In rural China, 'sisterhoods' demand justice, and cash

Guangdong Province, China: The women came from different villages, converging outside the local rural affairs bureau shortly after 10 am One had taken the morning off from her job selling rice rolls. Another was a tour operator. Yet another was a recent retiree.

The group, nine in all, double-checked their paperwork, then strode in. In a dimly lit office, they cornered three officials and demanded to know why they had been excluded from government payouts, worth tens of thousands of dollars, that were supposed to go to each villager.

"I had these rights at birth. Why did I suddenly lose them?" one woman asked.

That was the question uniting these women in Guangdong province, in southern China. They were joining a growing number of rural women, all across the country, who are finding each other to confront a long-standing custom of denying them land rights -- all because of whom they had married.

In much of rural China, if a woman marries someone from outside her village, she becomes a "married-out woman." To the village, she is no longer a member, even if she continues to live there.

That means the village assembly -- a decision-making body technically open to all adults, but usually dominated by men -- can deny her village-sponsored benefits such as health insurance, as well as money that is awarded to residents when the government takes over their land. (A man remains eligible no matter whom he marries.)

Now, women are fighting back, in a rare bright spot for women's rights and civil society. They are filing lawsuits and petitioning officials, energized by the conviction that they should be treated more fairly, and by the government's increasing recognition of their rights.

In doing so, they are challenging centuries of tradition that have defined women as appendages to men: their fathers before marriage, their husbands after. That view has persisted even as the country has rapidly modernized, and women have gone to school and sometimes even become their families' breadwinners.

They are also exposing a gap between the ruling Communist Party's words and its actions. Many courts, which are controlled by the party, refuse to take on the women's lawsuits. Even when women win favorable rulings, local officials have refused to implement them, fearing social unrest. Women have been harassed, beaten or detained for pursuing their rights in these cases.

Not long after a colleague and I met the Guangdong women and accompanied them to the rural affairs bureau, several told us they had been contacted by officials or would no longer be able to participate in this article. The New York Times is identifying the women only by their family names and omitting their exact location for safety reasons.

Often, married-out women staking claims are simply dismissed. Inside the Guangdong rural affairs office, which oversees land payouts, a middle-aged male official in a blue polo shirt tried to shoo the women away.

"This is your own villages' problem, not our problem," he said. When the women accused the government of ignoring their plight, he warned: "Don't talk nonsense."

One woman shot back: "How can you leave it entirely to the village? Then what are you all for?"

Fortunes lost to inequality

Chinese women have long suffered discrimination, but the financial implications of that inequality came into sharper view after the Chinese economy's breakneck expansion.

As China embraced market reforms starting in the 1980s, the government began taking over rural land for factories, railways and shopping centers. In exchange, villagers received compensation, often in the form of new apartments or certificates entitling them to dividends from the land's future use.

The government mandated that female village members be given equal compensation. But it left the definition of "members" to the male-led village assemblies. And to many of those assemblies, one group didn't qualify: married-out women.

It is unclear how many women have been denied land rights because of marriage, but the number has grown as the population has become more mobile, with people marrying across provinces, not just villages. Government-backed surveys indicate that as many as 80% of rural women -- hundreds of millions of people -- are not listed on their villages' land documents. That makes it hard for them to defend their claims if disputes arise, such as if they marry outsiders.

For decades, women in this situation had little recourse. Some accepted their deprivation as normal. But there are signs of a quiet resistance unfolding as women have become more educated and found more ways to connect with one another. The number of court rulings involving the words "married-out women" jumped to nearly 5,000 five years ago from 450 in 2013, according to official data.

Many villages, though, have clung to tradition.

Rebutting a lawsuit from 2019, a village in Nanning, a city in southwestern China, claimed that women who married outsiders did not live off the land anymore, and thus did not qualify as village members. (Men who leave are not held to that standard.)

A village in Shandong province, in China's east, was more direct in its response to a 2022 lawsuit. "Married-out daughters do not receive our property benefits," it said in court papers. "This is how we have done things for the last 20 years."

There are no authoritative estimates of the financial losses women have incurred. But especially in prosperous coastal areas, the sums could be enormous. In the port city of Ningbo, the apartments that married-out women were denied during village demolitions in 2022 were potentially worth upward of $550,000, according to official documents and average housing prices there.

Women who cannot prove their land rights also have a harder time investing or securing loans to start businesses, scholars have noted.

A growing awareness

I wanted to see firsthand how women were fighting for their land rights, and a legal expert suggested going to Guangdong. One of the earliest provinces to urbanize, it has also seen some of the most active mobilizing by married-out women.

In the city I visited, signs of economic transformation abounded. A high-speed rail station abuts the lush rice paddies that once sustained the local economy. Two-story village homes have given way to gated apartment complexes.

When I arrived, several married-out women were gathering in one of their living rooms to plan their visit to the rural affairs bureau the next day. One attendee was a woman surnamed Ma, whose overalls and ponytail gave her a youthful air, though she was retired.

