Note that the bitwise operators work on all the bits of the whole byte - so they're not quite equivalent to the Assembler instructions which directly address individual bits.

If you're lucky, your compiler and/or optimiser might be smart enough to spot what you're trying to do, and use the bit-addressing instructions.

ANSI 'C' does not provide operators to access to individual bits. The nearest thing is bitfields, but these are notorious for being non-portable and not efficiently implemented.

A decent 8051-targetted cross-compiler should provide extensions to implement bit-addressing. See your manual!