Runaway Wives, Urban Crimes, and Survival Tactics in Wartime Beijing, 1937–1949 by Zhao Ma (review)

Zhao Ma’s Runaway Wives is a fascinating study of the ways that poor women in the slums of Beijing survived the wartime years of Japanese occupation and the Chinese Civil War (1937–1949). It contrasts the formal world of state, law, and social reforms with these women’s world of “an informal economy, customary practices, neighborhood networks, a hierarchical pattern of household authority, illegitimate relationships, and criminal enterprises” (p. 4). These aspects of poor women’s lives are usually absent from the formal administrative record, but Ma cleverly finds a window into them through his examination of the Beijing District Court’s case files related to “Offenses against the Institutions of Marriage and the Family” (p. 2)—in other words, bigamy, adultery, and abduction. From the records, we come to see a fine-grained picture of women using the meager resources at their disposal to struggle for survival, connection, and sometimes even happiness.

This book is an important contribution to the field of research on the Japanese occupation and civil war. The scarcity of documentary evidence from that period can frequently make it difficult to study, but this book shows why it is crucial to do so. It brings to the fore people whose lives are routinely left out of conventional political and social histories. Of course what was happening in Beijing is not necessarily the same thing as what was happening elsewhere in the country, since the nature of Japanese colonial rule varied across Chinese puppet regimes and since other large swathes of the country were not occupied at all. Nevertheless, it highlights key issues related to gender, family, and economic survival among the people of the Beijing tenements. It does so by putting runaway wives at the center of the analysis and using their actions to shine light on an entire constellation of related social and economic issues. This move is accomplished in three main sections: poor women’s work and livelihood, the uses of neighborhood networks, and the consequences of increased mobility in the 1940s, respectively.

Ma argues that marriage was poor women’s most important survival strategy. This idea is perhaps not too surprising in that, in the Chinese patriarchal family system, a woman’s marriage was the key determinant of her future, and frequently marriage was an economic transaction between the bride’s family and the groom’s. But Ma takes this point even further. Poor women in the tenements could usually only find temporary and very low-paid employment, which meant that, unlike the “modern girls” and educated professional women who emerged elsewhere in China beginning in the 1920s,¹ they were highly dependent on their husbands’ income for survival. Ma shows, however, that with some frequency poor women did not simply accept the fate handed to them by their marriages if their husbands were unable to support them in the way they wanted or needed. Some husbands deserted their wives and left them with no source of income, some lost their jobs, and some could not earn enough through the meager work available to support a family during increasingly dire economic times. In these situations, court records show that some women simply left their husbands and, without benefit of divorce, married again, this time choosing their mates on the basis of ability to provide sufficient food, shelter, and clothing. In short, wives who ran away from their husbands often did so as a means of seeking a better economic livelihood, not because they were embroiled in a romantic affair and running off with a lover. It became less risky for them to do so as Qing-era laws requiring execution or severe punishment for runaway wives were abolished in favor of laws from the Guomindang 國民黨 era, leaving such women open only to charges of adultery or bigamy.

Lower-class women’s economic reliance on their husbands did not, however, mean that...