Marriage in Shaan Gan Ning

Twentieth-Century China, 38.
3, 184209, October 2013
FROM FREEDOM OF MARRIAGE TO SELF-

DETERMINED MARRIAGE: RECASTING
MARRIAGE IN THE SHAAN-GAN-NING
BORDER REGION OF THE 1940S
XIAOPING CONG
University of Houston, USA
This article is based on recently released archival documents produced by the High
Court in the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region during the 1940s. Through
analysis of a number of legal cases concerning marriage disputes, this article
challenges the previous scholarly assumption, prevalent since the 1980s, that the
CCP failed at its promised project of liberating women. This article argues that the
CCP indeed adjusted its policies on women and marriage in the new revolutionary
base, but this adjustment was for the purpose of adapting to a new social and
cultural ecology that differed from the previous revolutionary bases where radical
policy had been formed. In implementing the regulation, the legal system gradually
developed a new principle of self-determination in judging marriage disputes,
which granted female litigants choice regarding their marriages. The author argues
that this new principle aimed to disentangle women from the old patriarchal
system, thereby undermining patriarchal power, and empowered women. It
represented a step toward womens acquisition of independence and right to
choose marriage partners.
KEYWORDS: Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region, marriage reform, gender
Freedom of marriage ( hunyin ziyou) was an important component of

the iconoclastic New Culture and May Fourth discourses on women because it
challenged the authority of patriarchal power and the traditional power structure
of the family. The New Culture and May Fourth movements arose at about the
same time as the introduction of Marxism, socialism, and communism into China,
which greatly influenced the May Fourth discourse on women and marriage. May
Fourth thinkers favored liberating women from feudal patriarchal oppression
and loveless marriages, and their arguments became an important part of the social
transformation of twentieth-century China. The marriage reforms undertaken in
the Communist revolutionary base areas of the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region
( SGNBR, or Border Region) from the 1930s to the 1940s marked an
important moment in early social reforms, and had a profound effect on post-1949
social policy.
# Twentieth-Century China 2013 DOI: 10.1179/1521538513Z.00000000026

FROM FREEDOM OF MARRIAGE TO SELF-DETERMINED MARRIAGE 185
Based on analysis of legal cases involving marriage disputes from recently

released archival documents of the High Court in the SGN Border Region during
the 1940s, this article challenges the previous scholarly assumption, prevalent
since the 1980s, that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) failed in its promised
goals of marriage and family reform and the liberation of women from patriarchal
power. This article argues that the CCP did indeed adjust its policies on marriage
in the new revolutionary base, but the purpose of this adjustment was to adapt to a
new social and cultural ecology that differed from the previous revolutionary bases
in which the radical policy was formed. Instead of compromising the principle of
marriage reform, the CCPs legal practice gradually transformed the May Fourth
concept of freedom of marriage to a more effective principle of self-willing/self-
determined (/ ziyuan/zizhu) marriage. This principle was in fact written
into the revised 1944 and 1946 marriage regulations and put into legal practice,
but the implication and significance of the revision have been overlooked and
misunderstood by previous studies. This reform under the new principle
endeavored to disentangle women from the old patriarchal system while
undermining patriarchal power and empowering women. A large number of
archival documents demonstrate the origins and early implementation of this
principle in the Border Region of the 1940s, and that it continued to develop and
was extended into nationwide legal practice after 1950. The belief in self-
determination was later granted legal status in the contemporary Chinese Civil
Code, promulgated by the legislature, as an individuals right to marriage (
hunyin zizhu quan).1
RETHINKING THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY REVOLUTIONARY DISCOURSE

ON MARRIAGE
Many May Fourth writers focused on what they considered the miserable condition of
women in family life, which condemned many young women to wither away within
traditional Chinese elite families due to loveless arranged marriages.2 Some authors
criticized Confucian doctrine regarding womens chastity and restrictions against the
remarriage of widows,3 and called for a revolution in family life by advocating the
ideas of free marriage, free divorce, monogamous marriage, and the nuclear family. At
the same time, they denounced the traditional model of the extended family.4
1
See Zhonghua renmin gongheguo minfa tongze (The General Civil Code of the Peoples
Republic of China, Promulgated on April 12, 1986). For Chinese version, see http://www.law-
lib.com/law/law_view.asp?id53633 (accessed September 8, 2011). For an English version, see
http://www.dffy.com/faguixiazai/msf/200701/20070119171429.htm (accessed September 8,
2011). Term 103 of the Civil Code states that Citizens shall enjoy the right of marriage by
choice (zizhu quan). Mercenary marriages, marriages upon arbitrary decision by any third party
and any other acts of interference in the freedom of marriage shall be prohibited.
2
See, for example, Pa Chin (Ba Jin), Family, trans. Sidney Shapiro (Prospect Heights, IL:
Waveland Press, 1989, c. 1972).
3
Lu Xun, Wo zhi jie lie guan (My View of Chastity), and Hu Shi, Zhencao wenti (The
Issue of Womens Chastity), in Wusi shiqi funu wenti wenxuan (Selected Writings on Womens
Issues Published in the May Fourth Period) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1981), 11523, 10614.
4
Susan Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 19151953 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003), 126.
186 XIAOPING CONG
Without a doubt, the May Fourth discourse created a progressive movement that
encouraged young elite women to resist the domination of the traditional
Confucian family and inspired educated women to pursue spiritual and economic
independence. It is no exaggeration to say that May Fourth thinking on women
led to a fundamental change in the position of women in both society and the
family. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, these changes occurred only in urban
areas among educated women. Later, however, the CCP would recast the concept
and practice of traditional marriage in an entirely different social, geographical,
and cultural environment.
Although communism as an urban intellectual movement beginning in the
1920s was involved in organizing female factory workers to struggle for better
working conditions and increased wages, the efforts of Communist female leaders
to change the status of women were not seen as priority by a party leadership
dominated by male intellectuals.5 Early CCP leaders also paid little attention to the
issues of marriage and family reforms and rural womens conditions until they
established a Soviet government at their rural Jiangxi revolutionary base.6 In
response to demands from rural women who suffered from poverty and unhappy
family lives, the Jiangxi Soviet government issued a marriage regulation in 1931
that, under the influence of the Soviet Unions legal code of 1926, granted women
freedom of marriage and divorce.7 This regulation was revised into the Marriage
Law of 1934, which placed a moratorium on divorces of Red Army soldiers, in the
interest of military stability, when their wives demanded them.8 Previous studies
on the marriage reform in Jiangxi have noted that the real conditions of the
implementation and the effectiveness of this regulation are difficult to discern,
except for the results propagated by the official documents of the CCP.9
After the Long March, in 1936 the CCP reestablished its revolutionary base in
the most poverty-stricken rural regions of northern China. CCP control covered
northern Shaanxi ( Shaanbei), eastern Gansu ( Longdong), and a small
part of southern Ningxia, collectively known as the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border
Region. Not until 1939, when the Border Region government eventually stabilized
its control against the sieges of the Nationalist army and attacks from local
warlords and bandits, did it effectively extend its administrative power to village
5
Christina Gilmartin, Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women, Communist
Politics, and Mass Movements in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
6
Patricia Stranahan, Yanan women and the communist party (Berkeley: University of
California, Institute of East Asian Studies, 1984), 924; Delia Davin, Woman-work: Women and
the Party in Revolutionary China (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 2123.
7
Zhonghua Suweiai Gongheguo hunyin tiaoli (The Marriage Regulation of the Chinese
Soviet Republic), Jiangxi Su qu funu yundong shiliao xuanbian (Selected Collection of
Documents on the Womens Movement in the Jiangxi Soviet Region), compiled by Jiangxi
Provincial Association of Womens Federation and Jiangxi Provincial Archives (Nanchang:
Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, 1982), 3335; also see M. J. Meijer, Marriage Law and Policy in the
Chinese Peoples Republic (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1971), 49, 5253.
8
Zhonghua Suweiai gongheguo hunyin fa (Marriage Law of the Chinese Soviet Republic),
Jiangxi Su qu funu yundong shiliao xuanbian, 17678.
9
Meijer, Marriage Law and Policy in the Chinese Peoples Republic, 4243; Davin, Woman-
work: Women and the Party in Revolutionary China, 2829; Stranahan, Yanan women and the
communist party, 924.
populations by establishing sub-regional, county, and township governments. In

