Fish without bicycles

Female liberation Chinese style ... PRC Supremes say that if a wife brings nothing to a marriage, she gets nothing on the split-up ... As property prices soar, divorce booms ... Millions of young men with no home and no woman ... Trouble brewing ... Percy Lo-Kit Chan reports 

They may "hold up half the sky", as our late Chairman once remarked, but the recent interpretation of the 1950 Marriage Law by the PRC Supreme Court has occasioned great disquiet.

In effect, the court has ruled that property that a party brings to a marriage will revert to that party on divorce.

Since it is almost a cultural prerequisite that a young male suitor possesses a flat of some sort before making a serious proposal of marriage, the ruling means that a divorced wife (and divorce is becoming increasingly common - last year 2.7 million couples divorced which was an eight percent year-on-year increase over 2009 and seems to have prompted the ruling) will be left without anything. 

Think back to your own position before the wretched decision of your High Court in Mallet v Mallet required a Family Court judge to go through the embarrassing and fruitless exercise of calculating a "pool" of assets brought to the marriage.

This now means a late inheritance, or a lottery win, or some boost to super can have a significant effect on the "pot" available to be claimed by the "lucky" spouse.  

Surely a system where 20 years' hard work meant an automatic 50-50 split would be much simpler and fairer – although not popular with those advising on the high technicality of how to calculate the relevant "pools".

End of the joint assetPrior to the recent ruling by the PRC Supreme Court, the family home had been considered a "joint asset" regardless of who acquired it.

Now, "feudal society is back again" as one irate blogger (and there were more than a million-and-a-half of them on Sina Weibo, the largest micro-blog) has commented.

It was claimed by supporters of the new interpretation that the rule in fact strengthened the traditional family structure by preserving a family's financial investment - for that read, the "husband's family" - whose money may have gone into the acquisition of the newly weds' apartment.

The new ruling must also be seen against the present market position.

First, the price of property has risen some 500 percent since 2000. So, if parents and relatives contribute to help buy the apartment, they will lose out if the marriage founders. 

Secondly, an inability to find the funds to buy an apartment in the first place is leading to a very large and looming social problem.

On present estimates, some 25 to 30 million men will end up as "bare branches" - they will never be able to find a wife because they cannot afford the price of a flat, and more poignantly, because selective feticide which favours a male heir means that the country is many millions of women "short".

Zhou: bare branch crisis loomingYou don't need to be Zhou En-Lai to realize that having 25 million fellas wandering the streets with no home, and no woman, at the age of 24 is going to be a recipe for very big trouble.

If you can, see a recent Chinese movie, Black Mountain, which graphically examines the plight of villagers who have no women and are forced to the unpleasant stratagem of kidnapping young girls and forcing them into a sort of wedlock. 

Of course, the court's ruling is "gender-neutral". If the wife has provided the flat, she will get it back on a split up – as if.

The new ruling, unlike the notional operation of your section 75, ignores all the unpaid work that a wife may provide over many years in running the household.

The position is even worse than the ridiculous UK situation exemplified by Rosset and Stack v Sowden where some sort of notional trust, constructive or resulting (who would know?) is erected by a fiction to provide for the unpaid labour of the female partner.

It is said that the new rules could put women off marriage completely.

The new Marriage Law of 1950 was the first law passed by the Communist government when it seized power in 1949.

It outlawed all sorts of unpleasantness from feudal times - arranged marriages, concubinage, and permitted divorce by a wife for the first time.

Don't forget that it was only the 1938 Act in England that had achieved pretty much the same result as far as divorce was concerned, while the 1882 Married Womens' Property Act had removed part of the problem involved in a woman unfortunately marrying a drunk or a lunatic, or a drunken lunatic, while giving the quietus to a lot of trust learning on settlements of covenants.

Is the new ruling a grossly backward step, or merely the latest incentive to encourage women to become fully emancipated?

To quote one blogger:

"Women, work hard, earn money and buy your own home. After this, a man is as insubstantial as a cloud."

Or as one local female savant put it: "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicyle."