Untying the Knot in China

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.