MEI WU, a young lawyer in Shanghai, earns 1m yuan ($160,000) a year. She recently left her abusive husband. Ms. Mei and her parents invested all their savings in her 5m yuan home, which has tripled in value over five years. It was bought solely in her husband's name. She will now leave her marriage without her savings and without her home.
Hers is not an isolated case. Although the condition of women in China is better than in many developing countries, and has advanced dramatically in recent years in some respects, old customs and new laws have combined to short-change China’s women in the property market. Since the privatisation of the housing market in 1998, they have “missed out on the greatest accumulation of property wealth in history”, says Leta Hong Fincher, a sociologist.
One problem is a Chinese divorce law that went into force in 2011. The supreme court ruled that in the case of divorce, residential property should not be divided, but should be entirely given to the person in whose name it is registered. That is almost always men, due to the social norm that they are...Continue reading
No comments:
Post a Comment