Red China takes a "Great Leap Backwards" in Women's Rights, re-institutes medieval property laws

[Nelson Tondreau]

http://www.globalroomforwomen.com/global-heart-blog/entry/did-china-just-take-a-great-leap-backward-on-its-marriage-laws-.html

“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 the very basis of marriage, said Zhao Xiaoli, a law professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

[iverglas]

1. "Red China"?

I'm sorry ... but, "Red China"?

Did you mis-copy the headline?

"Did China Just Take a Great Leap Backward on its Marriage Laws?"

It's an interesting article, and it's the same problem in North America:

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 real problem is that all these years later, in both cases, women are still the ones making all these unpaid contributions -- thus freeing up the man to earn income and acquire assets. That's what's actually feudal.

And legislating equal rights in the family home (most couples' most significant and usually only significant asset) actually perpetuates that feudal state of affairs.

Apart from just not being interested in the whole patriarchy thing, that's a reason I'm not married. The house is mine, I paid for it before my relationship began and have continued to pay for it since, and if he wants a house if we break up he can get his own. (No, he has not bought the groceries and paid the bills, as is often the case for working women in couples while the man pays the mortgage.) Here in Ontario, almost everything is the same for unmarried couples as for married, support obligations in particular, but property is the big difference. I got to make a choice.

Unfortunately, there are women who don't make the choice quite as voluntarily or with quite such informed consent. A woman in a common-law couple where the house is in the man's name could still get screwed when the relationship breaks down. It's a fine balance between allowing choice for people who don't need protecting (and in fact need protecting from the law) and protecting people who deserve protection.

Anyhow. Women in China complaining that this is taking them backward should maybe not have been so content to stop moving forward. Not that I make a practice of blaming the victim, but the feminist intellectuals should maybe have been taking a bit of a more active leadership role. One hesitates to have any opinion about the sleeping giant, though. Imagine living in a country of a billion people ...

[Leftist4Life]

2. "Red" China is a misnomer

It would be a mistake to call China "Red" in this instance as it implies that China is actually running under a socialist system...while it's actually not.

Not that I have any love for China, but we should try to stay away from right-wing scare terms.