Legal Consciousness of the Leftover Woman: Law and Qing in Chinese Family Relations, Qian Liu
In this article, Qian Liu addresses the legal consciousness of Putianese family members with regard to issues of marriage and the obligations children owe their parents and ancestors.
Because of China's one-child policy, which was modified relatively recently, and prohibitions against sex-selective abortion, many families ended up with no male descendants. By custom, when the daughters in one-child families married young men, they became obligated to support their husbands' parents and ancestors but not their own. In this sense, marriage of a daughter could create serious problems for her parents and ancestors. If a daughter remained single for a long time, however, she became known as a “leftover woman,” a stigmatized social status. A customary Putianese solution to this dilemma is the practice known as lianggu, an agreement between husband and wife to support both lineages equally: “Under lianggu, the married couple supports all parents and ensures that the next generation will carry on the family names of both sides as a way to continue both family lines. Additionally, the couple is responsible for ancestor worship of both families, which includes visiting ancestors' graves on Tomb-Sweeping Day and on the anniversary of the death.” Young women's parents viewed lianggu as a way to ensure their own support and well-being, even after death, while still allowing their daughter to marry and start her own family. Whether the young man's family would acquiesce to this customary practice was another matter.As they navigate their way through these complex and sometimes contraÂdictory frameworks, the 72 “leftover women” interviewed in Liu's study draw on the concept of qing to inform their choices to embrace, avoid, or resist the law. In her article, Liu skillfully weaves together the various strands of state law and customary practice as she explains the thoughts and actions - the legal consciousness - of so-called leftover women and their Putianese families.
To understand the legal consciousness of ordinary Chinese people and the interactions among individuals in Chinese society, it is not enough to consider their relationship to law alone, but also law's connection to qing in people's thoughts and actions. As a long-standing and supremely important concept in China, qing is loosely translated as a sense of humanity, human instinct, human nature, and human relations. In traditional Chinese legal culture, the concept of qing refers to human nature and the normal feelings or attitudes of the public in particular contexts and circumstances. For example, people's desire to enjoy a healthy and wealthy life together with their family members is considered the qing of ordinary people, because it is human nature to long for health, wealth, and the wellbeing of their loved ones. Chinese people believe that law should respect the desires and needs shared by ordinary people and that law should be consistent with qing (1⅛⅛ AA±W)∙
Ordinary people in China typically look to qing, rather than state law, to distinguish right from wrong. Historically, Chinese jurisprudence emphasized that qing, li (3, reasonableness), and fa (1⅛, law) should exist in unity, and that all three of these elements formed an indistinguishable whole. People are well advised that, when a conflict arises, the first thing to be considered is qing, and “only when all such avenues are exhausted does one turn to li... If this too proves unavailing, one is then forced as a last resort to invoke fa.”[CII] In other words, ordinary Chinese people's primary emphasis is on qing and only secondarily on fa and li. [...]
The primary aim of this article is to investigate how law and qing interact in different ways to shape ordinary Chinese people's legal consciousness. In my research, I observed two broad categories of interaction between law and qing - namely, law in opposition to qing and law in alliance with qing.
To be specific, I identify four forms of legal consciousness when state law is in opposition to qing: (1) avoidance of state law when it conflicts with qing, (2) invocation of qing to mitigate undesirable results of state law, (3) resistance of state law to protect qing and (4) dismissal of state law when breaking the law conforms to qing. On the other hand, when it is perceived that state law is - or should be - in alliance with qing, the legal consciousness that emerges from the interaction of qing and law may be of two kinds: (1) embrace of state law when it enforces qing and (2) perception of state law as too weak when it fails to transform “old” understandings of qing.My theory of how the interaction of law and qing shapes ordinary Chinese people's legal consciousness in everyday life is based on my study of the legal consciousness of “leftover women.” “Leftover women” is a term of recent origin that refers to Chinese women who fail to follow the practice of marrying at an early age. The state media, as well as the public, often regard these women as “leftover” products in the marriage market. I use this discriminatory term in this article to emphasize that the society has imposed a significant pressure on single women to marry. [...]
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