Decoupling: Marital Violence and the Struggle to Divorce in China

Abstract

An analysis of adjudicated divorce decisions in two Chinese provinces reveals the extent to which and the reasons why Chinese courts subvert the global legal norms they symbolically embrace. In China, uncontested no-fault divorces are readily attainable outside the court system. Courts, by contrast, granted divorces in fewer than half of the cases they adjudicated. Despite an abundance of formal legal mechanisms designed to provide relief to victims of marital abuse, a plaintiff's claim of domestic violence did not increase the probability a court granted a divorce request. Chinese courts' highly institutionalized practice of denying first-attempt divorce petitions and granting divorces on subsequent litigation attempts disproportionately impacts women and has spawned a sizable population of female marital-violence refugees. These findings carry substantive and theoretical implications concerning the limits and possibilities of the local penetration of global legal norms.A 27-year-old female plaintiff from a village in Huojia County, Henan Province, seeking to divorce her husband in court supported her claim of marital abuse with medical documentation showing a diagnosis of a vertebral fracture. In his defense statement, her husband rebutted, "I did not beat the 1 This research came to fruition only because of the generous support of Benjamin Liebman, Rachel Stern, and Alice Wang, who collected and shared the raw data from Henan Province. I am grateful to Ke Li, my former student, for reversing roles and teaching me much about Chinese divorce litigation and serving as a critically helpful sounding board as I worked through the data. All errors are my own. Hai Hu and Zuoyu Tian provided key technical assistance with the collection and preparation of data.

Unfamiliarity and Procedural Justice: Litigants' Attitudes Toward Civil Justice in Southern China

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Does the Shortage of Marriageable Women Induce the Trafficking of Women for Forced Marriage? Evidence From China

“…By the end of 2018, there were more than 50 million judicial documents on the platform, with an ongoing daily increase of more than 10,000. The court documents have been used in sociological and criminological research on topics such as divorce and human trafficking (Michelson, 2019; Qiu et al, 2019; Xia et al, 2020).…”

When Family Property Becomes Individual Property: Intrahousehold Property Ownership and Women's Well‐Being in China

“…Family in China is closely tied to dominant patriarchal ideologies and plays a fundamental role in maintaining the social order of the patriarchal society. In the era of rising divorce rates, a series of efforts have been made by the state toward strengthening the family and controlling rising divorce rates (Michelson, ). The new judicial interpretation, along with these recent efforts, can be seen a response of the state to the change of marriage as a social institution.…”