signed letters to magazines--suggest the degree to which violence, divorce, extramarital affairs and sexual harassment are plaguing the ordinary run of Chinese households. In Mao's time women not only won wholesale opportunities in education and jobs, they also gained such dignity of independence overall that most husbands pitched in with the housework. Of course, Mao's regime was also a purgatory for scores of millions of Chinese who fell victim to the class struggle, misbegotten economic schemes, mass political purges and show trials. But on the home front the leveling of status between mates led two generations of women to assume that their gains were permanent.

Not now. More and more husbands, it seems, are resorting to the modern equivalent of concubines as incomes have risen to afford the luxury--or as connubial tensions flare under the pressure of keener competition for livelihoods. At the same time, many Chinese women, newly aware of what their counterparts in the West expect from marriage and sex, have soured on customary homelife, in which men pay consuming attention to their sons.

Divorce is on the upswing, and so is wife beating. In a recent survey of Beijing by the capital's Women's Federation, 20% of wives canvassed admitted that they have been at the receiving end of domestic violence. Women's advocates believe wife beating is much more widespread than studies suggest. In Zhang Lixi's view, "The traditional idea of women being subordinate to men is deeply embedded."

THE DISENCHANTMENTS GNAWING at Chinese women are all the greater in light of what they had attained. Chen Yiyun, the Jinglun Family Center chief, is a case study. Her grandmother had bound feet and a bottomless fund of woeful tales. Her mother was a housewife for 30 years before the communists took over and decreed that women could work outside the home. "For my generation," Chen says, "every girl who could study did." She graduated from Peking University, landed a job, married and received the same salary as her husband, who stayed behind to take care of the family when Chen went off to Canada in 1980 for studies in political science.

Chen expected to meet women even more liberated than she was. "Instead," she recalls, "I heard lots of stories about men not doing the housework and women fighting for equal rights in the home and workplace. It was as if they were telling me my grandmother's stories." She adds, "I felt very proud to be a Chinese woman." But after a second study trip abroad, to Los Angeles in 1987, Chen returned in 1988 to find that market reforms had transformed her homeland almost beyond recognition: "The changes were so great, it was as though I had been gone for years. Gradually, there were many things we had in common with our global sisters."

Chen now runs her family center with a staff of professionals who try to focus on youth education. She explains, "I felt the gender problem had to start early in life, and we can't afford to wait until adolescents become confused adults." Such determined efforts have given heart to other feminists like Zhang Lixi, who remarks, "It will take a long, painful process, but I think we have a good chance." Is China hypocritical in playing host to the World Conference on Women? "Most of these problems are inevitable side effects of positive changes," Zhang argues. "Can any country claim that it has now solved all its women's problems and should therefore host this conference? I doubt it." Countless women elsewhere in the world have reason to doubt it too.

--Reported by Jaime A. FlorCruz and Mia Turner/Beijing