zhao liuyang comments on "women and property in china"｜do traditional chinese women have the right to inherit property?
2024-09-27
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"women and property in china (960-1949)", [american] bai kai, translated by liu chang, guangxi normal university press, published in july 2024, 276 pages, 78.00 yuan
let’s start with an inheritance dispute case
in 1933, 35-year-old liang guozhen filed a lawsuit with the peking district court over inheritance issues. her husband wang ruxian passed away in 1922. although liang guozhen was wang ruxian's concubine, she began to take charge of the family business at this time. at that time, all family members included liang guozhen herself, her youngest son wang yuanjun, and another concubine peng shizhen and her daughter. wang yuanzhao, plus two adopted sons wang yuanming and wang yuanyi. the direct cause of this lawsuit was the death of liang guozhen's son in 1932. liang guozhen accused his two adopted sons, now adults, of occupying the family property. they refused to support her and peng shizhen, and of course they also refused to support the underage wang yuanzhao. liang asked the court to transfer the property divided among family members. she submitted that she had special rights in this case because her son was dead and unmarried and had no children, so she should receive his share of the inheritance under civil law.
the two adopted sons argued that their father died before the civil law of the republic of china was implemented, so the case should be decided according to the old law. as a concubine, liang had no right to inherit her son's share of the inheritance.
the court, in accordance with the law at the time of wang yuanjun's death, ruled in favor of liang. in the court's view, although the date of the father's death was important in determining how the estate was divided among the children, the date of liang's son's death was the real key to determining whether liang could inherit the property. according to the law at the time of wang yuanjun's death, , his biological mother liang had every right to inherit his share of the property. in the end, the court ruled that liang received 72,000 yuan of the 200,000 yuan family property (pages 211-212).
the new law seems to help women like liang fight for property rights, but does this mean that modern laws during the republic of china, after overturning the old inheritance principles, can enable women to enjoy full property inheritance rights?
women’s inheritance rights: a difficult evolution
i believe that readers will have a deeper understanding of the above issues after reading ucla professor emeritus kathryn bernhardt’s classic work on traditional chinese women and the property inheritance system.
the author of this book, bai kai, is an important scholar in the field of china studies in the american academic community. she graduated from the history department of stanford university and studied under the famous american historians lyman van slyke and harold kahn. she was one of the first overseas scholars to come to china for academic research and exchanges after the reform and opening up. she mainly focused on the socio-economic history and legal history of modern china. her research on land rent, taxation and popular resistance in the yangtze river delta region of modern china won the fairbank award, the highest award for east asian studies from the american historical association. this book on women and the property inheritance system continues her focus on the changes in the system and how its actual operation affects the lives of ordinary people. after the english version of the book was published, it quickly became a classic in this field.
in my opinion, the exemplary significance of this work is that the author uses rigorous, concise and beautiful historical writing to show us how a change of perspective can bring people a new understanding of the meaning of history.
this book starts from a basic question: what impact will changes in china's property inheritance system have on women's actual lives? the reason why it is an important issue is that our understanding of traditional chinese property inheritance is often male-centered, that is, we believe that property inheritance is an equal distribution of the father's property among the sons through family division. in this system, women have no right to inherit property. if the family's financial resources allow, an unmarried daughter can only receive a dowry at most, and a widowed mother can only receive an old-age alimony, but neither of them has the right to do so. inherit a family property. this male-dominated institutional system is especially reflected in two complementary folk customs, namely family division and inheritance (ancestry inheritance): a man must be inherited by his son in terms of ancestral sacrifice and property. if he does not have a biological child, heir, then he must adopt an heir to continue the paternal family. succession and family division are mutually exclusive. they are two sides of the same coin. only sons have the right to inherit. if we look at the inheritance system from a male perspective, then the property inheritance system from the song dynasty to the qing dynasty is indeed a static picture.
