A group of women from rural Zhejiang and Jiangsu have conducted protests of unfair inheritance practices and government discrimination.

The women, all of them from farming communities, made human pyramids and displayed banners expressing their complaints in four separate locations in Hangzhou. The protests, called a performance-art by the New Yrok Times, were staged by a small group that claimed to represent a much larger demographic of disenfranchised women.

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As China has expanded economically in recent years, the government has purchased huge amounts of land for development. In most cases, women receive no compensation for land loss, while men are much more likely to be paid.

While China’s legal code provides economic equality to women, the reality is often different from what the law says. Women “marry out” of their families and communities, in doing so losing many of their rights as land and property are usually registered under the husband’s name.

One of the slogans scrawled on a banner read “Married-out women are like thrown-out water.”

While the Times reported that the protesters were only questioned by authorities at one site, China is known to be largely intolerant of public dissent. Chinese police violently cracked down on protests in Xinjiang province earlier this year, and reports of possibly 500 protests per day are largely censored by the state media.

Rural women’s land rights are not the only women’s equality issues faced by Chinese society. Women are underrepresented in politics and the vast majority of migrant labor is made up of women who have relocated from rural areas and work illegally in factories without contracts. Many of these migrant women are selected because of their young age and relative ignorance of their legal rights; many of them are further asked to sign agreements to remain unwed and to avoid pregnancy for the length of their employment.