Divorce Is Being Politicized in China—and Trapping Women in Abusive Marriages

Less than two months after Xie Yumei got married in 2021, her husband hit her for the first time.

Over the next two years, she called police in her city, Chengdu, six times to seek protection, asked a state-backed women’s group for help and tried to get a protection order and file for divorce in court.

Everywhere, she hit a wall. In April 2023, after a particularly vicious beating, she ended up in intensive care with multiple-organ damage. It took her another year to obtain a divorce.

Because of the central role family has in Chinese society, divorce used to be a cultural taboo. In recent years, it has become a political one. Lawyers and sociologists say many women in abusive marriages in China have been actively discouraged from divorcing violent husbands.

Under Xi Jinping , the Communist Party has emphasized “family harmony” and a “marriage and birth friendly” society, part of a quest for more babies as the population shrinks and ages.

An even more important priority is maintaining social stability. In China, men who have suffered setbacks, including divorce, are often seen as a security risk . Late last year, after a man killed 35 people by driving a car into a crowd in the southern city of Zhuhai, local police said the man was unhappy after splitting from his wife.

Police are often reluctant to intervene in what they describe as “family disputes,” despite a domestic-violence law that took effect in 2016. The law gives police the option to warn a violent spouse of punitive action if violence happens again. Nearly 100,000 such warnings were issued in 2023, which authorities say helped prevent further violence.

In reality, the warning has sometimes been used in lieu of tougher measures such as detaining a violent spouse, said Jeremy Daum , an expert in Chinese family law at Yale Law School.

“There is an emphasis on preserving family unity and happiness, which can lead to resolutions that may not adequately protect everybody,” Daum said.

Judges who give priority to mediation and return women to their families have been championed both in state and popular media, said Tiantian Zheng , an anthropologist at State University of New York, Cortland, studying gender-based violence in China.

Similarly, in divorce cases that go to court, judges often ask couples to work things out. In recent years, only about 35% of divorce trials resulted in actual divorces, compared with about 70% two decades ago, according to calculations based on official data by Ethan Michelson , an Indiana University sociologist and author of a book on gender injustice and divorce in China.

Judges routinely dismiss women’s claims and evidence of domestic violence, Michelson said. Out of more than 100,000 divorce rulings between 2017 and 2023 that he analyzed, judges referred to the domestic-violence law as grounds for granting a divorce in only three cases, he said.

A 2021 report released by Beijing Qianqian Law Firm, which provides legal aid to women, said that out of a random selection of court-published divorce cases between 2017 and 2020 in which plaintiffs sought a divorce because of domestic violence, only 30% were granted one. Of the 1,073 cases it studied, the court only acknowledged that domestic violence had occurred in 66 and granted a divorce only for 50 of those.

China’s State Council Information Office, which handles media inquiries on behalf of the Chinese government, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

When Qu Yan filed for divorce in Gansu province in 2022, a recording of the trial on a platform hosted by the Supreme People’s Court of China showed her repeatedly trying to present evidence of how her husband cut her with a knife and scalded her with boiling water, including photos of her injuries on her phone.

The judge declined to review her evidence and questioned whether she understood the term domestic violence, telling her that arguments and fights between the couple are normal. “But he attacked me with a knife!” Qu protested, according to the recording. The judge responded, “Every married couple might fight.”

In a ruling to deny her divorce request, he wrote, “Divorce is not the best way to resolve conflicts between a husband and wife.” Qu couldn’t be reached. The court didn’t respond to a request for comment.

During another recorded divorce trial, a wall decoration with the Chinese character for “harmony” hung facing a husband and wife. Through her lawyer, the wife submitted police records and other evidence to support her claims of being a longtime victim of domestic violence. Her husband admitted that he beat her repeatedly and had an affair with another woman.

Still, the court denied a divorce. “It is still possible for the couple to reconcile,” the judge wrote in the ruling, saying the man showed remorse. “Both parties should consider ways to benefit your family and children.”

If both parties agree to split up, a couple can seek a divorce at the local civil-affairs office. If only one wants a divorce, the case has to go before a judge. More than 70% of divorce petitions to courts are initiated by women, said Michelson.

Since 2021, couples who agree to divorce face a 30-day cooling-off period , followed by another 30 days to get the actual divorce certificate. If either spouse changes their mind during these 60 days, the divorce is void.

Women-rights advocates say the cooling-off period can especially hurt abused women, who may have a brief window in which an abusive husband agrees to a divorce. If he then changes his mind, the woman’s only option is to try for divorce in court with the odds stacked against her. Data shows a sharp drop in divorces after the cooling-off period was instituted.

The number of divorce registrations with local civil-affairs offices, meaning outside court, rose 1.1% in 2024 to 2.6 million, while the number of marriage registrations fell by 20.5% to 6.1 million in the same period, according to government data.

Su Min , a retiree who has been video-blogging about her solo road trip around China to escape a bad marriage, has become an icon for many Chinese women. Many of her three million social-media followers cheered when she got a divorce earlier this year after paying her ex-husband around $22,000 to get him to agree to a divorce.

A public outcry followed media coverage of Xie, the Chengdu woman, who detailed her ordeal on social-media posts in June 2023. The Ministry of Public Security and other agencies issued guidelines late last year to require police to follow up on every written warning issued in domestic-violence incidents within a week.

However, Beijing’s tighter grip on civil-society organizations has meant that there is less help for abused women outside the state sector. The number of domestic-violence hotlines run by nonprofit organizations has dropped by nearly half to under 40 between 2018 and 2022, partly due to reduced government funding, said Feng Yuan , co-founder of Equality, a Beijing group focused on preventing violence against women.

“If government agencies don’t undertake their responsibilities on domestic violence,” Feng said, “essentially, they are allowing it to happen.”

According to accounts Xie posted, police responded to her repeated pleas for help with written warnings that her husband ignored. She made numerous calls to the local branch of the All-China Women’s Federation, a Communist Party-backed agency with a mandate to protect women, which told her it didn’t have any authority to take action against her ex-husband.

The women’s federation didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Xie spent time away from Chengdu and started using a friend’s phone number to escape her husband. He still managed to track her down, one night waiting for her outside a subway station. He told her he had used China’s extensive surveillance system, which only the police have authority to use, to find her. It is unclear how or whether her husband, a businessman, had access to the system.

When she went to court to seek a protective order and a divorce, she was turned down because her filing didn’t include her husband’s household-registration booklet, a document she didn’t have access to, as she was hiding from him at the time. Women’s-rights advocates have called for making it easier for women to seek protection or file for divorce.

The evening Xie attempted to file for divorce, her husband found her again and dragged her to a hotel room, where he beat her for hours. “I kept telling myself I must not fall asleep. All I wanted was to live,” Xie said later on social media. After a guest called the police, her husband took her to the hospital.

It was a long recovery. She had to wear a colostomy bag and still can’t eat solid food, according to her social-media posts.

Xie, now 31, confirmed the details in her social-media accounts to The Wall Street Journal but declined to comment further. Her lawyers didn’t reply to requests for comment.

“If any of the agencies had acted, I wouldn’t have ended up like this,” Xie said in a video she posted.

In May last year, a Chengdu court granted her divorce and custody of her daughter.

Late last year, a local court sentenced her ex-husband to 11 years in prison for abuse and intentional injury. Her ex-husband, who appealed the verdict, wasn’t reachable for comment. His lawyer said he can’t comment.

Write to Liyan Qi at Liyan.qi@wsj.com