the same year, the border government also established a juridical system, with a
High Court for appeals and reviews and county courts for primary trials.10 This
legal system, though often mingled with the administrative system, particularly at
the county level, became an important means of carrying out social reform projects
in the 1940s.
Unlike the 1950s, when land reform and marriage reform went hand-in-hand in
rural areas to help mobilize women, the marriage reform beginning in 1939 took
place in varied social conditions. As Pauline Keating points out, social and ecological
conditions varied even within this limited area of the Border Region, as did the
implementation of revolutionary land policies.11 In the Longdong subregion (
fenqu), the revolutionary government led by Liu Zhidan ( 19031936) and
others had launched a land revolution in 1933, while some areas of the Yanshu
subregion instigated the campaign in 1936 but halted it after 1937 because of a
policy change due to the establishment of the United Front.12 Since both the
Longdong and Yanshu subregions were areas of scarce population with vast land,13
the majority of poor families became small landowning farmers; in other subregions,
like Suide and Guanzhong, landownership did not change significantly but the
policy emphasized reducing peasants burden of rent and loan interest (also called
double reductions shuang jian) after 1937.14 Nonetheless, both land reform
and the double reductions were welcomed by locals because they laid a solid
foundation for the marriage reform and other social reform projects.
The principle of the marriage reform, simplified into the slogan hunyin ziyou,
was broadcast to a wide audience of local farmers. The 1939 regulation, an
improved version of the 1934 marriage law, was indeed revolutionary in that it
intended not only to regulate marriage as a union of a man and woman on the basis
of free will and love but also to ban many practices that the government regarded
as backward, such as concubinage ( na qie), foster child/daughter-in-law
10
The SGN High Court, established in 1937, was in the second tier of a nominally national
three-tiered court system, since it assumed that the Nationalist Highest Court in Nanjing was its
supreme court. In 1942, it experienced a reform in which a government trial committee was
established, functioning as a supreme court. However, the Border government abolished the trial
committee a year later and redesigned the court system after 1943, which nominally restored its
two-tiered form but actually operated in three tiers by adding subregional courts as the
dispatched branches of the High Court. See Wang Shirong, Liu Quane, Wang Jide, and Li Juan,
Xin Zhongguo sifa zhidu de jishiShaan-Gan-Ning bianqu gaodeng fayuan, 19371949 (The
Cornerstone of the Judicial System for New ChinaThe High Court of the SGN Border Region,
19371949) (Beijing: Shangwu yinshu guan, 2011). The SGN juridical system is an important
topic that deserves more extensive study and discussion than is possible in this space.
11
Pauline Keating, Two Revolutions: Village Reconstruction and the Cooperative
Movement in Northern Shaanxi, 19341945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997),
189.
12
The implementation of this policy also had to wait until 1939, after the SGN territory was
stabilized.
13
Qingyang diqu zhi bianzuan weiyuan hui, Qingyang diqu zhi (Qingyang District Records)
(Lanzhou: Lanzhou daxue chubanshe, 1993), 46869.
14
Liu Fengge (comps.), Longdong de tudi geming yundong (Land Revolution in Longdong
Area) (Zhonggong Qingyang diwei dangshi ziliao zhengji bangongshi, 1992), 244; Pauline
Keating, Two Revolutions, 6575.
188 XIAOPING CONG
( tongyangxi),15 buying/selling marriage ( mai mai hunyin),16

arranged marriage ( baoban), and marriage by force ( qiangpo).17
However, the implementation of this regulation was not a smooth process; it met
with resistance and criticism from local villagers, especially farmers families with
young males. Amid this criticism and protest, the regulation was revised in 1944
and then revised again in 1946.
These revisions, while still promoting the principle of free will in marriage, set
up some restrictions on marriage practices, particularly divorce. Although the CCP
implemented the changes to respond to immediate economic and military crises
and wartime conditions, the central issue for later historians is how to assess them
in light of womens emancipation. From the 1970s to 1980s, evaluation of the
marriage regulation revisions polarized the field. M. J. Meijers pioneering study
on the marriage reforms offers an affirmative appraisal of the revolutionary nature
of the reform, although he sees the 1934 Marriage Law as a concession to
soldiers complaints that required sacrifice from women.18 Davin provides a vague
but also generally positive assessment of the achievement of the revolution in
enhancing womens position in marriage and the family. She is convinced that
though the revision of the marriage regulations compromised the revolutionary
principle of free marriage, it derived from the military and political situation
faced by the border region in 1942.19 Later scholars disagreed with Davins
sympathetic defense and spoke against a positive assessment of the revolution.
In the early 1980s, some Western scholars who visited China were apparently
disappointed with womens conditions there. In their eyes, the Communist
revolution had not brought drastic improvements to the lives of Chinese women.
They believed that this unchanged condition stemmed from the revolutions failed
promises to women that could be traced back to the marriage regulations revised
in the 1940s. They assumed the revision was the result of the CCP backing off
from its previous idealism and radicalism in the cause of womens liberation in
order to gain male farmers support for its warfare against the Japanese and the
15
I agree with Philip Huang, who argues that the current English translations for tongyangxi
(child bride and adopted daughter-in-law) do not accurately indicate the meaning of the term
and suggests using the Chinese term directly (see Chinese Civil Justice, Past and Present [Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010], 12n).
16
The English term of purchased marriage is also problematic because it only indicates the
buying party and does not have the connotation of its original Chinese term, buying and selling
(mai mai), which encompasses the activities of the womans family. For convenience, I use
purchased marriage in this article but sometimes, to underline a particular behavior, I also refer
to buying or selling a marriage.
17
Shaan-Gan-Ning bianqu hunyin tiao li, 1939 (Marriage Regulation of the SGN Border
Government, April 4, 1939), in Shaan-Gan-Ning bianqu funu yundong wenxian ziliao xuanbian
(A Documentary Collection on the SGN Womens Movement) (Xian: Shaanxi Provincial
Womens Federation [compiled and printed], 1982), 5456.
18
Meijer, Marriage Law and Policy in the Chinese Peoples Republic, 4250.
19
Davin, Woman-Work: Women and the Party in Revolutionary China, 3540.
Unfortunately, Davin does not provide any solid case studies and also assumes that the marriage
regulations were not carried out in the area (38). This statement contradicts the legal records I
have examined.
Nationalists.20 Some scholars have tried to mitigate this accusation by stating that
the reestablishment of patriarchy in post-1949 rural China may not have been the
intention of the Communist revolution, but that the male-dominated leadership of
the party failed to overcome their male-centered perspective on policy
implementation, thus preventing social reform of gender equality.21 At any rate,
the CCPs failed promises to women, rooted in its 1940s practices, meant that
women continued to live in a patriarchal society.22 This conclusion attributes the
revised policy of the 1940s on women and marriage to the result of a negotiation
between rural males and the all-male leadership of the CCP, but ignores womens
role in local activities and legal processes. From a Western feminist perspective,
this assumption overemphasized the changed terms for divorce as a measure of
gender equality, but ignored other modifications that might have been more
significant in the historical context. Moreover, their evaluation of the 1940s
revisions of the marriage regulations, also based on policy studies and theoretical
supposition, oversimplified a complex process, in which the achievement of a
multi-faceted social transformation required various steps and certain conditions.
Over the past two decades, the issue of Chinese womens position in the family
and society has been revisited by a new group of scholars in both America and
China. Departing from previous policy studies, some scholars have expanded their
research to villages to discover the degree to which womens lives have been
influenced by political campaigns in past decades, and through interviews with
local village women investigate how they view important political movements
since the 1950s such as land reform, the campaign to implement the Marriage
Law, rural collectivization, and the Great Leap Forward.23 Among these scholars,
Neil Diamant, through fieldwork on the implementation of the 1950 Marriage
Law and the marriage conditions of both urban and rural women in the 1950s,
strongly opposes the assumption that the CCP compromised with rural patriarchal
power at the expense of womens rights. Instead, he offers a much more dynamic
picture of state power at the local level, in which village cadres had no intent or
authority to hinder womens divorce actions but rather turned over problems to
the higher authority, which held to a much stronger revolutionary principle of
helping women escape their unhappy marriages.24 Even with these excellent
20
See Kay Ann Johnson, Women, the Family and Peasant Revolution in China (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1983); Judith Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Phyllis Andors, The Unfinished Liberation of
Chinese Women, 19491980 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983); Patricia Stranahan,
Yanan women and the communist party.
21
Margery Wolf, Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1985).
22
This view still dominates studies of the 1940s SGN Border Region and the conclusions
from these works continue to be cited in the recent scholarship. See Keating, Two Revolutions, 7;
and Huang, Chinese Civil Justice, Past and Present, 10913.
23
See Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China9s Collective Past
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
24
Neil J. Diamant, Re-examining the Impact of the 1950s Marriage Law: State
Improvisation, Local Initiative and Rural Family Change, China Quarterly, 161 (March
2000), 17198. Also see his Revolutionizing the Family: Politics, Love, and Divorce in Urban and
Rural China, 19491968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
190 XIAOPING CONG
studies on the post-1949 period, the implementation of the marriage reform and its
impact on the lives of men and women in the 1940s revolutionary region are still
unclear. A more effective assessment on the topic is thus needed.
I turn away from the problematic question of whether or not the CCP revolution
fulfilled its promise to liberate women and approach marriage reform in the SGN
Border Region during the 1940s from a cross-cultural perspective. My research shows
a much more deeply rooted conflict and interaction, in which an imported idea and
local practices interplayed and were mutually recast. With supporting evidence from
legal cases and local gazetteers, I view the revisions of marriage regulations, through
the revolutionary states interaction with local culture, as an important step to
overcome the confusion caused by a clash between urban- and foreign-oriented ideals
and the social and cultural reality of the locality. The revisions and legal practices in the
1940s SGN Border Region transformed marriage from a family matter and a
traditional patriarchal prerogative to the individual choice of women, which laid a
necessary foundation for the later revolution in marriage and family. The archival
documents produced by the SGN High Court in the 1940s provide evidence for this
study: a rich and detailed source of various types of marriage disputes that occurred
during this period is now available. These documents of course have certain problems,
including incomplete case files, damaged pages, unreadable handwriting, and
disorganization. Despite these defects, these documents hold great value. Unlike the
documents produced by Qing county courts, which were often formatted by legal
experts ( shiye), the documents of the SGN High Court came from local court
secretaries who had limited education and legal training. Their disadvantages at the
time have become advantages for us today: the records were written in a plain style
based on the original words of the illiterate litigants, both males and females, so that we
are able to view these records today not through the lens of legal experts but instead of
ordinary people. Moreover, these documents offer us a concrete picture of marriage
disputes among villagers under Communist rule and the extent and degree of
effectiveness to which the marriage reform was carried out.
THE CULTURAL AND SOCIAL SETTING OF MARRIAGE REFORM

The region that the SGN border government controlled in the 1930s and 1940s was
characterized by unique features, and its geographical and ecological characteristics and
cultural and social customs differentiated it from previous Communist revolutionary
bases in southern China, as well as from the environment where the May Fourth
discourse was shaped. The northern boundary of this region bordered the Mongolian
prairie and had traditionally been at the edge of the Confucian empire up to the end
of the Qing dynasty. The local culture displayed a mixture of orthodox state ideology
and a patriarchal tradition with deeply rooted heterodox steppe customs absorbed
from the nomadic people living on the Mongolian prairie. It was a politically insulated
region, experiencing little impact from national events such as the Republican
Revolution in 1911 or the anti-traditional New Culture Movement and anti-
imperialism campaigns during the 1920s, until Communist forces arrived on the scene
in the 1930sfirst the local Communist guerrilla force led by Liu Zhidan, and then the
Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Red Army after the Long March.
The family structure and marriage traditions in this region also departed from
any stereotype of Confucian patriarchy as described in the May Fourth
criticism, due to its geographical character and the influence of steppe culture.
Various forms of family and marriage practices stemmed from this cultural
blending. First, as a previous imperial frontier, some counties were simply
established by the end of the Qing and some by the Communist power in the
1930s. Weak administrative power made the region much less influenced by
Confucian dogma. Although the Confucian elite family was indeed at the top of
the local hierarchy among educated people, their numbers were very small.
Moreover, the family structure in the region, like rural families in other regions,
differed greatly from that of elite families described in the May Fourth discourse.25
Various documents preserved in the Shaanxi and Gansu archives show that most
farmers families of the middle to lower classes were small in size and made up of
only two or three generationsusually a young couple with their parent(s) plus
minor child(ren), or simply a couple with their unmarried child(ren). Also, once
brothers were married the division of the household became inevitable. It was thus
very rare to see a large household with an extended family in which five
generations (of males) under one roof lived together, as described in Johnsons
book.26 Lastly, the fluidity of the population in the region, caused by the flow of
migrant workers and drifters looking for food, resulted in family instability.27
25
In the 1930s, the pioneer sociologist and anthropologist Fei Xiaotong, in his study of the
Jiangnan region, demonstrated that a majority of farmer families in Chinese villages were small
nuclear families, while bigger families of literati-elite might still be small in number and exist in
towns and urban areas (see Hsiao-Tung Fei, Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life
in the Yangtze Valley [London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd, 1939], 2729). Recent
studies by Chinese scholars on rural families from the 1930s to the contemporary era also argue
that the large family with more than three generations living together as an extended family was
simply a Confucian ideal but not Chinese reality. See Tan Tongxue, Qiao cun you dao: zhuanxing
xiangcun de diode, quanli yu shehui jiegou (The Way of Qiao Village: Morality, Power and Social
Structure in a Transitional Village) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2010); and Qin Yan and Hu
Hongan, Qing dai yi lai de Shaanbei zongzu yu shehui bianqian (Changes of the Clans and the
Society in Northern Shaanxi Since the Qing) (Xian: Xibei gongye daxue chubanshe, 2004).
26
Kay Ann Johnson, Women, the Family and Peasant Revolution in China, 9.
27
The information about the social customs described in this section comes from the following
documents and scholarly works if not specifically noted: Ge xian youguan de fengsu xiguan (The
Relevant Customs in Local Counties), in The Documents of the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border High
Court file no. 1557, in Shaanxi Provincial Archives (in the following text, all sources from Shaanxi
Provincial Archives will be abbreviated to SPA and file number); Qingjian de hunsu (Marriage
Customs in Qingjian County), Jiefang ribao (Liberation Daily), November 3 and 4, 1942; The
Ministry of Justice, Republican Government (compilation): Minshi xiguan diaocha baogao (Surveys
on the Customs of Civil Affairs) (Beijing: Zhongguo zhengfa daxue chubanshe, 2005, reprint), 799
833; Ding Shiliang and Zhao Fang, comps., Zhongguo difang zhi minsu ziliao huibian: Xibei juan
(A Collective Selection of Local Gazettes on Social Customs: Northwestern Region) (Beijing: Beijing
Tushuguan chubanshe, 1989), 10926, 18490; Yanan Lu Xun Artist Academy (collected and
comp.), Shanbei minge xuan (Selected Folk Songs from the North Shaanxi Region) (unknown place
of publication: Xinhua bookstore, 1949), 1120; Huachi xian zhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Huachi
xian zhi (Huachi County Gazetteer) (Lanzhou: Gansu renmin chubanshe, 2004), 15556; Qingyang
diqu zhi, 91924. Also see Qin Yan and Yue Long, Zou chu fengbi: Shanbei funu de hunyin yu
shengyu (19001949) (Getting Out of Confinement: Womens Marriage and Childbearing in
Northern Shaanxi, 19001949) (Xian: Shaanxi Peoples Publishing House, 1997), 21162; and Qin
Yan, Qing mo Min chu de Shaanbei shehui (The Society of Northern Shaanxi in the Late Qing and
Early Republic) (Xian: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe, 2000), 87128.
192 XIAOPING CONG
The forms of marriage varied based on economic conditions. Monogamy was

practiced by the great majority of people, though not all. Contrary to the May
Fourth writers laments regarding restraints on widows remarriage, it was
common practice in this region for a widow to remarry, often decided on either by
the widow herself or negotiated among the widow, her natal family, and her
deceased husbands family. If the deceased husbands family or the widow herself
insisted on staying in that family, the widow could select a husband (
zuotang zhaofu, lit. staying home and inviting a husband in), and their common
children would be divided as heirs of the two families. The practice of renting out a
wife ( dian qi), a miserable practice described in Rou Shis short story,28 did
indeed exist in local custom, but there was also a similar version of the practice for
males. For example, if a man was too poor to find a permanent wife, he could
choose to be a temporary/substitute husband ( zhao fu, lit. inviting a
[substitute] husband in) for a woman whose husband was absent from the family
for a period of time or had left the family without further contact. He provided full
support to his temporary wife until the original husband came back.
May Fourth writings deplored the miserable conditions of women who began to
serve as a tongyangxi at a young age. As in many other regions of China, the
custom for a girl to live and work in her future in-laws family and receive care
while waiting for her future marriage was indeed practiced in the SGN region. On
the other hand, a similar practice for males, though less seen than tongyangxi,
zhannian han , was also not uncommon in this region. In zhannian han,
a boy or young man, generally from a poor family, lived with and worked for his
intended in-laws while waiting for his future bride to grow up. In this way the
girls family, which was comparatively better-off and needed a male laborer, would
take the years of the boy/mans work as payment for the bride price and waive the
betrothal gifts (/ caili) from his family.
Concubinage occurred among rich people who could afford more than one wife,
while polyandry was practiced among poor people.29 This type of marriage
occurred when a husband was incompetent either in physical labor or procreating
ability; his wife could invite another man into the family ( zhaofu yangfu)
to play the role of husband in order to support the family, provide regular intimate
relations, and produce heirs for both sides of the male line.30 In contrast to the
28
Rou Shi, Wei nuli de muqin (A Mother as a Slave) (Shanghai: Shijie Yingyu bianyishe,
1947).
29
Matthew Sommer also comes to the same conclusion in his study on the Qing legal cases
in other parts of China. See Making Sex Work: Polyandry as a Survival Strategy in Qing Dynasty
China, in Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and
Modern China, ed. Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2005), 2954. Moreover, Zhang Zhiyongs study on the Northern China revolutionary base area
during the 1940s also shows a similar situation; see his Huabei kang Ri genjudi funu yundong yu
hun wai xing guanxi (Sexual Affairs and the Womens Movement in Northern China
Revolutionary Base Areas), Kang Ri zhanzheng yanjiu [Studies on the Anti-Japanese War], 1
[2009], 7786).
30
Ge xian youguan de fengsu xiguan, SPA 1557.
May Fourth writers criticism of the Confucian family, the family system and these
heterodox marriage practices in the region functioned as strategies for survival
rather than gender oppression. They did not specifically promote the subjugation
of women; each practice applied to both males and females, though males might
have had more options or opportunities to escape the despair than females did.
Like many other agricultural societies in the world, patriarchal power formed
the basis of the local power structure, in which a senior family member, usually the
father (though sometimes mothers, too), held control over other members of the
family. However, this only describes a static system of patriarchal order; in
practice this power might be compromised, intervened in, and even limited by
other members through participation in specific activities and operations. In both
big tradition and little tradition in different localities, patriarchal power never
operated in its absolute form as described in the works of the May Fourth authors
or of some scholars that view women as an entity oppressed by all males.31
In the marriage practices of the Border Region, this power was embodied in
arranged marriages for minors, both girls and boys. The ages for formal weddings
ranged from thirteen to seventeen for girls and fifteen and up for boys/men, but
parents frequently arranged engagements for their children beginning at age two.
Under this system of arranged marriage at an early age, both girls and boys had to
submit to their parents authority. This engagement was accompanied by betrothal
gifts from the boys family to the girls family as a marker of validation and
consent to the marriage. Therefore, the engagement, accompanied by a series of
ceremonies with various mediators in attendance, formed a written or oral
contract. Like many other types of contracts in the region, the marriage contract
was highly respected and deemed a formal legal document in any dispute. Any
party who abandoned the contract had to offer compensation to the other party. In
this region, any engagement and marriage was customarily the matter of two
families rather than two engaged individuals.32 When the May Fourth discourse,
which pursued the ideal of two individuals free will for a marriage, landed in this
region where family agency was still dominant, the freedom of the individual
was hijacked by and bundled into family agency in practice, thus becoming the
fathers privilege.
Although patriarchy dominated within the family, women were not entirely
powerless victims; instead they were able to carve out certain spaces for
31
Unlike Johnsons view of family as a totally male-dominated domain, Davin objectively
recognizes senior womens privileged position in a patriarchal system (Woman-Work, 4950);
nonetheless, Johnson, in order to employ male domination as a target, presents the division of
males and females as the basic form in the Chinese patriarchal system. To emphasize this point,
she regards matrilocal marriage as a deviation that was formed from womens shame rather
than male obedience (Women, the Family and Peasant Revolution, 12). Nonetheless, the culture
of the SGN region proved it a false description.
32
The documents of SGN Border courts concerning disputes about engagements and
divorces indicate that, as in late imperial times, these disputes were mostly between two or three
families instead of two or three individuals.
194 XIAOPING CONG
themselves.33 First, the widespread custom of female infanticide practiced in many

