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.

By routinely denying divorce petitions when plaintiffs file them for the first time, judges extend a judicial process of a few months into a litigation repeat that typically drags on for over a year. When plaintiffs return to court for another try, judges tend to grant their refiled petitions. I refer to this routine practice as the “divorce twofer” because it rewards judges in several ways. This chapter offers explanations for the divorce twofer and why litigants in general and female plaintiffs in particular have borne the brunt of it. The divorce twofer conserves judicial resources; judges save considerable time and effort by denying divorce petitions. Heavy caseloads and performance evaluation systems that reward judicial efficiency have thus incentivized judges to deny first-attempt divorce petitions. Nationwide ideological calls to preserve marriage have further reinforced judges’ incentives to deny first-attempt divorce petitions and provided official justification for their tendency to do so. Enduring patriarchal cultural values help explain why judges have clamped down harder on women than on men, which is to say why the divorce twofer disproportionately targets women.

In contrast to the benefits that capital enjoys, Chapter 3 shows in detail the largely negative impacts of mineral extraction on labor. Based on qualitative evidence on the working conditions and employment opportunties in mining industries, it reveals that resource boom in general does not benefit common citizens as the labor force. Moreover, mining industries generate various negative externalities to local communities, which impose heavy financial and health costs on local citizens. Statistical analysis corroborates the empirical observations and shows that resource abundance diminishes employment opportunities in not only high-tech but also labor-intensive industrial sectors and represses labor income in both urban and rural areas. The findings suggest that the resource sector can be characterized as pro-capital and anti-labor, which generates profound implications for social equality and stability.

Many Chinese courts started posting their written decisions online in the 2000s, and all have been required to do so since 2013. This book is the product of a computational (a.k.a. “big data”) approach to analyzing a collection of documents far too large to code manually. In this chapter, I document the automated process of collecting and coding almost 150,000 written divorce decisions from two Chinese provinces, Henan and Zhejiang. Despite scholarly concerns about the possibility of systematic disclosure bias, I demonstrate that online collections of Chinese court decisions are well suited for the study of adjudicated divorce outcomes prior to October 1, 2016, when the Supreme People’s Court prohibited the online publication of divorce decisions. I describe my method of constructing and assessing the accuracy of the two key outcome measures at the heart of this book: the court ruling to grant or deny the petition and the court ruling to grant or deny child custody. I then describe how I constructed and assessed the accuracy of the key measures I use to analyze judicial decision-making in general and gender disparities in judicial outcomes in particular.

This chapter introduces China’s formal legal divorce rights, standards, and procedures, which align closely with global norms concerning the protection of gender equality and women’s physical security. China’s legal standard for divorce is the breakdown of mutual affection, which can be established on the basis of irreconcilable differences, physical separation, or statutory wrongdoing such as domestic violence. Only exceedingly rarely, however, have Chinese judges granted divorces on fault-based grounds. In recognition of difficulties abuse victims often face proving their allegations of domestic violence, Chinese law relaxes evidentiary standards in domestic violence cases. Judges nonetheless tend to disaffirm domestic violence allegations on evidentiary grounds. Defendants are absent from a sizeable proportion of divorce trials because they choose to opt out or because their whereabouts are unknown. Judges are more inclined to grant divorces when defendants cannot be found. Judges rarely grant divorces when defendants withhold their consent to divorce. They typically treat a defendant’s unwillingness to divorce as proof that mutual affection has not broken down.

Domestic violence allegations were pervasive in divorce litigation and unimportant to judges. The viciousness of some of the incidents of marital abuse women reported in their divorce petitions boggles the mind. And yet, judges almost uniformly disregarded domestic violence allegations. They took advantage of legal ambiguity to gaslight female plaintiffs whose divorce petitions included claims of domestic violence. Judges sidelined plaintiffs’ claims of spousal wrongdoing by holding that mutual affection had not broken down and that reconciliation remained possible. Even in the face of horrific and often well-documented claims of domestic violence, judges justified their adjudicated denials of divorce petitions by citing the voluntary nature and duration of litigants’ courtship, the duration of their marriage, the fact that they produced children, defendants’ apologies for abusing plaintiffs, and, above all, defendants’ unwillingness to divorce.