Chinese Law Could Make Divorced Women Homeless - New York Times

BEIJING — Millions of Chinese women, and some men, woke on Aug. 13 to discover their spouse had, in effect, become their landlord.

On that day, the Supreme Court’s new interpretation of the 1980 Marriage Law came into force, stipulating that property bought before marriage, either outright or on mortgage, reverted to the buyer on divorce. Previously, the family home had been considered joint property. Experts agree the change would mostly affect women, since men traditionally provide the family home.

The result has been uproar — and, in the cities, a rush to add the wife’s name to title deeds.

Some husbands have agreed to this, but others have balked, and Chinese news outlets have already reported on marriage breakdowns caused by a husband’s refusal to add his wife’s name.

Marriage law experts and feminists are asking: Did China just take a great leap backward?

“Feudal society is back again. How many hundreds of years will it take before women are free again?” ran a typically angry post by a person called Jingmochengzhu on Sina Weibo, China’s biggest microblog, one of 1.4 million on the topic.

“The Supreme Court is under suspicion of overstepping its authority,” Ma Yinan, a Peking University law professor and deputy head of the Marriage and Family Law Institute under the China Law Society, told the newspaper Southern Weekend. Supporters were trying to justify the new rules as strengthening traditional family structures by preserving a family’s financial investment, he said.

“That’s feudalism,” Mr. Ma said. “We smashed that already. Broke it. For them to advocate traditional family structures is a joke!”

The new rules hollow out of the very basis of marriage, said Zhao Xiaoli, a law professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

“Interpretation Three basically amounts to the construction of individual, capitalist-style property law in the heart of China’s families,” Mr. Zhao said.

A person using the tag Zhang Lei CNY posted on Sina: “Since the new marriage law came out, the equilibrium has been shattered in countless families. This stone has caused more than a thousand waves.”

The government says that in an era of soaring property prices — up about 500 percent since 2000, according to the National Bureau of Statistics — the law must protect a family’s investment. Parents and other relatives often contribute money to buy an apartment for their son, in order to help him attract a wife.

The law does not specify gender, so a woman who bought an apartment would also get it back at divorce. Yet social scientists say far fewer women buy family homes.

The interpretation is intended to address an immediate problem, and not build a perfect, logical system, a senior Supreme Court official, Du Wanhua, told legal experts last year, Southern Weekend reported in a recent article, “The Behind-the-Scenes Struggle of the New Marriage Law.”

But marriage law specialists said court officials ignored their opinions, listening instead to property law specialists.

During the consultation process, Chen Wei, of the Southwest University of Political Science and Law in Chongqing, tried, but failed, to get a provision that would have excluded a family’s shared primary residence from the new rules, Southern Weekend reported.

“How can the home where you live together become just one person’s property?” Li Mingshun, deputy dean of China Women’s University in Beijing, asked in the online publication Women’s Voice.

The new rules ignore a woman’s unpaid contributions to the home, including childbirth, child rearing, housework and caring for elderly family members, Li Ying, deputy director of the Beijing Qianqian Law Firm, said in Women’s Voice.

The new legal interpretation “keeps stressing ‘fairness, fairness,’ but it doesn’t consider a woman’s weaker position,” said Ms. Li. “It doesn’t recognize at all the value of work done at home.”

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