areas of southern China was not seen in this region. Baby girls were not considered
a burden but as a family treasure. The SGN High Court recorded a number of
cases in which two or three families fought for custody or the residential rights of
young girls. In this region, a wedding marked adulthood for a woman and allowed
her to escape from her parents authority. As adults, some married women tried
every means possible to benefit from the system. The tradition of dividing a
household among brothers after marriage allowed some young women to be in
charge of their own families. Due to the remaining influence of matrilineal family
practices from the steppe culture, as well as the fluidity of the population, young
women had a certain amount of autonomy in this system. Many practices, such as
arranged kidnapping or marriage by capture ( qiang hun) and runaway wives
( taoqi), provided ways for women to resist the domination of patriarchal
authority. At the same time, sexual relations outside of marriage ( da huoji)
and taking lovers ( zhao gan gege) were popular practices and became
outlets for a woman to escape from an unhappy marriage and family difficulties.
Local folk songs passionately affirmed these widespread practices, which had not
been regulated by the state up to the early 1940s.
If we consider the family structure and marriage forms in this region as a
strategy for economic production and survival, then love and sexuality can be
viewed more as individual affairs that partially fell outside the circles of family and
marriage. However, the modern concepts that the May Fourth movement
promoted and the CCPs marriage reform brought became attempts to enclose
the social institutions of marriage and family with love and sexuality within the
same circle, with love as the axis. It was this incompatibility of concepts in
marriage that made the early CCP policy on marriage, though idealistic, more
confusing and seemingly improvised.
THE 1939 REGULATION AND ITS IMPLEMENTATION: THE ECONOMIC

CONFLICT BENEATH MARRIAGE DISPUTES
The Communists began their marriage reform work in 1939 within this social and
cultural setting. The ideological basis of this reform came from both the May
Fourth discourse on women, imbued by the Communists with a strong anti-
traditional and anti-patriarchal significance, and the Marxist-Communist theory
that womens liberation could be achieved through their participation in the
greater cause of human liberation. The CCP expected its policy on hunyin ziyou
to benefit women and thus be welcomed by them. It was hoped that this policy
33
The studies of Dorothy Ko (Teachers of the Inner Chamber: Women and Culture in
Seventeenth-Century China [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994]), Susan Mann (Precious
Records: Women in Chinas Long Eighteenth Century [Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1997]), Patricia Ebrey (The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the
Sung Period [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993]), and Kathryn Bernhardt (Women
and Property in China, 960-1949 [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999]) show that elite
women under the patriarchal system made efforts to carve out some spaces for themselves in
imperial China. By the same token, women of lower social strata and rural women also had the
ability to do the same, but in different ways.
would save thousands of women from suffering in unhappy and loveless

marriages, and from the oppression of the patriarchy. It was within this theoretical
framework that the 1939 marriage regulation was promulgated, which required
marriage to be based on an individuals free will ( zhao benren
zhi ziyou yizhi). It also decreed that either a husband or a wife could file for
divorce, after the couple had exhausted negotiations, if any of the following ten
conditions had occurred, prioritized by their order: (1) bigamy, (2) total
incompatibility of (the couples) emotional relations and their wills, and inability
to live together ( ganqing yizhi genben bu he,
wu fa jixu tongju),34 (3) adultery, (4) spousal abuse, (5) abandonment, (6) criminal
framing of spouse, (7) impotence, (8) incurable disease, (9) lost contact for one
year or more, or (10) other important reasons.35 The liberal principles of the 1939
regulation did indeed embody the early idealism of the Communist revolution
regarding womens liberation and gender equality. The liberal spirit of this
regulation was highlighted by use of the terms free will and emotional
relations/relationship as the basis of marriage and also as the measurement for
divorce. However, these terms overlooked the fact that in the Border Region,
marriage was neither an individual matter nor a question of emotional relations
and free will for individuals. It also failed to foresee later economic conflicts caused
by marriage dissolutions.
Differing from the modern concept that a formal marriage starts from the
moment of either the states or churchs validation of the union between a man and
a woman, in the SGN border societys traditions, a marriage was a long journey
that began with engagement, and the wedding, named guomen ( moving to
[the husbands] household), was viewed as the final establishment of the marriage.
An engagement contract was followed by a process of property transformation
through caili-giving that could last for more than a decade while the engaged
couple was growing up. Nonetheless, the 1939 regulation, backed by the modern
concept of marriage, did not consider engagement to have any legal status, and
therefore did not set up any terms for engagements nor for related issues such as
property disputes.36 For locals, an engagement was almost equated with
marriage;37 a lawsuit brought for breaking an engagement was considered a
marriage dispute as well. Facing this reality, local government cadres and legal
workers did not separate broken engagements from divorce cases, treating the two
34
The Chinese term ganqing is a word containing multiple meanings, but difficult to
express in English. Philip Huang tries to translate it as emotional relations or simply
relationship to indicate the degrees and conditions of this term (see Chinese Civil Justice, Past
and Present, 12n). For convenience, I also adopt this translation, but sometimes also use
emotional affection to fit the context.
35
Shaan-Gan-Ning Bianqu hunyin tiao li, 1939 term 11, in Shaan-Gan-Ning bianqu funu
yundong wenxian ziliao xuan bian, 5456.
36
In fact, the GMD Civil Code gave certain consideration to the status of engagement and its
related presents, but it dealt with betrothal presents as donations in exchange for the donees
trousseau. See Meijer, Marriage Law and Policy, 2627.
37
This is not only a social custom for the SGN society but also a traditional Chinese
marriage practice. See Guo Songyi, Lunli yu shenghuo: Qing dai de hunyin guanxi (Ethics and
Life: Marriage Relations in the Qing) (Beijing: Shangwu yin shu guan, 2000), 12123.
196 XIAOPING CONG
with the same principles and in the same category as divorce until the 1944
regulation began to distinguish between them.38
After the 1939 marriage regulation was promulgated, the divorce rate increased,
as did cases of broken engagements. The record shows 48 marriage-related
disputes among 273 total legal cases in all counties in 1939. In the first six months
of 1941, marriage disputes increased to 71 out of a total of 271.39 In most cases a
woman or her family proposed divorce or the abolishment of an engagement. At
the same time, some male farmers were increasingly voicing their discontent.40
Superficially, these phenomena are easily read as a sign of the realization of
womens liberation through freedom of marriage, or as a sign that conservative
male farmers were upset about the erosion of male domination. However, if we
carefully scrutinize concrete cases of marriage disputes, we find a totally different
picture.
In the 1940s, many marriage disputes, including divorces and abolishment of
engagements, were related to the widespread local custom of betrothal gifts. The
payment of caili varied in terms of time and amount, although the first caili was
certainly paid at the time the engagement was settled. When the formal wedding
date approached, some grooms families provided additional gifts to fill out the
brides dowry; others did not. In some areas the groom-to-bes family had an
obligation to support the bride-to-bes family by offering material and/or manual
help. The first caili was likely to be grain or silver dollars for the brides family,
while additional gifts given to the bride before weddings ( er cheng li) were
mainly clothes, fabrics, cosmetics, jewelry, or personal goods such as quilts,
bedding, washing basins, mirrors, and the like. Although a bride was expected to
bring goods from her natal family to her husbands family, the dowry was always
much smaller compared to the caili. In the late Qing and the early Republican
periods, caili was rather small, since it was only a token of a promise of a marriage
or a deposit for a bride. However, with the deterioration of the rural economy,
natural disasters, famines, and bankruptcy of farmers in the region increasing
beginning in the late 1920s, the amount of caili gradually increased in the 1930s.
To the SGN government, this practice crossed the line into what the marriage
regulation called purchased marriage, causing a serious problem for legal
practices in the 1940s.
The price of caili was driven to an unprecedented level in the 1940s for multiple
reasons. First, the arrival of Communist power in the region brought in a large
male population, including army soldiers, government workers, and war refugees,
that enlarged the gap between the existing imbalanced ratio between males and
38
The statistics collected before 1944 combine both into one category of marriage-related
disputes; in order to determine the nature of the dispute we have to analyze legal documents on a
case-by-case basis. Unfortunately, these cases are scattered in the archival collections. The local
officials also did not distinguish between the two in their reports to superiors, so the number of
divorce cases adopted in previous scholarship citing these reports may not be accurate.
39
Bianqu sifa gongzuo baogao (Report on the Border Legal Works), SPA 15175.
40
Guanyu lihun de zhiyi (Questioning the Issue of Divorce), SPA 465.
females in the population.41 The shortage in the female population consequently

