Property and Marriage Formation in Contemporary China

The government of the PRC has consistently opposed "marriage by purchase." In the 1950 marriage law this was not interpreted to prohibit all betrothal exchanges but only "the exaction [emphasis added] of money or gifts in connection with marriage" (article 2). Its targets were those who fixed a price for a daughter or widow and those who set gifts as a condition for agreeing to the marriage of their daughter or widowed daugher-in-law (Meijer 1971:172).

As with much legislation concerning the family in China, the rules were widely ignored, especially in rural areas, unless a political campaign put muscle into enforcement. The cost of this disdain was not high because, although violating the rules was illegal and therefore subject to criticism, it was not criminal. "Buying" and "selling" wives continued.^[14] Thus article 3 of the 1980 revised marriage law repeated the language of its predecessor, and legal scholars once again sought to define the terms of acceptable be-

havior. Marriage by sale (mai-mai hun-yin ) involves a marriage arranged or coerced by a third party for the purpose of obtaining property. In the less-offensive marriage to exact property (chieh hun-yin so-ch'u ts'ai-wu ), the couple marries voluntarily, but the bride's side demands substantial gifts, sometimes as a precondition for the marriage (CFCP , November 28, 1987, 2). Even though third parties, usually the bride's parents, receive something, so long as the bride is the chief beneficiary, such behavior does not constitute marriage by sale. Property and money given directly and without compulsion to the bride are simply gifts (Wang and Wu 1983:2; Sung 1984:11-12).

The nature of the betrothal gifts depends not only on whether the couple is rural or urban but also on city of residence. Although many urban residents claim not to take these matters too seriously (M. Wolf 1985:158-59; Honig and Hershatter 1988:141-42), the "marriage-related consumption" that comprises these gifts, together with the costs of a wedding and wedding travel, are substantial and are borne largely by the man and his family (Ch'ien et al. 1988:220-22). One recent newspaper article complained that a couple's every meeting, from their first to their wedding day, is marked by an exchange of gifts (FCJP , May 12, 1988, 3; M. Wolf 1985:175). In major urban centers, the watches, bicycles, and sewing-machine girls of the 1970s have been replaced by color televisions, refrigerators, pianos, and furniture sets worth over one thousand yuan (Ch'ien et al. 1988:227, n. 5). Even soldiers stationed in rural areas are expected to give gold jewelry, double-tub washing machines, and double-door refrigerators (FCJP , May 12, 1988, 3), while rural families may give substantial quantities of foodstuffs in addition to cash amounts up to two thousand yuan (HYAL 3-4, 29, 31-32; FHTC , May 1986, 6). Because engagements and betrothal agreements no longer have legal effect, there is no formal framework to define respective rights in interests. Yet given the amounts of property involved, disputes about ownership are proliferating in mediation groups and the courts as agreements to marry or marriages themselves collapse.

In some areas, many of the betrothal gifts or much of their value accrue to the married couple themselves, as a form of dowry or indirect dowry (Whyte and Parish 1984:136). But even if there is no such reversion, a large brideprice without certainty of return through dowry or labor is an effective affirmation of the male's economic standing. Similarly, rather than have her family display its social standing through a dowry, a woman can define herself in comparison to her peers by the quality and size of her betrothal gifts and wedding festivities. In 1931 in the first marriage law of the Kiangsi Soviet, dowry as well as brideprice were forbidden as part of the attack on arranged and mercenary marriages. But by the 1934 revision, the prohibition on dowry had been excised. Other than this singular instance, the party has reserved its opprobrium for betrothal gifts and ignored dowry (Croll 1984:57).

