Women’s Property in Republican China: Rights and Practice

WOMEN'S PROPERTY IN REPUBLICAN CHINA: RIGHTS AND PRACTICE by Rubie S. Watson Throughout most of Chinese history there were those who worked the land and those who owned it, those who produced cloth and those who owned the machines that made production possible, those who controlled markets and those who paid to use them. Few would deny that at any given time a large percentage of the Chinese population was alienated from the ownership of productive resources. However, what is often not appreciated is that there was one section of the population for whom that alienation was systematic and sustained. A Chinese man might own nothing but a few personal effects and perhaps a village house, but he could always cherish the hope that someday he might own a small piece of land, a shop, or a small business. For most women, on the other hand, even that hope was distant and remote. Well into the twentieth century women's rights to own and control property were severely restricted in China. It has been argued that Chinese women, as women, were a propertyless class (for discussion of this see e.g., K. Johnson 1983:40). To what extent is this a fair characterization of Republican China? Were women as a category totally alienated from control qver important resources? Should women be treated as a uniform category or did women's relations to property vary according to their family's status or class, their marital history, the nature of their work, and their rural or urban affiliation? There is no doubt that women as a category were discriminated against in China, but this does not necessarily imply--as we shall see in the following discussion--that all women were the same. This paper asks many more questions than it answers. It offers hypotheses for future research rather than conclusions. Although it is clear that women did not have the same ~ights over property as did men, we do not yet have detailed studies that take into account both women's legal rights to property and the translation of those rights into pract:Lce. Women's Legal Rights Until recently Chinese women were very much second class citizens. In a legal sense they were perpetual children, always falling under a man's authority whether it was a father, a husband, or a son. In Chinese law adultery was not an offense for a male, but a husband could kill his adulterous wife with impunity. A man could be held accountable for his wife's accidental death, but a wife was guilty of murder if she accidentally killed her husband (Ch'u 1961:107, 115). Divorce was largely a male privilege. In the domain of property, women's rights were negligible compared to those of men. The legal scholar Ch'u T'ung-tsu points out that during the Qing women owned no property and had no power to dispose of family property (1961:17). According to van der Sprenkel only sons had rights to inherit and, if a man had no son, the law required that he adopt an heir (1962:16). Shiga notes, however, that during the Qing women might inherit in unusual circumstances (for example, failing a designated male heir), although he goes on to say that women were never seen as co-owners of the family estate as were males(1978:110, 127). Dowry goods constituted the one domain over which women seemed to have exercised some rights. Meijer maintains that unmarried daughters had a right to dowry during the Qing (1971:11-12), but accoPding to Ch'u, women's control of their dowries was always limited. "As late as 1918," Ch'u writes, "the Supreme Court maintained that the wife's own property was subject to the husband's authority" (1961:104). Furthermore, a widow who remarried was prohibited from taking her dowry with her. In . 1930 and 1931 new penal and civil codes were promulgated in Republican China that considerably improved women's legal position (see Lang 1946:115-119). In the field of property rights many of the old inequalities were swept away. Daughters were given equal rights of inheritance with sons and a...