Page 166 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE FAMILY 153
Who stands to gain from the trend towards borrowing, remitting and investing marital
payments in new housing? At first glance, the answer seems obvious. In contributing
towards a son’s marriage and housing for his family, parents transfer a substantial amount
of family wealth to their male offspring. As most brides move to the houses owned by
their husbands or his parents, it stands to reason that their right to occupation might well
be conditional on their maintenance of good marital relations (Wang 1999; Zhao 2001).
And as in the past, so today discriminatory inheritance practices tend to favour male
beneficiaries (Davis 2000). In short, young men appear to gain most from housing
investments.
To some extent, the discriminatory impact of such customary practice is mitigated by
legislation. Women’s equal rights to property are spelled out in the Chinese Constitution
and a raft of civil and family law, including the recent Law on the Protection of Women’s
Rights. The Law on Contracting Village Farmland and the Inheritance Law grant women
the right to contract land and house sites, and to own, inhabit, inherit and benefit from
joint family property. The Inheritance Law also provides that spouses’ inheritance rights
take priority over the rights of children, parents and siblings. As women tend to be the
primary caregivers in families, their interests are represented in the stipulation that family
members who care for property owners should be recompensed from their estate.
On the other hand, legislation that individualises property rights may have some
negative implications for women’s claims to marital property. Ironically, this is the case with
Articles 17, 18 and 19 of the revised Marriage Law of 2001. Unless husband and wife sign
a written agreement to the contrary, the property owned by each party before marriage
remains their personal property, while all income from wages, businesses, agricultural
production and intellectual property, and assets, inheritance and gifts obtained during the
marriage become the joint property of husband and wife. Yet as I have pointed out, in
many cases young women make no financial contribution towards the construction of
their post-marital residence because they prefer to marry a man who is already in
possession of a new house. Although marriage to a propertied man promises a woman a
life initially free of housing debt, in the absence of a document conferring joint
ownership, it confers on her no rights in her husband’s house.
Two factors might counterbalance the potentially adverse effects on women of this
individualisation of property rights. First is the instruction, in Article 39 of the Marriage
Law, that in adjudicating property disputes in divorce cases courts must evaluate the
needs of all parties and ‘follow the principle of favouring the children and the wife’. From
the fact that around 70 per cent of divorce cases are pressed by women, many of whom
are rural residents disgruntled about property issues, one can assume that at least some
village women have confidence that courts will indeed protect their interests (Shanghai
Star, 10 October 2000; People’s Daily, 6 November 2001).
The second factor is the capacity and willingness of young women to negotiate their
housing entitlements as part of a marital agreement. Consider the disparate routes by
which two informants, Aihua and her prospective daughter-in-law, Jieming, achieved
home ownership. There is no denying that Aihua had worked hard to achieve her own
status as a homeowner. I had observed her slaving, saving and scavenging the materials to
erect a modest, two-storeyed village house when I lived in Hangzhou from 1992 to 1993