Her village had started distributing payouts several decades ago, after contracting its teeming fish ponds to a private company. But Ma was cut off in 1997, after she married an outsider. Even when she divorced and moved back home several years later, the village continued to refuse her.

Ma had no experience with the law and didn't know whom to ask for help. Other villagers accused her of trying to claim what didn't belong to her. Her brothers told her not to make a fuss.

She bought a copy of China's civil code to educate herself. She repeatedly called and visited government offices, though they refused to accept her case. "If I waited until others came forward, I wouldn't have anything," she said.

Then, gradually, more women began taking similar steps -- not just in Guangdong, but across China. At times, they found sympathetic officials, and some won their cases.

As news spread, Ma and several dozen other women nearby found each other by word-of-mouth. They had no leader, and only sporadic meetings. They represented a fraction of the thousands of women they estimated had been denied land rights in their villages.

Still, their growing numbers put pressure on local courts. Ma's case was accepted in 2020, as were those of other women.

"Now, many courts have so many cases that they're overwhelmed," said another woman in the living room, surnamed Li.

Li had remained in her village after marrying a factory worker from Hunan province, to the northwest, whom she had met while he was working nearby. She now balances her job making rice rolls with trips to the courthouse, where she is suing for about $7,000 in payments she has been denied since her marriage five years ago.

The older women spent years searching for the right avenue for their complaints, but younger women said hearing about others' experiences gave them a road map of sorts. A woman in her 20s, surnamed Huo, sued her village as soon as she learned that it had cut her off in 2020. (She found out when, after delivering her first child, the hospital said she no longer had village-sponsored health insurance.)

Li's and Huo's stories also reflect the greater say that younger women have over where they should live. Traditionally, women moved to their husbands' homes; older generations of married-out women returned to their villages only after divorcing or becoming widowed. Younger ones have embraced bringing their husbands to their own villages, in part to assert their independence.

"It's a woman's backup plan," said Huo, now working in construction. "In case anything happens, you at least have your own home."

An uphill battle

On paper, the women's legal chances look good. Scholarly analyses have found that many court rulings in these cases favor married-out women.

But those are the cases that make it to court, not those that judges throw out or officials force into out-of-court mediation. And villages often refuse to recognize rulings against them -- as was the case for several of the Guangdong women.

Government agencies often say they cannot force the assemblies to comply, citing respect for village self-governance, the nominal guarantee in Chinese law of some democratic rights for villagers. (In reality, the party retains control.) When some of the Guangdong women staged small demonstrations outside government offices, they were physically pushed away, they said.

The law itself has loopholes. A top legal body last fall urged prosecutors to protect the rights of women who marry outside their villages, in line with constitutional guarantees of gender equality.

But in June, China passed a law reaffirming that village assemblies can continue to decide who counts as a member of their village collectives, and is therefore eligible for land rights. Women's rights advocates had called for the law to say definitively that women are members, regardless of their marriage status.

Because married-out women are still a relatively small group, the government has little incentive to risk angering the village majority, which also includes women who married fellow villagers and thus remain eligible for benefits, said Lin Lixia, a legal advocate at Qianqian Law Firm in Beijing who has worked on women's land rights for 20 years.

"From the perspective of maintaining social stability, local governments or courts are definitely more inclined to protect the benefits of the majority," Lin said. She said she received 40 to 50 inquiries a year, and that about 90% of her lawsuits were unsuccessful.

Some sense of solidarity

Amid the difficulties, the women have also found community.

In the living room, as they planned their visit to the bureau, some of the women referred to each other as "sisters." Over bowls of lychees, a local specialty, they laughed darkly about their treatment by fellow villagers, who piled trash at their doors. They competed over whose village assembly was worse. When Huo said that people in her village had not abused her, Ma teased her: "They're so good to you."

Huo replied: "I always say, you all aren't mean enough. I'm mean, so nobody dares treat me like that."

They debated tactics. If they wrote a letter about their situation to a higher-level government office, should they lay out all the details, or keep it general? Some were skeptical about going to the bureau, given how many times they had been rebuffed. But others said the point was documenting every step, successful or not, to bolster their case.

Several women emphasized that they were not a unified movement. They speculated that some among them had been threatened or bought off into becoming government informers -- a sign of how surveilled and fractured civil society has become in today's China.

But the women have faced intimidation before, and they said it would not put them off.

At the bureau the next morning, the women seemed to be a familiar presence for the officials, who required little explanation of their grievances. For nearly two hours, the women laid them out anyway.

Finally, shortly after noon, they emerged, triumphant. They hadn't secured their payouts -- far from it. But an official had agreed to give them written acknowledgment of their visit, which they could now bring to the next government office they visited.

"We take it one step and one place at a time," one of the women said.

They piled into cars, to head to lunch, and to plan their next move.