Chapter 5 analyzes how mineral resources affect local provision of public goods. Through case studies and statistical analysis, it shows that local governments in resource-rich regions tend to spend less on human capital-developing public goods, including education and health care, due to the diminished demand for labor, the myopic decision-making of both citizens and officials, and the shedding of government responsibilities onto mining enterprises. On the other hand, wary of the tension between mining industries and local citizens and driven by the pressure to preserve social stability, the local governments in resource-rich regions spend more fiscal revenue on social security benefits for disadvantaged citizens. The redistribution of the resource wealth from resource capital to labor partially compensates for the latter’s welfare losses. Overall, while resource-rich regions have weak incentives to invest in human capital development, they do spend more on redistributive policies to redress popular grievance and ameliorate resource-triggered social conflicts.

The first part of this chapter is devoted to a computational analysis of judicial discourse in written court decisions. Chinese judges ignored domestic violence allegations in the process of denying divorce petitions. When often justified doing so on ideological, moral, and therapeutic grounds. Although divorce litigation was rife with allegations of domestic violence, they had no discernable effect on the character of judicial discourse in court holdings. Regardless of domestic violence claims, judges focused on couples’ reconciliation potential and provided paternalistic and patronizing relationship advice. Judicial discourse was gendered insofar as judges directed such gaslighting strategies toward women more than toward men. The second part of this chapter is devoted to an analysis of judicial decision-making: (1) the extent and nature of gender inequality in case outcomes, and (2) the effect of domestic violence allegations on case outcomes. Judges took the claims and interests of men more seriously than those of women. Domestic violence did not move the needle toward divorce. Victims of domestic violence, mostly women, were revictimized by judges who ignored their claims.

This opening chapter raises the research questions that motivate this book. It briefly introduces the state of mineral exploration in China and the ensuing impacts on the Chinese economy and society and pinpoints the puzzling existence of a contained resource curse in China. After critically reviewing the existing debate on the resource curse, it proposes an original theory about how mineral resources affect state–capital–labor relations, which can explain the empirical observations in China. This chapter lays out the roadmap of the whole book and explains the research methods and data sources for the empirical analysis in the following chapters.

This chapter picks up where the previous one left off. Included in courts’ toolkit of coping strategies to the problem of caseload pressure is the routine practice of denying first-time divorce petitions and granting them on subsequent attempts. The divorce twofer is a pressure release valve for courts. Denying divorce petitions helps judges clear their dockets more efficiently and thus improves their performance evaluation scores. By enhancing judicial efficiency, the divorce twofer greases the wheels of justice and helps judges clear their dockets, often at the cost of injustice. The benefits judges gain from denying first-attempt petitions are clear: less onerous pretrial and trial formalities, shorter trials, and briefer decisions. China’s judicial clampdown on adjudicated divorce is, more than anything else, courts’ response to rapidly expanding volumes of litigation. China’s ideology of family preservation, which has deep roots but which has been further elevated since 2012, helps enable and justify the judicial clampdown on divorce.

This book chronicles and explains Chinese judges’ tendency to deny divorce petitions. This tendency has intensified beginning in the mid-2000s in a process I call the judicial clampdown on divorce. Most divorce petitions in China are filed by women, and about one-third include allegations of domestic violence. In their determination to deny divorce petitions, judges have generally ignored plaintiffs’ allegations of marital abuse. In so doing, they have subverted China’s domestic laws and international commitments protecting gender equality and women’s physical security. This book is about decoupling in two senses of the word. Decoupling, the book’s title, refers both to the decoupling of married couples and to the decoupling of legal practices from legal promises. This chapter zooms in to the organization and operation of the basic-level courts tasked with handling China’s divorce litigation, as well as to the involved actors, including litigants, judges, and legal advocates. It also zooms out from courts and litigation by situating them in the broader landscape of divorce processes.

In this chapter, I demonstrate that Chinese civil justice became increasingly perfunctory as a response to swelling caseloads. As the volume of litigation mushroomed beginning in the mid-2000s, the population of frontline judges handling cases remained stable and even declined after a judge quota reform imposed a hard cap on the number of judges a court could appoint. Aggravating the challenge of appointing judges in sufficient numbers has been the challenge of retaining judges. Insofar as judges could not be recruited in greater numbers and court cases multiplied relentlessly, judicial efficiency gains became the only way out of the problem widely referred to as “many cases, few judges.” China’s clogged courts innovated by deputizing assistant judges, expanding the scope of the simplified procedure, and increasing lay assessor participation. Courts in Zhejiang adopted these coping strategies earlier and more aggressively than courts in Henan. The efficiency gains for courts and judges have come at the expense of due process for litigants, particularly female litigants.

China’s judicial clampdown on divorce has diverted marital disputes into the criminal justice system. When judges failed to protect battered women, domestic violence sometimes escalated to criminal battery or homicide. When judges ignored and subverted the law by routinely denying divorce petitions, divorce cases sometimes transformed into criminal cases after abusive husbands murdered their wives and after abused wives, in self-defense, murdered their abusive husbands. Endemic failure on the part of courts and the police to uphold their legal mandates to protect abuse victims has cost lives. So far, China’s criminal courts appear not to recognize domestic violence as a sufficiently mitigating factor to merit probation, much less acquittal, in homicide cases. In trials of women charged with killing their abusive husbands, criminal courts have steadfastly eschewed the concept of “battered woman syndrome,” and have therefore been averse to acquit—or even to sentence to probation in lieu of prison time—the very women they affirmed to be victims of domestic violence. Nonetheless, reforms introduced in 2015 have clearly turned the tide toward leniency in sentencing.

In addition to summarizing the key findings in this book, this concluding chapter draws also out their theoretical and methodological implications. From a theoretical standpoint, marital decoupling in China sheds light on institutional decoupling – the extent to which and reasons why legal systems that bear the symbolic hallmarks of global legal norms subvert them in practice. Michael Lipsky’s theory of street-level bureaucracy helps illuminate how and why Chinese judges created bottom-up legal and policy substitutes for the top-down domestic laws and international legal commitments they sidelined and subverted. From a methodological standpoint, macro-comparative cross-national research designed to assess the local impact of the global diffusion of law and rights are limited in their ability to do so if they cannot observe judicial decision-making and the institutional forces shaping it.

Quantitative analyses of child custody determinations reaffirm and build on findings reported in previous chapters. Just as domestic violence allegations did not increase the likelihood that courts granted women’s divorce requests, they likewise did not increase the likelihood that courts granted child custody to marital abuse victims. Owing to the dominant rural practice of patrilocality, fathers were more likely than mothers to have physical possession of their children. As a result, judges rewarded rural men with child custody for beating their wives. Judges supported the patriarchal family in additional ways. Rural courts tended to grant custody of only-sons to fathers. In rural areas, mothers’ best chances for child custody came from multiple children and from only-daughters. In cases involving siblings, courts frequently split them up between the parents. In cases of mixed-sex siblings, courts typically granted custody of sons to fathers and custody of daughters to mothers. Fathers’ advantages in child custody determinations were limited to rural areas, which accounted for most child custody determinations. Urban courts, by contrast, favored mothers over fathers.