China’s new civil law “30-day divorce grace period” will be implemented on January 1 next year. This will require Chinese people who want to divorce to go through five hurdles, or at least 30 days of waiting. This rule has caused public discontent in China. Will the divorce rate in China, which has increased tenfold in 30 years, drop as a result?
Is divorce difficult? Five hurdles and a 30-day cooling-off period are required.
On December 4, China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA) issued a Notice on Implementing the Provisions on Marriage Registration in the Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China, formally regulating the new procedures for divorce in China starting next year.
According to the new rules, Chinese couples who divorce by mutual agreement will have to go through a five-step process: application, acceptance, cooling-off period, hearing, and registration and issuance of a certificate. The cooling-off period lasts 30 days, during which either party may withdraw their divorce application if they do not wish to do so.
Wang Jinhua, director of the Department of Social Affairs at the Ministry of Civil Affairs, said that the adjustments to the divorce procedure are mainly to add a threshold for hasty and impulsive divorcees.
However, the bill, which was first revealed to the world in late May this year along with the Civil Code, has already caused a backlash from the Chinese public at large.
At the time, “opposing a cooling-off period for marriage” was a trending topic on Weibo, reaching over 40 million views. Netizens joked, “Thanks to the government for giving us another reason not to get married,” they said.
“People feel that any public policy should be decided based on public opinion, and many people have written letters to the NPC and the party committee has responded, but now (the cooling-off period policy is still in place) basically means that I’ve received all your opinions, but that’s the way it is. It’s very irrational.” Lu Pin, a women’s rights activist from China, told the station.
How impulsive are Chinese divorcees? How rash?
Jiang Shengnan, a deputy to the National People’s Congress and the author of Mi Yue and Yandai, has also spoken out against the rule, criticizing it as using the marital problems of a very few people to force the vast majority to pay for it. Because according to “2016 China Marriage Survey Report” and other related surveys, less than five percent of people get married and divorced in a flash, rash marriage and divorce.
“In fact, very few people get a hasty divorce, and marriage is very important in China. Marriage in China is tied up with a lot of things, and marriage in China is very often not a personal choice, it’s a two-family affair. And the potential cost of exiting a marriage is very, very high, especially for Chinese women,” Lv Pin said.
Lv Pin was a feminist activist in China for two decades and founder of China’s Feminist Voice, but moved to the United States in 2015 after a crackdown by the authorities.
She explains that the cooling-off period has generated huge opposition in China because people feel their freedom to marry is threatened and there is a stigma attached to it, with divorce being seen as a hasty or impulsive negative event.
What does it mean that China’s divorce rate has increased tenfold in thirty years?
China’s divorce rate is on the rise. According to the Civil Affairs Bureau, China’s crude divorce rate (the ratio of the number of annual divorces to the total population) was 0.3 per 1,000 in 1979, reached 1.0 per 1,000 in 2000, 2.6 per 1,000 in 2013, and reached 3.4 per 1,000 in 2019, a more than tenfold increase in the divorce rate over the past thirty years.
Dr. Wendi Wang, a sociologist from Shaanxi, China, who is currently the research director of the Institute for Families (IFS), a U.S. think tank, told the station that there are complex ways to interpret the figures behind the divorce rate, according to different national conditions.
“If a society is 80% married and only 5% divorced, it may be a stable society, but at the same time, many Middle Eastern countries have very low divorce rates, and the quality of marriage is not certain. Or maybe behind this (number) is that more and more people are not getting married.” Wendi Wang mentioned the difficulties of doing research on divorce and related public policies. She argued that the divorce rate has to be put together with the marriage rate to make sense.
Attorney Haoming Lei, who has practiced law in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taiwan and now specializes in divorce lawsuits, shared his observations from the front lines. “Divorce is still a taboo subject for the older generation, and it’s important to keep family shame to oneself and not persuade them to make peace. Often encountered already strife, affair, and even a certain degree of hands-on situation, the elders will still not want (divorce) ……, even their own children (to be wronged), but also the woman’s elders to help Mr. side.”
Lei Haoming said, he now presides over the Che Law Law Firm will receive 700 to 800 divorce cases a year, and more than 70 percent of them are filed by women.
Data released recently by China’s Supreme People’s Court also shows that 73.4 percent of divorces in China are initiated by women, with the first cause being emotional discord, accounting for 77.51 percent, and the second cause being domestic violence, accounting for 14.86 percent.
Domestic Violence Victims Trapped in Marriage
There is concern that the cooling-off period does not put victims of domestic violence in a more vulnerable position. The official explanation given by the Chinese Communist Party is that the cooling-off period only applies to divorce by mutual agreement. In cases of domestic violence, the parties involved can file a lawsuit in court.
Lv Pin criticized this statement as “very unrealistic. It’s very difficult to get evidence of domestic violence in China,” he said. So you (Communist Party officials) say that domestic violence is not the limit, (but the fact is) there are a lot of women who don’t have the means to come up with a standard that is accepted by the government.” She also questioned the motivation behind the public policy.
She also questioned the motives behind the public policy, including the creation of a marriage department in the Communist Youth League three years ago to encourage people to get married, and now the inclusion of a cooling-off period to prevent people from getting divorced.
“My question is, are (these policies) for the welfare of the people? Is it to make people happier in their families? Why is the government pushing people into marriage?” She asked three questions in a row and then gave her own answer: “The family is good for stability, people are tied into one family, and marriage is good for rule.”
Recent Comments