Chinese Courts Want Abused Women to Shut Up

The fact that authoritarian societies are more brutal seems intuitive. Why shouldn’t a coercive state create coercive relationships between its citizens?

Yet the mechanisms of how authoritarianism breeds intimate partner violence in particular are rarely considered—even though authoritarian regimes tend also to be reactionary and patriarchal ones. For many years, domestic violence was seen even by dissidents and critics as a personal matter, far removed from the high and mighty machinations of the state. Writers, mostly male, who were eager to consider the impact of the gulag or the Cultural Revolution had no space for thinking about ordinary home life, especially about women.

Violent Intimacy: Family Harmony, State Stability, and Intimate Partner Violence in Post-Socialist China, Tiantian Zheng, Bloomsbury, 224 pp, $29.95, July 2022.

In contrast, by taking an ethnographic approach to China’s domestic violence problem in Violent Intimacy: Family Harmony, State Stability, and Intimate Partner Violence in Post-Socialist China, anthropologist Tiantian Zheng shows how the government’s paranoia over any potential political instability means an emphasis on so-called family harmony. Divorced men, or single ones, are seen as a destabilizing element.

That, in practice, means that domestic abuse victims are overwhelmingly denied their rights—from the right to divorce a violent man to the ability to even report a violent crime by a partner. Many examples are offered in the book, such as the 2017 case of a woman in Guangxi region being denied a divorce after her husband graduated from beating her to putting a knife to her neck in front of their child. In such cases, judges who deny divorce petitions are praised and not criticized—as was the case of the Guangxi judge, because he had “saved a marriage.” Today, the fates of the woman and child are unknown—and unimportant to the glorious political quest for harmony. Somehow, this is actually one of the less disturbing cases Zheng cites in her work.

In this dismal setup, women, the primary victims of domestic abuse, are intended as a barrier, absorbing the impotent rage of men so they don’t turn this rage toward society and the state.

Zheng uses the testimony of both victims and abusers, as well as court documents and other paperwork. Her book benefits from the openness of court verdicts, which were put online in the 2010s—and are now being systematically removed from open access by the Chinese state in part because of research such as this.

Within Violent Intimacy’s pages, the modern Chinese state emerges as a cynical and rapacious apparatus. It pays lip service to protecting women in the form of ornamental organizations such as the All China Women’s Federation, which, in practice, urges women to remain with their abusers. As one victim puts it, “Their officials told me to be gentle, nice, and kind to my husband to avoid the violence.”

The family is seen as the cornerstone of the state, and if women are to be injured or killed in its service, then that’s a sacrifice Chinese bureaucrats are willing to make. (Not coincidentally, there are currently no women in the Chinese Communist Party’s 25-man Politburo, and only six women have ever been members.) And while Zheng shows how individual issues, from substance abuse to personal and financial insecurity, can contribute to a partner creating an abusive environment in the home, the failure to both root out and prevent abuse is a systemic problem.

Zheng is a shrewd anthropologist, and she teases the failures of the system out by juxtaposing them with visceral firsthand and secondhand accounts of violence in her narrative—historic perceptions of womanhood and lack of political will go hand in hand with gruesome beatings, rapes, torture sessions, and murders coupled with appalling police inaction. It’s heavy reading, but Zheng’s dispassionate, anthropological style keeps the text from veering off into prurience.

As per official government statistics that Zheng cites, the rate of domestic abuse has risen by 25.4 percent in China since the 1980s, with these horrors affecting 35.7 percent of Chinese women today. As Zheng herself notes, the Chinese government is “not always reliable” when it comes to statistics, and the real numbers could potentially be much higher.

Why the change? Zheng explores the question with quite a bit of nuance, noting that China’s economic transition is a likely culprit. In the last few decades, the Chinese government encouraged women to sacrifice their careers and be laid off first, thus becoming more financially dependent and vulnerable. It is also possible that as people are more aware of the problem of domestic violence, they’re more likely to report it.