bai kai enlighteningly points out that this perspective does not take into account the different relationships that women have with the property inheritance system as daughters, wives, and concubines. observing the traditional chinese property inheritance system from a woman's perspective, we can see that family division and inheritance are two obviously different processes: when a man has biological heirs, property inheritance is naturally governed by the principle of family division, but when he when there are no biological heirs, chengzu is the one who plays the dominant role. bai kai estimated based on detailed research that one-fifth of the families in ming and qing china usually did not have an adult son. therefore, about one-fifth of the families inherited property through inheritance. for a woman, given her status in her natal family and her husband's family throughout her life, inheritance is even more important. as a daughter, a woman has a 6 to 12 percent chance of giving birth to a biological heir who did not survive to adulthood. family, and as a wife, the probability that her husband will be childless is about 20 percent, so that one in three women may be either a brotherless daughter, a childless wife, or both. it’s both. in other words, for a woman, at some point in her life, it is likely that she will be associated with the inheritance of zong.
therefore, if we observe the traditional chinese property inheritance system from the perspective of women, we will find that this system is no longer a static picture. on the contrary, it is more like a dynamic image. in the song dynasty, if both parents died without a son, whether biological or adopted, the daughter had the right to inherit the family's property according to law. however, by the early ming dynasty, the law stipulated that heirless families must adopt an heir from a nephew. therefore, in the face of the law that forced nephews to succeed, the nephew's property rights took precedence over the daughter's property rights, and the possibility of a daughter inheriting the family property was extremely slim. for a widow, if she had no heirs in the past, she could inherit all of her late husband's property. now she only has custody rights over the property, that is, she is the guardian of the family property for her husband's heir, and this heir is what she must adopt according to law. the widow he has no choice but to adopt the nephew who is the closest blood relative to his deceased husband. in the middle of the qing dynasty, driven by the concept of chaste widowhood, the emphasis on widows' obligation to honor their late husbands strengthened women's property inheritance rights. the law allowed widows to freely choose their successors among their nephews, and the property rights of widows were greatly expanded. the strengthening of the concept of widow's chastity also led to the expansion of the guardianship of widowed concubines' property. a widowed concubine who remained chaste could enjoy the same rights as any widowed widow, including the guardianship of her deceased husband's property and the right to freely choose an heir.
the reason why this work was able to obtain the above-mentioned important understanding is closely related to bai kai's concern about the fate of ordinary people and institutional practices. in her writing, women are no longer a collection of identities, but individuals full of life with different identities such as mothers, wives, daughters, etc.; the legal system is not a written expression that has nothing to do with daily ethics. the law is related to the collision of lives of women with different identities has a profound impact on their emotions and destiny.
another subtlety of this book is that bai kai provides us with an in-depth analysis of the dilemmas faced by women’s inheritance practices during the republic of china, providing us with completely different understandings of the logic and consequences of the two conceptual systems that govern the inheritance system. the legislators of the kuomintang believe that the inheritance system is the root of "feudal" ideas and practices. they believe that if the inheritance system can be destroyed and replaced by the principle of personal property and equal rights between men and women, the old inheritance system can be destroyed. by cracking down, women can get the same rights as men. however, the actual results are very complicated: first, the property owner continued the traditional custom of division of property through gifts during his lifetime, and this was recognized by the law. as long as a father divides his property during his lifetime, he can deprive his daughters of their inheritance rights, resulting in their daughters not receiving the inheritance rights that kuomintang legislators originally hoped to give them. secondly, kuomintang legislators also deprived widows of the property guardianship rights they had enjoyed under previous laws, and widows could no longer ensure control of their property through succession. although the legislator gave the widow a portion of her husband's property, this inheritance came at the expense of the guardianship of all her husband's property.
in short, this work shows us not only a dynamic picture of the property inheritance system, but also a difficult evolution history of women's rights. obviously, the realization of women's rights is not a linear evolution, but a difficult evolution process full of twists and turns.
how to write the social history of gender?
bai kai's book also has profound implications for how we write the history of gender. influenced by the feminist movement, in the 1960s and 1970s, some western female scholars began to pay attention to the status and rights of women in history. however, these researchers soon discovered that using the original research method to write women's history was just adding women's history to the existing framework, and this framework was constructed by men, contained discrimination against women, and reflected of inequality between the sexes. therefore, they advocated that the history of gender should be studied, and how "gender" was proposed as a useful analytical category (yu jinyao: "writing the history of the people: the research tradition of social historiography and its paradigm shift", "chinese social sciences" 》the third issue in 2011). gender history is significantly different from previous studies of women's history, both in method and philosophy.
