By studying rural women seeking divorce, this project will explore the disputing behavior of two enormous segments of the contemporary Chinese population: rural residents and women. In post-Mao rural China, how have rapid social changes affected marriage and family life? To what extent and by what means do rural residents mobilize law to address marital disputes? In what ways does a grassroots legal system redress inequities and injustices and in what ways does it reproduce and reinforce them? In China, women are far more likely than men to initiate divorce litigation; in recent years, this gender disparity in divorce lawsuits has become ever more pronounced in the countryside. However, to date no research has explored Chinese women's litigiousness. In highlighting rural women's experiences of divorce litigation, this project will present a study of legal mobilization and dispute resolution in the rapidly changing social world of China.
This project examines the aforementioned issues through an ethnographic study of divorce litigation in rural Sichuan Province in southwest China. The research will include semi-structured interviews with divorce litigants, legal workers, judges, and court clerks; participant observation in the courts and surrounding communities; and legal document analysis. By situating research inquiries in contemporary rural China, this project aims to produce highly contextualized knowledge about law, politics, and gender. Meanwhile, this project also seeks to cast new light on: (1) the processes and mechanisms whereby legal mobilization and dispute resolution reflect, create, and destroy inequalities and injustices, (2) the extent to which the rise of the rule of law in formerly authoritarian societies has transformed preexisting power structures, and (3) the social forces that are reshaping marriage, family life, and gender relationships in transitional societies.
Between January 2010 and May 2011, I conducted an ethnographic study of divorce litigation in Sichuan Province in southwest China. During the 17-month fieldwork, I collected and examined court records of 211divorce lawsuits. Court case records, along with on-site observations of divorce proceedings, offered rare glimpses into how the grassroots legal system actually processed divorce litigation on a day-to-day basis. To capture rural women’s disputing experiences, I conducted 50 unstructured or semi-structured interviews with those who were either considering or already undertaking divorce litigation. These interviews provided first-hand information as to what kind of marital grievances rural Chinese women harbored, why they took their marital problems to court, and how they fared along the way. In addition, I carried out another 62 interviews with local state agents and rural disputants. Their testimonies further revealed how the landscape of dispute resolution had shifted in rural China over the past decades. My research finds that, as rural women increasingly participate in the urban workforce, they come to gain new resources and opportunities, which enable them to better tackle marital grievances and disputes. As these women move to seek legal assistance for divorce through the burgeoning legal services market, they are nevertheless subject to economic exploitation, stigmatization and discrimination, and oftentimes, wind up with shoddy legal representation in divorce litigation. Furthermore, the grassroots legal system, preoccupied with its own priorities and interests, shows a glimmer of concern with women’s lawful rights and interests. As a result, many rural women walk away from divorce litigation without land, farmhouse or any kind of finanical compensation, let along alimony, whereas their spouses and in-laws are far more likely to keep the family’s properties. Seen in this light, rural women’s experiences of divorce litigation are at once liberating and restraining: they allow women to break away from unhappy marriages, and meanwhile, further contribute to the prevalent gender inequalities in the countryside.