resulted in the skyrocketing price of caili. Moreover, this rapid increase of the
population in a region that was geographically small, economically under-
developed, and lacking in natural resources caused widespread inflation and the
devaluation of currencies, which also contributed significantly to the rising price of
caili. In the early 1930s, the amount of a caili could range from 2 to 50 silver yuan
depending on the area, but was mostly around 10 to 20 yuan. However, by the
middle of the 1940s, the price of the caili went as high as one million to one and a
half million Republican yuan ( fabi42) in Yanan and Eastern Gansu, where
inflation was more serious, while the lowest price was 3000 yuan fabi in Fuxian,
or 200,000 Border Currency yuan ( bianbi) in other places less influenced by
currency devaluation.43
Facing such inflation, most families that had engaged their daughters in the
1920s and 1930s felt that their caili were set too low. Some demanded that
the groom-to-bes family pay a second caili, especially just before the wedding.
The previously optional wedding gifts now became mandatory.44 Moreover, the
amount of these second caili, in contrast to its previously symbolic nature, was
now substantial and included currency, grain, and special gifts for the bride. If the
grooms family refused or could not afford to pay, the wedding was postponed
indefinitely or even cancelled. For the majority of girls families the most
convenient method was to pretend that the first betrothal at a girls young age had
never existed, and then find another family willing to pay the current price for the
41
Local gazettes indicate that the ratio between male and female before the coming of the
Communists was about 5355 percent males and only 4547 percent female of total population.
This rate varied in various locations (see Qingyang diquzhi, 519). The imbalanced sex ratio in
Yanan once reached thirty (male) to one (female) before 1938 and eighteen to one in 1941. With
more female students from cities after 1938, the gap gradually narrowed but still was at eight to
one in 1944. See Zhu Hongzhao, Yanan: Ri chang shenghuo zhong de lishi, 19371947 (Yanan:
Daily Life in History, 19371947) (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2007), 283.
42
Fabi is the paper currency issued by the Republican government in 1935. One silver dollar
supposedly equaled one fabi yuan, but beginning in 1940 it rapidly devalued. In some
Nationalist-controlled regions, it fell to one silver dollar for 1000 fabi yuan in the mid-1940s and
20003000 fabi in the late 1940s. In the Communist-controlled region, fabi seemed to devalue
comparatively slowly. On the other hand, the SGN government also issued its own currency,
bianbi (Border currency) in 1941, attempting to reduce the impact of fabi devaluation while
developing its own currency. Bianbi circulated concurrently with fabi and silver yuan for some
years in most parts of the SGN region, but bianbi gradually replaced fabi and silver yuan in the
middle of the 1940s. The SGN government originally stated that one bianbi was equal to one
fabi. However, inflation in the SGN region eventually stabilized the exchange rate of one fabi
to nine bianbi in the mid-1940s. This situation lasted until 1949. Cf. Huachi xianzhi (Huachi
County Records) (Lanzhou: Gansu renmin chubanshe, 2004), 52830); Huang Zhenglin, Shaan-
Gan-Ning bianqu xiangcun de jingji yu shehui (Rural Economy and Society in the Shaan-Gan-
Ning Border Region) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2006), 10419; and Zhu Hongzhao, Yanan:
Ri chang shenghuo zhong de lishi, 324.
43
SPA 1557, Hunyin wenti yu hunyin tiaoli, 1945 (The Issue of Marriage and the
Marriage Regulation, 1945), SPA 1572.
44
According to archival documents, the second betrothal gifts did not exist until the 1940s
in many areas. It was a practice formed during the time of inflation. See the Guanzhong District
Court: Wei cheng qing mai mai hunyin ruhe chuli (Request Instruction from the High Court on
How to Deal with Purchased Marriages), SPA 1539.
198 XIAOPING CONG
girl at marriageable age.45 The wedding would then be held promptly. By the time
the family of the first fiance discovered this deception, the girl would already have
been married for some time and the money from the second family was already
spent. The family of the first fiance would file a lawsuit against the girls family
while the second grooms family also sued the girls family for cheating. In the
records of the SGN courts a legal category exists titled yi nu liang/duo xu (
/ one girl betrothed to two or more families or two men fighting for one
woman) that reflects such situations.
For example, in 1941 the SGN High Court took a case from the local court of
Ansai County. Two men, Xu Zhiting () and Cao Jingui (), sued Jing
Furong () and his stepdaughter, Feng Runer (), fighting over which
man would have Runer as his wife. Runers biological father, Mr. Feng, had
engaged his three-year-old girl to Xu Zhiting in 1929, receiving 24 silver yuan as a
caili from the Xu family. However, after Mr. Feng passed away (it is unclear
when), his wife, Woman Feng-Liu (), married Jing Furong, and brought
Runer into the Jing family; they then moved from Anding County to Ansai
County in 1936. It was here that Jing Furong found another match, Cao Jingui, for
his stepdaughter and received 40 yuan for this betrothal. In 1937, when the family
finances were declining, Jing Furong sent thirteen-year-old Runer to the Cao
family as a tongyangxi. Two years later a formal wedding was held for Runer and
Jingui. When the news of this marriage traveled back to Runers former residence
in 1940, the Xu family came to Jings family to ask for Runer. When Woman
Feng-Liu acknowledged the original betrothal, the Xus had cause to take Jing and
Cao to court. The Xu family sued Jing and Cao in Ansai County, asking for Runer
to be returned to the Xu family to marry Zhiting. The local court voided both
marriage and engagement based on the fact that Runer had not reached legal
marriageable age. It ruled that once Runer reached eighteen, the legal age for
marriage, she would have right to make a decision to choose her marriage mate.46
Another case, Feng v. Zhang, occurred in 1943 in Huachi County, East Gansu
Region. In 1928 Feng Yangui () betrothed his four-year-old daughter,
Penger (), to Zhang Jincais () son, Zhang Bo (), receiving 10 yuan
as a caili. But in 1942, Feng Yangui refused the Zhangs request for a formal
wedding, and the Zhang family took Feng to the county office for reneging. The
local government, based on the fact that Feng Penger strongly objected to this
engagement,47 voided the betrothal on the basis of the freedom of marriage
policy.48 After breaking this betrothal, Feng Yangui found another family with a
much higher price, but Zhang Jincai discovered this attempt and sued Feng for
45
In English language girls and women have a clear distinctive age line. In the cases of
the Border Region, the distinction between a girl and a woman was decided by her marital status.
Although legal marriageable age was set by the 1939 regulation as the age of eighteen, many local
families still followed traditional customs by marrying their daughters at age of fourteen or
fifteen. Therefore, in the following discussion I use both girls and women to indicate those who
asked for divorce.
46
Cao Jingui v. Jing Furong, SPA 151293.
47
See the Department of Civil Affairs, the SGN Government, Shaan-Gan-Ning bianqu
hunyin wenti huiji, 1943 (A Compilation of Documents on Marriage Issues, 1943), SPA 4-1-65.
48
Ibid.
marriage-for-selling. This engagement failed. In 1943 Feng eventually accepted

another offer of 7000 fabi yuan, plus some expensive fabrics and cotton for his
daughters betrothal. However, before the formal wedding and with Pengers
consent, the Zhang family kidnapped her for marriage. Pengers father sued the
Zhang family for kidnapping and requested that the marriage between Penger and
Zhang Bo be voided. This case was appealed at sub-regional court and to Prefect
Ma Xiwu ( 18981962), who approved Pengers choice. This case later
became famous because it was cited as an example of Ma Xiwus way of
judging49 and served as the prototype for a series of cultural products in the
1940s and 1950s.
In these cases, the girls families and the girls themselves enjoyed government
support. The government policy against arranged and purchased marriage, and the
promotion of freedom of marriage, provided a legal basis for scrapping the
marriage contract without paying a price. A girl, often accompanied by her father,
usually went to the township government ( xiang zhengfu) to demand
dismissal of the original engagement in the name of anti-arranged marriage and
freedom of marriage. Given the continuous inflation of the bride-price, most girls
families had a strong motivation to do so, as the number of cases proves. Also, in
most cases a father needed cooperation from his daughter, since the government
required a clear expression of consent from the girl herself on the specific marriage
case.50
In the cases of annulling an engagement, daughters cooperation with their
fathers was critical, since they also received some rewards from this game. Women
normally had no right to own property under the patriarchal system, but one
exception was their own dowries. The early payment on the engagements had
benefited their fathers and families since the caili were paid with silver yuan and
grain (and in some cases plots of land), but a certain part of the second caili went
directly to the girls for their dowries. This was the only chance for a girl to gain
property and to gain a few luxury goods. If she did not grasp this chance she
could end up owning nothing and having no power in her future husbands family.
It is hard to use high moral standards to judge these womens material demands for
their marriages and engagements. In an economically underdeveloped area such as
the SGN region, women were the foremost victims of poverty. Given this situation,
marriage was the only way to change their existing conditions and to grasp some
measure of material security for their precarious lives.
RURAL MALES WHO LOST BOTH WOMEN AND PROPERTY

