Untying the Knot in China

By Hunter R. Clark

New law permits divorce--even for incompatibility

Yu Luojin, a Peking writer, was mortified by her second husband Cai Zhongpei. In fact, she was sure she had married a bumpkin. He never seemed to talk about aesthetics and the finer things of life, only stupid topics like the price of yellowfish. He flailed and hooted like a child while watching soccer games, and when she hauled him to the theater for some cultural uplift, he laughed when he should have cried. One day Yu tried to coax him into reading a book. He snapped: "I've been selected a model worker every year without reading books and newspapers!" That did it. She rushed to the nearest court and filed for divorce. After much publicity and a judge's stern lecture on socialist morality, Yu won her case, in effect on grounds of incompatibility. Said Yu, piously: "To continue a marriage without love is utterly immoral."

Divorce, Chinese style, more and more resembles that of the decadent bourgeois West. Though there is still a stigma attached to breaking up a marriage in the puritanical People's Republic, a recent and dramatically liberalized law is sending record numbers of unhappy mates in search of freedom. In the first half of 1981, courts in Peking received a total of 3,444 divorce suits, a 72.5% increase over the same period the year before. In Shanghai, according to a recent survey, a single district granted 50 divorces in only six months, nothing much by U.S. standards but very shocking for China.

A man in his 50s filed for divorce, complaining that his wife could not cope with his need to have sex twice a day. One couple, in a now famous case, argued so bitterly over whose family should pay for the wedding that the husband ran away and the wife filed for divorce after, five days of marriage. Xiao Lan, a dancer and something of a social butterfly, tired of her introverted husband Fang Baojian, filed for divorce and declared in court: "I no longer love Fang. I long for a free world. I'll sleep with any man I wish to sleep with."

Chinese culture has long been pitched heavily against divorce. An ancient proverb tells newlyweds: "You're married until your hair turns white." In practice, however, divorce, while almost impossible for women to initiate, has traditionally been easy for men. All the husband had to do was send an emissary to his father-in-law to declare that he "cannot worship at the ancestral shrine with your daughter any longer." The father-in-law usually acquiesced, with apologies for not having brought his daughter up properly.

In the old view, it was also shameful for women to marry more than once. Even if a bride's betrothed died before the wedding, she could be forced to go through the ceremony with a wooden figure (or a symbolic rooster) and then spend the rest of her life single.

In 1950 Mao Tse-tung's new Communist regime tried to expunge the last vestiges of feudal marriage by enacting China's first marriage-and-divorce law. The law banned compulsory arranged marriages, concubinage, child betrothal and interference in the remarriage of widows. It reluctantly permitted divorce, but only when "mediation and counseling" had failed and the marriage clearly could not go on. China needed stability and unity, it was reasoned, so couples were called upon to "put politics in command of everything" and stay together. In practice, divorce was usually denied when only one party, wife or husband, wanted it. The new law, which took effect a year ago, is closer to Western statutes: "Complete alienation of mutual affection" is sufficient grounds for divorce, and one party can apply even against the wishes of the other.

That revision is a grudging admission that the regime can expect more social and political stability by easing up on divorce than by maintaining inflexible pressure against it. Often marriages are inherently unstable. China is still a country where a great many alliances were arranged by parents, or through go-betweens, on a "marry now, love later" basis. Moreover, couples frequently find themselves trapped in political marriages that seem pointless after each new shift in the political winds. During the Cultural Revolution a young librarian suspected as an "intellectual" was terrified of the rampaging Red Guards. She married the rebel leader at her high school to gain political protection in an alliance known as a "Red Umbrella" marriage. When the revolution was over, she applied for a divorce and got one. Some, like Yu Luojin, marry peasants to neutralize their upper-class origins and look better in the eyes of the state. In other cases, partners now want to end mercenary marriages, contracted simply to get a good flat and the furniture coupons that go to married couples. Or they may simply want to get a job and get back to the city from a tedious as signment on a remote farm.

Fickleness, usually accompanied by what the official language delicately calls "a third party," is also a rising cause of divorce. Peking's Research Association on Marital Affairs solemnly states that fickleness can come from social-climbing, gold-digging, unsatisfied sexual or romantic desire, or simply "bourgeois liberalism." Peking has plenty of gloom-and-doomers who warn of bankrupt Western ways. These ideologues blame the increased divorce rate on creeping "bourgeois ideas" of materialism and egotism. In fact, the demand for divorce seems highest among the most Westernized Chinese. Some of the leading marital experts, however, see a positive side to the increase in broken marriages.

Whereas in the past marriage was primarily an economic proposition, many Chinese now place due emphasis on mutual affection, compatibility and even sexual equality. Officials insist that the rise in divorce is temporary, largely because of cases that piled up under the old restrictive law. Alarmed Communist guardians of Chinese morals are hoping that they are right.

-- By Hunter R. Clark. Reported by Jimi Florcruz/Peking

With reporting by Jimi Florcruz

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