Gender Inequality in Chinese Courts: the Case of Married-Out Women and Their Rural Land Rights

Gender inequality, especially in the context of women’s rural land rights, is a persistentsocial problem in China. The problem is particularly acute for women married tooutsiders but chose to retain their household registration in their home village. In otherwords, these women chose to keep their household registration of their village of origininstead of transferring their registration to their husbands’ household registration(usually in the cities). They are commonly known as “married-out women” (外嫁女)(“MOW”)). It is a common phenomenon in rural China that vested interests in villagecommunities rely on traditional customs to deny MOW’s land rights, as MOW areconsidered “outsiders”. The problem can essentially be summed up as follows. When thegovernment acquires rural land for development, the village collective in question willreceive monetary compensation from the state. Under state law, the village collectivemust distribute this monetary compensation in the form of “dividends” to its members.However, many village collectives refuse to distribute dividends to MOW on the basis ofdiscriminatory provisions in villagers’ charters. These provisions are designed to revoke(but without any legal basis) the village collective membership of MOW (once they aremarried), thereby stripping them of the rights to a share of the state compensation.This project examines the effectiveness of the Chinese civil justice system in dealingwith cases brought by MOW. The project involves a review of over 1600 civil judgmentsin Chinese courts since 2009 to identify trends and patterns. Following the review, theproject proceeds to interviewing judges in six local courts (in six different provinces)with reputation of strong inclination towards MOW disputes to test and confirm findingsin the judgments review exercise. A series of focused groups will be conducted with theMOW litigants. The objective of the focused groups is to identify the magnitude andnature of the problem of court dockets refusing to accept civil lawsuits brought by MOW.This project will also examine sample village charters to identify discriminatoryprovisions and recommend ways to amend the charters with the view to uphold MOWrights.To date, there has been no comprehensive empirical study of the MOW problem from acivil litigation perspective. This project will fill an important gap in the literature.