influenced by western academic and social trends of thought, overseas women's history scholars in the field of china studies have begun to reflect on the established value assumptions of traditional chinese women in the academic community. in the view of these scholars, modern chinese intellectuals' understanding of chinese women is often closely linked to the realistic goal of building a modern country. they are accustomed to associating the image of closed, uneducated, and ignorant women with the humiliating history of modern china (gail hershatter, and wang zheng, “chinese history: a useful category of gender analysis,” the american historical review, vol. 113 , no. 5, 2008, p. 1404), this understanding has the purpose of transforming reality. western missionaries' discussions about chinese women further strengthened the views of modern chinese intellectuals on chinese women, forming what liu he calls the characteristics of "translated modernity." although it is a fact that a large number of women are deeply oppressed, the problem is that relevant discussions by chinese and western scholars in modern times have strengthened the image of traditional chinese women as "victims." this understanding is not based on an in-depth understanding of women's real life conditions, but emphasizes the liberation of women from the oppression of confucian ideology so that they can have a strong identification with the construction of a modern country. it is this “victim” narrative that overseas chinese gender history scholars hope to deconstruct. in the view of these scholars, the "victim" narrative conceals the complexity of traditional chinese women's life situations, overemphasizes the construction of the country, and ignores women's own subjectivity.
however, in deconstructing the "victim" narrative, the gender history narrative has gradually gone to the extreme of beautifying the living conditions of traditional chinese women, turning any view of traditional chinese women as victims into clichés. in 1992, at a conference on how to understand traditional chinese women’s subjectivity organized by the famous chinese gender history scholar charlotte furth, french scholar marie bruneau’s views were obviously different from those of most gender history scholars attending the conference. . in her view, the history of gender is neither a history about the advancement of rights, nor should it only regard women as victims, but should critically analyze the macro-historical forces that shape gender relations, especially the power relations behind such forces. bruni disagrees with the simple transfer of women from one end of the spectrum to “victims” to the other, which in effect still treats power as a static construct. she believes that power relations are more like a dynamic process, and patriarchy is the basis of all other power systems. whether in early modern europe or china, no matter what form of subjectivity and survival strategy, it is impossible to escape the influence of this force. (marie florine bruneau, “learned and literary women in late imperial china and early modern europe,” late imperial china, vol. 13, no.1, 1992, pp. 156-172). considering that bruni participated in a conference organized by representative scholars in the american academic circle who emphasize the autonomy of traditional chinese women, her criticism is not without its sharpness.
secondly, gender history narratives often oppose the construction of the nation to women’s liberation in modern china, a view that also has obvious problems. as the famous american scholar margery wolf commented, although women's liberation and national construction in modern china are closely connected, the two are not necessarily opposed. the goal of family reform is not to eliminate the family. on the contrary, it hopes to establish a new type of harmonious and equal family relationships. in this kind of relationship, young people are free to choose their partners, and young brides are no longer oppressed by their mother-in-law. especially after the founding of new china, the country has been fighting against the old irrational family system: in cities, the country has broken the constraints of family relatives on women's rights; in rural areas, the country has eliminated unequal social systems through large-scale social reforms. family relations (margery wolf, “marriage, family, and the state in contemporary china,” pacific affairs, vol. 57, no. 2, 1984, pp. 213-236). therefore, in the process of criticizing the "victim" narrative, gender history narratives regard women's liberation in modern china entirely as a subjective construction, which not only limits the further development of gender history research, but also restricts the reflexivity of gender history itself.
the inspiration of bai kai's work for constructing a more realistic gender history narrative is that we cannot understand china's modernity and the realization of women's rights based on some established ideas or unitary thinking, but should conduct in-depth research in complex practices. how china and the west collided, conflicted and integrated in modern times, thus further explaining the true significance of historical continuation and changes to the realization of women's rights in modern china.
therefore, the role of gender history researchers should not only be “participants” but also “observers.” as "participants", researchers can examine the multiple meanings of history from a female perspective; as "observers", researchers should strive to avoid falling into the misunderstanding that "what exists is reasonable" and ensure the reflexivity of historical research. to achieve this goal, researchers especially need to be oriented toward truth-seeking rather than blindly following fashionable theoretical trends. in fact, only in the practice of pursuing truth and reality can research on gender history go further.
for this reason, the reprint of professor bai kai's classic work has even more important demonstration significance for today's ascendant research trend in gender history.
zhao liuyang
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