Theoretically, the regulation that promoted freedom of marriage and prohibited
purchased marriage benefited both men and women because ideally it allowed men
and women to choose each other on the basis of mutual love while eliminating the
49
Feng v. Zhang, SPA 15842; Ma Xiwu tongzhi de shenpan fangshi (Comrade Ma
Xiwus Way of Judging), Jiefang ri bao (Liberation Daily), March 13, 1944.
50
As it was in the case of Feng v. Zhang, Pengers father brought her to the township office
to express her objection to her previous engagement. Interview with Feng Zhiqin (Penger) on
July 7, 2007.
200 XIAOPING CONG
connection between material gain and marriage. The Communists expected that
young men and women, especially young males from poverty-stricken families,
would embrace this policy, which was in accord with the CCPs revolutionary
principle of the class line. As the previous section demonstrated, young women and
their fathers welcomed this policy for reasons totally different from the original
intent. Contrary to the Communists expectations, the record shows that young
poverty-stricken males vigorously opposed this policy51 because breaking an
engagement without repayment equal to the original value was not simply a
marital dispute, but a financial issue and a question of fairness.
The 1939 marriage regulation failed to address the issue of engagements that
either existed prior to the arrival of Communist power or were carried out privately
between families in the SGN Region, or the property relations behind these
engagements. Although the regulation did include certain terms on dividing
connubial property that favored women, it set up these terms on the assumption that
the property was only held by an existing marital couple, without considering that
property transfers between engaged families could last for over a decade. Thus under
the new marriage practice, male farmers who had paid for their wives had no way to
win the game, especially in a time of economic inflation. A family would spend all of
its assets ( qing jia dang chan) to engage a wife for its son, expecting that
the contract would be honored. However, inflation often caused destitution and the
original contract was also lost. This group of farmers described their situation with
the phrase losing both woman and property (/ ren cai liang kong/shi).
Due to the widespread inflation of the 1940s, the value of returned caili, even with
compensation, was far below its original value and not enough to be payment for a
new wife.52 Moreover, most girls families had already spent the money and had no
way to pay it back. In some cases the original gift included land; this land had been
cultivated by the girls families for years and it was a great hardship to return it to the
grooms families.53 In fact, this situation of losing both threatened the very
survival of this group of poor male farming families.
Statistics collected in 1945 categorized the reasons for abolishing an
engagement.54
Among the reasons listed, physical causes (mental illness, sexual impotence, and
death) made engagements easy to dismiss because they were legitimate reasons in
both local tradition and the revolutionary regulations. Categories eight and nine
also followed the rule that if the fiances absence without contact (including
military soldiers) lasted for a certain number of years (generally three to five years),
the engagement could be dismissed. Although varied, in the remaining reasons for
51
Zenyang jinzhi mai mai hunyin? (How to Stop Purchased Marriages?), SPA 1540. The
poorer a boys family was the larger amount of caili he had to pay to the girls family. Rich
families would pay much less for a bride. This condition related to the bridal familys concern
about her future living conditions.
52
Bianqu tuishi shenpan yuan lianxi huiyi fayan jilu, 5 (Collection of Presentations on the
Legal Conference, Volume 5), SPA 1580.
53
Bianqu tuishi shenpan yuan lianxi huiyi fayan jilu, 7 (Collection of Presentations on the
Legal Conference, Volume 7), SPA 1581.
54
The 1944 marriage regulation eventually set up a term to control the practice of affiances;
the 1945 data thus separated engagement disputes from divorce disputes.
TABLE1. Data from Various Counties on the Dismissal of Engagements, 1944.55

Reasons for requesting Number of Requested by
the dismissal cases
mens side womens
side
1 Instigation of natal family 3 3
( niang jia tiao suo)
2 One girl betrothed to two 4 4
families ( yi nu
liang xu)
3 [Girl] demanding self- 4 4
determination (
yao qiu zi zhu)
4 [Fiance has] mental problems 2 2
( shen jing bing)
5 [Fiance] sexually impotent 1 1
( bu neng ren dao)
6 [Fiance] lied about [his] age 2 2
( yin man nianling)
7 [Girls] aversion to a poor 2 2
fiance ( xian pen)
8 Absent soldier in the Anti- 3 3
Japanese War without
contact ( kang
Ri junren wu xin)
9 Absent fiance without 1 1
contact ( wai
chu wu xin)
10 Fiance deceased ( 1 1
wei hun fu si)
Total 23 23
requesting the dismissal of an engagement, economic motives dominated. The

reasons of one girl betrothed to two families and aversion to a poor fiance
were directly linked to economic motives, while instigation of natal family
involved the natal family demanding more caili or seeking a suitor with a higher
bid. The category demanding self-determination was much more complicated
because it needed to be examined on a case-by-case basis. Many cases indicated
that girls families used this legal rhetoric to conceal their economic motives.
In divorce cases, the property issue was even harder to tackle. The records of the
SGN High Court show that in some divorce cases the girls family sent the bride to
the grooms family to fulfill the engagement contract in order to avoid returning caili
55
SGN High Court: Shaan-Gan-Ning bianqu hunyin wenti yu hunyin tiaoli (Issue of
Marriage and Marriage Regulation in the SGN Border Region, 1945), SPA 1572.
202 XIAOPING CONG
or paying compensation, but a few days after the wedding, when the bride returned
to her natal family for a short break as required by local custom, her family would
refuse to return her to the husbands family.56 In some cases the girls family quickly
engaged the bride to another family. When the husbands family demanded the wife
back, the girls family would immediately file for divorce. Once the government
granted the divorce, the girls family kept most of the caili, and only a small portion
was returned to the grooms family. Also, in many cases, if a girl did not meet the
statutory marriage age of eighteen, the local government simply voided the marriage
or engagement but struggled to deal with the issue of caili.57
A 1942 divorce case in Yanan illustrates this problem. Chen Zhifang (,
wife) married Li Hancheng (, husband) at the age of fourteen, and the two
did not get along. Two years later, Chen filed for a divorce, but Li strongly
opposed it. In court Li explained that in order to marry Chen he had sold the only
plot of land he owned and became impecunious; Chen wanted a divorce without
paying back the money. Li used a phrase prevalent in the region to describe his
situation: he would lose both the woman (wife) and the money. When the court
delivered a divorce verdict and asked Chen to return the money from her betrothal
to Li, Chen replied that Only if the government law stipulates the return of
property at divorce will I do it.58 The SGN government had no law for returning
caili in 1942, and would not until 1944. In this system scrapping a betrothal
contract or requesting a divorce for material motives fell under a loophole in the
law because the local government had no legal basis for ruling on the return of
property transferred during the period of engagement.
Due to the fact that disputes over broken engagements composed a major part of
marriage disputes, the marriage regulation was revised in 1944. The 1944
regulation recognized the legal status of engagements and required the return of
caili at its original value after breaking an engagement.59 Under this term, many
local authorities ordered the girls family to pay an amount of grain ( pei mi)
to the boys family to compensate for losses caused by inflation. In practice,
compensation was difficult to impose and in most cases very little was returned to
the groom-to-bes family. According to 1945 statistics, among a total of seventy-
nine cases requesting engagement dismissal, seven engagements were dismissed
without the return of caili, fifty-nine were dismissed with only the original caili
returned without considering the influence of inflation, and three were dismissed
with returned caili and grain payment as compensation, while ten cases were not
allowed to be dismissed.60
56
Zhang Weijin v. Bai Fenglin, SPA 151332.
57
For example, the case of Zuo Run v. Wang Yinsuo. See Cong Xiaoping, Zuo Run su
Wang Yinsuo: 20 shiji 40 niandai Shaan-Gan-Ning Bianqu de funu, hunyin yu guojia jiangou
(Zuo Run v. Wang Yinsuo: Women, Marriage and State-Building in the 1940s Shaan-Gan-Ning
Border Region), in Kaifang shidai (Open Times), 10 (October 2009), 6279.
58
Chen v. Li, SPA 151340.
59
Xiu zheng Shaan Gan Ning bianqu hunyin zanxing tiaoli (A Revised Provisional
Regulation on Marriage in the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region), Shaan-Gan-Ning bianqu funu
yundong wenxian ziliao xuan bian, 19294.
60
SGN High Court: Shaan-Gan-Ning bianqu hunyin wenti yu tiaoli, SPA 1572.
In reality, the requirement for compensation created more problems than it

