At the 10th National Women's Congress, there are young women eager to change the stereotypes of their generation.

After working three night-shifts, Policewoman Jiang Min, a quake relief heroine, rushed to Beijing to attend the congress.

As one of many delegates who were born in the 1980s, Jiang used to match China's typical "post-1980s generation", characterized by their parents as delicate, selfish and irresponsible.

But the policewoman in Pengzhou City of Sichuan Province, born in 1980, said before the May 12 massive earthquake jolted her home, she liked hanging out with friends and she was used to shopping.

"We have grown in a different environment from that of the older generations so we tend to pay more attention to ourselves and our quality of life," Jiang said.

Jiang's generation grew up after the country's reform and opening-up and its transition to a market economy. Most members are the only child of the family who had not been through social upheavals.

However, she lost 10 family members, including her two-year-old daughter and her mother, when the quake almost leveled her hometown, Beichuan County. Despite her tremendous grief, Jiang, who is physically petite, kept helping others affected by the quake, showing her psychological strength.

Earlier this month, Jiang was praised by President Hu Jintao for her outstanding contribution to the quake's rescue and relief work.

"The honor should belong to the Chinese people. I'm just an ordinary person after I return to my post, and I will do my duties as others do."

Young women such as Jiang had begun to change the social stereotype of her generation. Twenty-six-year-old Li Li, another young delegate to the women's congress, chose to work in a sewing machine manufacturing company in the eastern province of Zhejiang after she graduated from the Beijing-based elite Qinghua University in 2003.

With her special expertise, she had developed several popular types of sewing machines over the last five years.

"We have not brought our potentials to a full play, and I don't think our generation lacks social responsibility," Li said.

Zhao Ling went back to her hometown in Dongxiang Autonomous County in northwest China's Gansu Province after graduation. She found her hometown was in one of the country's poorest counties where conventional ideas against women prevail.

The 21-year-old was very worried to see most women there were doing chores at home or on farmland while their husbands were doing poor-salary manual work in cities.

Zhao then started to organize local women to do embroidery and needlework and sold the products in the local market.

"Each woman doing embroidery can earn a monthly income of more than 300 yuan (US$44.1). Their life has greatly improved," said Zhao who was elected as local women's council director in June and attended the ongoing national women's congress here in Beijing as a delegate.

"I could not let it be when I saw people of my hometown were poor," she said, adding more and more women in her village had joined them to do the handicraft.

The five-day congress, which was opened on Tuesday, was to outline plans to further boost women's involvement in social and economic development and their participation in state affairs.

Li Li hoped that legitimate rights and interests of women could be fully protected and the national policy on equal status between men and women could be fully implemented.

(Xinhua News Agency October 30, 2008)