Revolutionizing the family: Law, love, and divorce in urban and rural China, 1950-1968

This dissertation examines the impact of the People's Republic of China's "Marriage Law" on family structure and relations in urban and rural China from the establishment of the People's Republic until the end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The first law enacted by the new state, the Marriage Law was a dramatic attempt to change the most basic "unit" of Chinese society--the family. In it, the state attempted to abolish the so-called "feudal" marriage system, a system said to involve practices such as arranged marriages, concubinage, and bigamy and replace it with a new "socialist" and "democratic" family based on "love" and "equality" between spouses and "harmonious" relationships between parents and children. Citizens coerced into "feudal" marriages could now take advantage of new state institutions to sue for divorce. In 1951 and 1953, the Communist Party mounted two large scale political campaigns to enforce the new law, but even after these campaigns were over, state registrars and other officials were charged with making sure that the law did not turn into a dead letter.;To date, the secondary literature dealing with the Marriage Law has emphasized its limited impact, particularly in remote rural areas. Whether owing to the weakness of state institutions, the strength and cohesiveness of patriarchal village communities, or the long distances to court, rural Chinese are said to have been unable to use new state institutions to change their family situation. As a result, rural family relations remained similar to what they had been prior to the Communist Revolution: arranged marriages remained common and divorce rare. In contrast, change is said to have been more widespread in more modern urban areas, where urbanization, industrialization and a strong state presence weakened forces of tradition and allowed residents the freedom to take advantage of the liberal provision and new institutions put in place by the law.;In this study, I argue instead that it was among peasants and rural migrants in cities that the Marriage Law had its greatest impact. Rural family structure and relations, I contend, were not nearly as stable and resistant to change as previous scholarship suggests. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).