For women in rural China, inheritance rights are often limited by traditional customs which give greater benefits to men. Although this is being challenged by new laws that recognise women’s legal rights, increased access for women to jobs and education, there is a big gap between legislation and reality.

Research from University College Chester analyses the transfer of resources between generations within households and village communities in rural China, with particular reference to Dongdatun, a village in the north. Women’s access to family resources is limited by patriarchal inheritance systems, which favour male family members.

In Dongdatun, as in many villages, recent years have seen a marked diversification of rural livelihoods, a rapid growth of rural industry and a diversification of ownership structures. However, changing economic conditions caused by the ending of rural communes has reduced rural people’s security. In the absence of state or collectively financed social security, needs that are met by social welfare services in China’s cities are still perceived as the responsibility of individuals in rural areas.

In rural societies, the focus of women’s lives is their husbands’ families, due to the persistence of ‘patrilocal marriage’, in which a woman moves into her husband’s village at marriage. Daughters leave their natal (birth) families, but sons stay put. This means rural people continue to rely on sons for security and support in ill health or retirement.

Evidence from interviews with village women showed that:

• Most women do not have the same inheritance rights as their brothers nor do they try to claim them.
• Many women still believe that a ‘virtuous woman’ should not assert her own interests in the home and should avoid household disputes through tolerance and unselfishness.
• Traditional beliefs are so strongly held that many women also have negative attitudes towards daughters’ inheritance rights.

This situation appears to be changing, however. Improved opportunities for women to have paid jobs, education and training have increased their confidence and bargaining power in the transfer and redistribution of resources within the household. Young village women defend the legitimacy of ‘uxorilocal’ marriage, in which the husband lives with his wife’s family. More married daughters now stay on in their natal households. The question of rural women’s inheritance rights – particularly married women’s’ inheritance to parental estates and remarried widows’ inheritance rights in their previous married families – is now discussed more openly.

A lack of similar legal mechanisms for old-age security, combined with the persistence of patrilocal marriage, has reinforced the tradition of passing resources onto sons, the denial of daughters’ inheritance rights and the need for families to provide security for the elderly. However, the traditional security of extended and close family structures is now under threat from rural industrialisation, population mobility and family planning laws.

To protect older people and encourage stronger rights for women, the Chinese authorities should:

• accept that the lack of a basic system of social security has reinforced constraints on women’s rights to inherit, their power in the family and society, as well as their citizenship rights
• recognise that the state has an active role to play in extending rural social security programmes - to promote welfare for all, especially women
• challenge patriarchal practices in order to realise equal inheritance rights for men and women in rural China.

The unfairness of the differences between traditional rights of men and women will only change with effective social policies that combat gender discrimination and exclusion.

Source(s):
‘Gender difference in inheritance rights: observations from a Chinese village’, in 'The Journal of Peasant Studies', 30, (3-4), pp 252-77, by Heather Xiaoquan Zhang, April 2003
‘Gender difference in inheritance rights: observations from a Chinese village’ by Heather Xiaoquan Zhang, in ‘Rural development in transitional China: the new agriculture’ by P.Ho, J. Eyferth, and E. B. Vermeer, pp 252-77, Frank Cass, 2004

id21 Research Highlight: 2 February 2005

Further Information:
Heather Xiaoquan Zhang
Department of Geography
University of Chester
Parkgate Road
Chester CH1 4BJ
UK

Tel: +44 (0) 1244 375444
Fax: +44 (0) 1244 392820
Contact the contributor: h.zhang@chester.ac.uk

Geography Department, University of Chester

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