Zheng also points out how a strain of old, Confucian thinking has been resurrected by modern Chinese leadership. Today, Chinese President Xi Jinping praises “family-state harmony” and urges women to maintain it at all costs, while striving to be “dutiful wives and virtuous mothers.” As Zheng notes, this is quite a departure from the early days of the Chinese Communist Party; she notes that “Mao Zedong would never have made a statement implicitly praising Confucianism and arguing for an inferior status for women.”

One of the most striking pieces of oral history in Violent Intimacy is in a chapter dedicated to Chinese men’s justifications for domestic abuse: “How can a man get the upper hand in a quarrel with a woman? … She should shut up; otherwise she’ll get a beating.”

If you are willing to read between the lines here, the inherent helplessness conveyed in this statement is visible. The man saying this feels small. Why else would he feel the need to resort to physical violence in order to have the upper hand?

If you’ve ever experienced intimate partner violence, you know how fundamentally messy it is. There can be blood, there can be screams. The neighbors give you weird looks. Yet having lived in my own domestic hell for years, I can state with confidence that these so-called inconveniences are worth it to the abuser—because the abuser gets to feel like he is in control.

And for an abuser who lives under an authoritarian system, the freedom to destroy another human being—as long as she is female and lives under the same roof—can appear almost intoxicating, a chance for revenge against all perceived and real wrongs. He cannot express his rage at a controlling system that emasculates him, but he is allowed to have an outlet inside his marital home.

In conversations with Zheng, male abusers, without realizing it, present themselves as infantile and thoroughly out of control. A popular Chinese psychology expert, writing in an advice column cited by Zheng, urged battered women to consider that “[e]ven though the husband knows it is wrong to beat his wife, he cannot control himself.”

This is, of course, monstrous. We are talking about grown men here, not toddlers. If this same grown man were to see a shiny new car he likes and decide to steal it, not a single member of the Chinese bureaucracy or pundit class would argue that he should be absolved of the crime because “he cannot control himself.”

But because the perpetrator, in this case, is hitting or otherwise abusing a woman, the situation is instantly reframed. As long as the violence happens within the home, or the confines of a relationship, it is no threat to the family harmony model the Chinese government is pursuing. If anything, in this perverse understanding of harmony, violence enhances peace, by making sure the woman remains wholly subservient.

It’s not just family ideology that keeps the system on the side of the abuser. In this sense, violence against a woman is a convenient outlet presented to an angry man by an authoritarian state apparatus: “Sure, we will tell you what to do. But we will also provide you with the opportunity and the excuse to tell someone else what to do—with your fists if necessary.”

There is a striking parallel between the logic of the modern Chinese state and the modern Russian state, which decriminalized domestic abuse in 2017. Before sending droves of its men to die in Ukraine starting in 2022, the Russian government gave them the same cynical trade-off—because an oppressive government that acts like it owns your body must allow you to own someone else’s body lest you rebel.

We can even see the parallel between Chinese and Russian authoritarians and the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump. Before waging war on U.S. government institutions in order to bend them to his will, Trump had a reputation as an abuser, including accusations of rape by his ex-wife. In fact, one of his most prominent victims, E. Jean Carroll, just successfully sued him for sexual abuse and defamation.

In many ways, authoritarian abuse is simply domestic abuse on a macro scale. As my former colleague and classmate Anna Lind-Guzik puts it, “[I]t’s the same self-destructive, patriarchal entitlement that motivates domestic violence that motivates atrocities like the Russian invasion of Ukraine—if I can’t have you, nobody can—with the same results.”

When we consider China’s future actions around Taiwan, for instance, we should consider what is already happening within Chinese families—and what the Chinese government is or isn’t doing about it. Leaders who tacitly or otherwise encourage personal violence are just as likely to create political violence. Russian propagandists frequently frame Ukraine as a kind of disobedient woman unwilling to be contained within the Russian sphere of influence. Chinese propagandists did the same for Hong Kong, casting it as a willful (and feminine) child. The language of violence at home and the language of violence overseas are intimately joined.