solved. First, many rural families were not willing to accept the return of caili and
compensation as a solution because even with the compensation, it was still not
enough for a family to pay for a new wife for its son, especially in a time of rapid
inflation. Second, this practice invited even more protest than before, because
complaints now came from both sides.61 Third, due to the fact that the rate of
inflation varied by region, the amount of grain to be paid to the grooms family
was difficult to determine, especially since some caili included labor services hard
to calculate. In the negotiation process, government officials or court workers had
to serve as mediators, and compensation amounts were included in the legal
settlements. Fourth, when certain girls families refused to pay compensation,
government officials had to carry out the implementation of the verdict, but it was
difficult for the short-handed government of the time. In some cases, girls fathers
simply fled the governments jurisdiction to avoid paying the compensation.
Moreover, serving as mediators put government officials in an awkward position.
In theory, the government prohibited purchased marriage, but in practice, they
were helping the two sides of the dispute set the price for a marriage/betrothal.
This practice led the villagers to believe that the government allowed purchased
marriage and thus worked against the ending of arranged and purchased
marriages.62 After 1944, the cases of buying and selling marriages increased
instead of decreased for this reason.63 On the other hand, if the government did
not rule for compensation it would encourage more girls families to abort
engagements for material profit while being unfair to those who paid for marriage.
Finally, once the 1944 regulation established the terms of compensation, some
county courts sought a quick solution by approving all requests for engagement
dismissal and divorce with the female side paying the compensation regardless of
the reason.64 This practice also caused great concern for the High Court.
In 1946, to get out of this dilemma and to avoid malpractice of the law, the High
Court called a halt to the practice of repaying grains compensation.65
Correspondingly, it issued a revision to the 1944 regulation that required
returning the caili after breaking an engagement.66 In the new 1946 regulation, the
High Court composed a lengthy explanation which provided a practical definition
of buying/selling marriage and made a distinction between a caili as the local
custom of gift-giving and token for marriage consent from a caili as a buying/
selling marriage. The explanation stated that gift-giving caili ought to be returned
to fiances family after the engagement was aborted. The explanation also defined
a purchased marriage by a caili amount so large that it would make a difference to
61
Ibid.
62
SGN High Court: Wei chuli hunyin anjian zhong bu de zai you nu fang pei mi (Instruction
on Marriage Cases: It Should No Longer Make the Womans Side Repay Grains), SPA 15365.
63
SGN High Court: Shaan-Gan-Ning bianqu hunyin wenti yu hunyin tiaoli, SPA 1572.
64
Wubao xian sifa chu minshi panjueshu (A Collection of Civil Adjudication of Wubao
County Court), SPA 15365.
65
SGN High Court: Shaan-Gan-Ning bianqu hunyin wenti yu hunyin tiaoli, SPA 1572.
66
Shaan-Gan-Ning Bianqu hunyin zanxing tiaoli (The Marriage Regulation of the SGN
Border Region, 1946), in Shaan-Gan-Ning bianqu funu yundong wenxian ziliao xuan bian (xu
bian) (A Documentary Collection on the SGN Womens Movement, Continuation) (Xian:
Shaanxi Provincial Womens Federation [compiled and printed], 1985), 42224.
204 XIAOPING CONG
a familys financial condition. Once a purchased marriage was identified, the local
authority could confiscate the major part of the caili for the commonweal and only
a small part would be returned to the grooms family.67 The intention of this
regulation and its explanation meant to legitimate a local marriage custom while
restricting the mercenary marriages that benefited girls parents.
FROM FREEDOM OF MARRIAGE TO SELF-DETERMINED MARRIAGE

The argument that promoting hunyin ziyou would benefit women was only
partially true in these cases. It did indeed benefit women in some ways, but not in
the way that policymakers had originally intended. Legal documents indicate that
the great majority of engagement dismissals and divorce cases were indeed
proposed by the womans side ( nu fang; see above table), a phenomenon that
could be easily read as a triumph of womens demands for free marriage and
womens resistance to arranged marriages.
In fact, the term nu fang in Chinese is a fully contextualized concept. In the
reality of the 1940s SGN region, most womens families or parentsnot
individual women themselvesrepresented nu fang. Though in some rare cases
women represented themselves on paper, they could also have been influenced by
their families and/or third parties. When a man, especially a father, represented his
daughter as the womans side, he, as head of the family, would put the familys
survival ahead of a daughters happiness. In the best-case scenario, some womens
families hoped to gain more money to either improve family conditions or pay off
debts. This was the situation in the 1946 case of Xu Shengyou v. Ma Fugui, in
which Xus recently widowed daughter was sold by her father for more than one
million bianbi yuan in order to pay the family debt.68
In the worst-case scenario, a father, brother, or influential third party tried to sell
a woman to support his bad habits. Since the late Qing up to the 1950s, many rural
Chinese men had fallen into opium-smoking or gambling. In addition, rural
communities also had groups of idlers who did not want to engage in productive
work in the fields.69 These idlers or rogues were always looking for the
opportunity to make money without laboring, such as in the case of Zuo Run v.
Wang Yinsuo.70 When this group of males acted in the name of nu fang, the fact
that the womens side officially proposed divorce or broke up an arranged
engagement became a less accurate indicator of womens liberation.
Under this situation, the actual beneficiaries of this policy were the families of
the girls, especially the father and/or an influential third party (mostly womens
male relatives). It did not change the structure of patriarchal domination and did
not empower women; rather, it allowed property to be moved from grooms
67
SGN High Court: Shaan-Gan-Ning bianqu hunyin tiaoli jieshi (An Explanation of the
SGN Marriage Regulation, 1945), SPA 1572. This explanation was a document prepared by
the High Court at the 1945 legal conference of the Border Region for the forthcoming 1946
regulation.
68
SPA 151574.
69
Discussed in the case of Wang Mingxuan v. Liu Zhiban (SPA 1529) and the divorce case
of Chen Yu (SPA 15842).
70
Cong Xiaoping, Zuo Run su Wang Yinsuo.
families to brides families. Even worse, this policy in fact reinforced patriarchal
control over girls/women by encouraging them to collaborate with their fathers in
order to receive material gain while fathers/third parties used these gains to
manipulate the girls/women. This policy caused new injustices rather than
liberation of women because it reinforced fathers control over their daughters.
The consequences of this policy were pointed out by a contemporary legal
practitioner, Dang Lingquan (), who in 1946 wrote to the chief judge of the
SGN High Court, Ma Xiwu, regarding the issue of buying/selling marriage. In the
letter, he described some cases he had dealt with that were very similar to those
mentioned above. One case he detailed involved a father who betrothed his
daughter and received caili, then urged his daughter to go to the government for
her freedom. Dang said that he had suspicions about the girls motive for ending
the engagement and tried to persuade her to not listen to her father regarding
participation in the practice of purchased marriage, but the girl swore that it was
she who wanted her freedom. He then had no choice but to void the engagement;
the father immediately set up another engagement for a much higher price. Dang
was very disappointed, stating that the so-called freedom of marriage was not
truly free, but only free superficially. The daughter only sought to break the
engagement because her father, seeking more money, led her to do so.71
In fact, the term freedom of marriage also proved to be misleading. Several
decades ago, Paul Cohen pointed out that in the Chinese language the term
liberty/freedom ( ziyou) has connotation of license or lawlessness.72
Especially when it is taken out of its previous intellectual and urban context and
put into the SGN social and cultural setting, this term can be understood as doing
whatever about a marriage. In the implementation of hunyin ziyou, the
prerequisite is the existence of an individual wishing to exercise his or her freedom,
which was not the case in this region. Due to the fact that marriage in the Border
Region was conducted as a family matter and the term hunyin ziyou did not
clearly indicate whose freedom was at stake, fathers customarily acted in the name
of freedom and benefited from it amid economic inflation. It was this
understanding of ziyou that caused tremendous problems in the legal practice
of dealing with marriage disputes in which farmers, mostly girls fathers or the
women themselves, argued with local officials and asked for their ziyou.73 The
legal documents indicate that the High Court and local courts frequently tried to
clarify the term by stressing that ziyou did not mean doing anything without
restraint and that a freedom out of law is not real freedom (
chu hu falu zhi wai zhi ziyou, bu neng renwei zhenzheng
zhi ziyou).74 We can see the cultural differences underlying the misunderstanding
of the term.
71
Dang Lingquan, Guanyu sifa gongzuo gei Ma yuanzhang de yi feng xin (A Letter to
Chief-judge Ma Regarding Some Legal Cases), SPA 1540.
72
Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent
Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 14.
73
Cong, Zuo Run su Wang Yinsuo, 6279.
74
Sun Shanwen v. Wang Shenggui, SPA 151495; Lian Shenghai v. He Xianglin, SPA
151407.
206 XIAOPING CONG
Beginning in 1942, government cadres and judges began to realize these

problems, though the political rhetoric showed only a slight change at the time. By
1943, the SGN government was overwhelmed with complaints from villagers,
local cadres, and local legal practitioners,75 which led to a revised regulation
promulgated in 1944 and again in 1946. In both marriage regulations, this clause
was changed to on the principle of ones self-willingness ( yi ziyuan
wei yuanze).76 In English there seems little difference between ziyou yizhi (
free will) and ziyuan ( self-willingness), but in Chinese the former
implies a much more open possibility, while the latter signifies a willingness
toward a more specific action by the actor self, thus narrowing the possibility
hinted at by the phrase hunyin ziyou. This term also implies that the focus of
action was on a specific actor, while freedom of marriage did not give a clear
indication.
There were corresponding changes in the legal practice. From 1942 on, many
court documents frequently used the term zizhu ( self-determination) as the
principle for solving marriage disputes.77 The phrase zizhu underscored
womens decisions concerning the engagement and which man they would like
to be with if there was any dispute among two or more families. More and more
legal workers used zizhu instead of ziyou and emotional relations as their basis
for settlement. By developing an understanding of the certain autonomy that
women enjoyed under the patriarchal system and their demands for making the
decisions about their marriages, the courts tried to break down the father-daughter
alliance and win women over to their side. Correspondingly, a changing legal
strategy was adopted that was intended to help women in marriage disputes. In
those cases in which one girl was betrothed to two or three families, local legal
workers would first question the girl/woman in a separate room for investigation.
Free from the gazes of her father, husband, or any third party, a girl/woman was
often more willing to express her true wishes about which man she wanted to be
with. Legal records of the SGN High Court show a broad implementation of this
strategy in courts.
The case Gu v. Cai and Bai exemplified this practice. Woman Bai ( Bai shi)
was engaged to Gu Jiayou () in 1931 and soon became a tongyangxi of the
Gu family. After fifteen-year-old Gu Jiayou left home as a migrant worker in 1935,
his older brother engaged Woman Bai to Cai Mingqi () for 50 silver yuan,
and the wedding was held in 1939. One day in 1941 on the streets of the Dingbian
County seat, Woman Bai ran into Gu Jiayou, who now was a revolutionary soldier
in the local military unit. Woman Bai initiated a greeting by asking if Gu
recognized her and still wanted her. When Gu responded affirmatively and then
brought her to the local government office to register for marriage, this attempt
was prevented by the government official. A few days later the Cais heard the news
75
Hunyin wenti cailiao (Materials on the Problems of Marriages), SPA 466.
76
Xiu zheng Shaan-Gan-Ning bianqu hunyin zanxing tiaoli, 1944 (Revised Provisional
Marriage Regulation of SGN, 1944), Shaan-Gan-Ning bianqu funu yundong wenxian ziliao
xuan bian, 19294.
77
SGN High Court, Panjueshu jicheng, SPA 1529.
and came to fight for Bai; her case thus became a legal dispute between two men
over a woman. Moreover, this case almost caused a military revolt in which Gu
and his fellow soldiers, led by the unit officer, besieged the local government office
asking for a favorable ruling. The petition was even sent up to Gao Gang (
19051954), the then local political and military leader, and Xie Juezai (,
18841971), the vice-chair of the SGN Border Region Council.78 However, after
stirring up all these troubles, when the court asked Woman Bai individually which
man she wanted to be with, Bai decided to return to Cai Mingqi, regardless of Gus
wishes. Thus the court ruled according to Bais decision and the case was closed.79
The aforementioned two cases of one girl/woman betrothed to two families also
followed the same principle and used the same court technique. By practicing self-
determination, legal practitioners and government officials hoped to gradually
exclude the influence and motive of parents or third parties on girls/women
regarding their marriage decisions, and thus respect womens choices about their
own marriages.
In divorce cases, the High Court also recognized that both material motives and
parental domination complicated the issues at hand. In 1942, the High Court
instructed the county courts deliberating on divorce cases that they should not apply
the term of freedom of marriage mechanically ( bu
neng jixie de ban yong hunyin ziyou yuanze).80 Therefore, from 1943 on various
local courts and the High Court tried to understand the motivation behind divorces
by putting them into various categories. Physical and mental disabilities, a long-time
absent husband, and family abuse were legitimate conditions for approving a
divorce, but incompatibility of emotional relations required much more detailed
information and a courts deliberation. At the same time, the courts also listed other
conditions that were not described in the 1939 regulation, such as a [wifes] aversion
to her poor husband and preference for a richer [suitor] ( xian pin ai fu),
and [parents/third-party] instigation (/ tiao/jiao suo).81
In a corresponding discussion among local courts in 1943, the judges reached a
consensus on the principles for approval and rejection of divorce cases in addition
to those listed in the 1939 regulation. They agreed that a girls/womans request
for divorce must be ruled out if it was instigated by her parents. A divorce
motivated by aversion to a poor husband and/or her parents instigation should
not be allowed, while a divorce request based on proven family violence should be
granted.82 In order to detect the true reasons for a divorce and the real problems in
a marriage, the judges had to talk to the woman face-to-face during investigations
and deal with each divorce on a case-by-case basis by analyzing the motive. In
doing so, they tried to exclude parental and third-party interests from the divorce.
On the other hand, legal practitioners and Communist cadres increasingly
realized that a divorce was not a simple solution for women in the region. After a
78
Bai Zhimin zhi Gao Gang han (Bai Zhimins Letter to Gao Gang), SPA 4-2-170.
79
Gu v. Cai and Bai, SPA 151293.
80
High Court: Zhishi xin 3 hao (Instructive Letter Number 3), SPA 1533.
81
Hunyin wenti yu hunyin tiaoli, SPA 1572.
82
Ge xian taolun chuli lihun anjian jueding banfa ji hunyin zhengce, 1943 (County Courts
Discussion on Dealing with Divorce Cases and Policy on Marriage, 1943), SPA 1543.
208 XIAOPING CONG
divorce, even if it came about because of her husbands abuse, the girl/woman
would immediately fall back into the hands of her parents and become the object
for the next arranged marriage for a higher price. Ultimately, for true freedom of
marriage, the state had to help women win economic independence and improve
their position in the family. In February 1943, the CCP Central Party Committee
instructed that womens work should be redirected to organizing women to engage
in economic productivity.83 Around the March 8 International Womens Day that
year, Cai Chang ( 19001990), one of the important women leaders in
Yanan, published an article responding to the Central Committees call. It
emphasized the importance of women winning their economic independence and
encouraged women to be involved in productive work in handcrafts and
agriculture.84 Through working in the fields, the partys female workers believed,
women would become an important part of the labor force and would earn their
independence so that they would not need to depend on men to provide their food
and labor, which would eventually change the power relations in the family.85 This
topic, however, goes beyond the focus of this article.
CONCLUSION
The 1940s marriage reform was just one stage of the transformation of Chinese
society and the realization of the goal of gender equality in the twentieth century.
After the radical 1939 regulation was put into practice, the CCP became
increasingly aware of the conditions under which the patriarchal family continued
to dominate marriage practices. Parents twisted the sketchy policy to their benefit
rather than that of their daughters. In legal practice, government officials
eventually recognized that they needed the cooperation of women in order to
carry out their program of marriage reform and that first they needed to break
down the father-daughter alliance and win over the women.
Therefore, the idea of marriage reform in the SGN gradually shifted away from
its focus on calling for freedom of marriage and toward the granting of power to
women in marriage decisions. The CCP introduced a new principle of self-
determination into the legal process. In this shift, the power to choose ones
marriage mate gradually moved from the parents into the hands of young women,
as well as young men. This change had a profound influence that extended to
national legal practices in the post-1949 era, and eventually shaped the right of
self-determination in marriage ( hunyin zizhu quan) in the PRC Civil
Code in 1986. However, freedom of marriage remained a general and value-
oriented principle, while self-determination is the de facto right of individuals in
83
Zhongguo Gongchandang zhongyang weiyuanhui guanyu kang Ri genjudi muqian funu
gonzuo fangzhen de jueding (The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Partys Decision
on the Recent Development of Womens Work in Various Revolutionary Base Areas), Shaan-
Gan-Ning bianqu funu yundong wenxian ziliao xuan bian, 16264.
84
Cai Chang, Yingjie funu gongzuo de xin fangxiang (Facing the New Direction of
Womens Work), Shaan-Gan-Ning bianqu funu yundong wenxian ziliao xuan bian, 16771.
85
Regarding women in the Great Production Campaign for their economic independence,
see Stranahan, Yanan Women and the Communist Party, 5886.
marriage practice.86 After more than four decades of struggle and change, the
urban-born and imported ideal of freedom of marriage and the local principle
based on legal practices in rural communities of self-determined marriage
eventually reached a reconciliation that has changed marriage customs and
practices in twentieth-century China.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My deepest gratitude to the Fulbright Research Scholar Grant and NEH-funded ACLS/
ARHC Grant of 20082009 for sponsoring archival work of this research project. An early
version of this article was presented under another title at the International Workshop on
Across and Beyond: The Regeneration of May Fourth Scholarship from Transnational and
Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, organized by the Rice University Chao Center for Asian
Studies, Rice University (Houston, March 1820, 2010). I am very grateful to all comments
made by the participants of the workshop, especially those of Drs. Michela Duranti and
Anne Chao, and Professors Tani Barlow, Wang Hui, Nanxiu Qian, Tim Weston, Robert
Culp, and other attendants. My special gratitude to Professors Ben Elman, Gail Hershatter,
Richard Smith, and John Hart who have read my draft carefully and offered me very
valuable feedback. This article was also presented to a reading group in my department at
University of Houston in which Professors Landon Storrs and Natalia Milanesio also made
very important comments on an early version. I appreciate their help and support. I also
would like to express my appreciation to two anonymous reviewers whose important
comments and insightful suggestions for revision made this article much stronger than
before.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR
Xiaoping Cong is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at University of
Houston. She is the author of a monograph, Teachers Schools and the Making of the
Modern Chinese Nation-State, 18971937 (Toronto: University of British Columbia Press,
2007), and other articles published in both Chinese and English journals.
Correspondence to: Xiaoping Cong. Email: xcong@Central.UH.EDU
86
Hunyin ziyou yu hunyin zizhu quan de qubie (The Difference Between Freedom of
Marriage and the Right of Self-Determination), Hunyin falu wang, www.lihun99.com/jh/hyzzq/
1007011263.html (accessed August 8, 2011).
Copyright of Twentieth-Century China is the property of Maney Publishing and its content
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Twentieth-Century China, 38.

3, 184209, October 2013

FROM FREEDOM OF MARRIAGE TO SELF-

Freedom of marriage ( hunyin ziyou) was an important component of

# Twentieth-Century China 2013 DOI: 10.1179/1521538513Z.00000000026

Based on analysis of legal cases involving marriage disputes from recently

RETHINKING THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY REVOLUTIONARY DISCOURSE

populations by establishing sub-regional, county, and township governments. In

( tongyangxi),15 buying/selling marriage ( mai mai hunyin),16

THE CULTURAL AND SOCIAL SETTING OF MARRIAGE REFORM

The forms of marriage varied based on economic conditions. Monogamy was

themselves.33 First, the widespread custom of female infanticide practiced in many

THE 1939 REGULATION AND ITS IMPLEMENTATION: THE ECONOMIC

would save thousands of women from suffering in unhappy and loveless

females in the population.41 The shortage in the female population consequently

marriage-for-selling. This engagement failed. In 1943 Feng eventually accepted

RURAL MALES WHO LOST BOTH WOMEN AND PROPERTY

TABLE1. Data from Various Counties on the Dismissal of Engagements, 1944.55

requesting the dismissal of an engagement, economic motives dominated. The

In reality, the requirement for compensation created more problems than it

FROM FREEDOM OF MARRIAGE TO SELF-DETERMINED MARRIAGE

Beginning in 1942, government cadres and judges began to realize these

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