The party's continuing lack of interest in dowry reflects the fact that it is passed from parents to daughter and thus lacks the commercial aura of be-

trothal gifts that move between families. For a daughter, though, a dowry is of some consequence, returning a measure of the income she has contributed to the family's community property and providing her a measure of marital financial independence. Family community property (chia-t'ing kung-yu ts'ai-ch'an ) is composed of any property created by family members living together. It includes income from collective and individual labor, marital community property, and individual property. Except at partition, Chinese families traditionally do not distinguish among the various elements and will draw from the total pool to help children establish their own households (Yang and Yang 1985:208-9, 216). Croll (1984:58) notes that in the competition for resources between siblings, daughters will lose out to sons, who must disburse substantial betrothal gifts in order to bring in a wife. That few daughters object to this pervasive custom, a Chinese legal scholar argued, does not make it right for parents to give them less than their fair share of family property (Yang and Yang 1985:216). Nor does it mean that dowry is diminishing. My reading suggests that rises in dowry parallel those in brideprice.^[15] Yet even when no part of a dowry is composed of recycled betrothal gifts, a woman and her family do not seem to be as oppressed by the task of gathering it as men are by the drive to acquire their share of wedding expenses. There are no tragic tales of young women driven to crime to pay for their marriages (Honig and Hershatter 1988:155-58; HYAL 29; Chung-kuo hun-yin 1983:38-39).

There is some indication that in well-to-do villages dowries are becoming more significant (JMJP hai-wai-pan , January 9, 1986, 2), but in economically backward areas, especially those in which the cost of marriage has remained high, "exchange of relatives" (huan-ch'in ) has developed as an alternative to betrothal gifts. In one Shantung commune they constituted 15 percent of the 940 marriages surveyed (Wu 1985:28). This money-saving barter relationship consists at its simplest level of an exchange of daughters between two families, each with an unmarried son, but as many as eight transfers have been reported (CFCP , June 11, 1987, 3; Wang and Wu 1983:49). Like the other forms of arranged marriage, huan-ch'in victimizes women. It reminds them that in a still predominantly patrivirilocal society they are inferior to a brother. Their interests and needs can be sacrificed in order to meet his needs and those of the patriline. Parents and families vigorously oppress resistance to these arrangements not only on the principle of parental authority but also because one daughter's withdrawal can subvert the plans of several families. Although some of the pairings work out and couples are reluctant to separate when a multilateral agreement unravels, the intimidating beatings and threats that seem to be part of huan-ch'in arrangements would appear to produce more suicides and multiple family breakups than happy marriages (HFAL 1983:404; CFCP , June 11, 1987, 3; HYAL 1-3, 5-6, 44-48; Wang and Wu 1983:49).

The case of Ting Feng-ch'in (F) v. Wu T'ien-chu (M) is typical of cases that have reached the courts. In 1978 in order to get a bride for his son, Yung-ming, Ting's father got a matchmaker to work out a three-way exchange. His daughter Feng-ch'in would marry Wu T'ien-chu, whose younger sister would then marry Yu Ch'un-lin. Ch'un-lin's younger sister, Yu Hsiao-ying, would in turn marry Ting's older brother, Ting Yung-ming. Ting and Wu disliked each other at first sight, but Ting's father threatened to break his daughter's legs if she failed to go through with the wedding. The three couples registered their marriages in 1980, but Ting slept with her clothes on, and she and Wu never consummated their marriage. Within six months Ting had twice run back to her family, but her father had driven her off each time. She told him she could not stand the sight of Wu, to which he responded that he would solve that problem by tearing out her eyes. Saved by her mother, Ting resumed sporadic residence with Wu, but finally filed for divorce late that year. The court investigators ordered her to return to her own house, but when her father ejected her, Ting ran away. Without a plaintiff, the court dropped the charges. At this point, Wu decided that if he could not have a wife, no one could. He retrieved his sister from the Yus and sent her away. Yu in turn ordered his sister home from the Tings, even though she and her husband (Ting Feng-ch'in's brother) got along well and had a five-month-old child. Beaten when she refused to leave, Ms. Yu committed suicide. In 1981 Ting Feng-ch'in again filed for divorce, which she eventually obtained after mediation failed (HYAL 1984:1-3).