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Pursuing Rights and Getting Justice on China's Ethnic Frontier, 1949–1966

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Neil J. Diamant
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Abstract

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This article explains how minority women in rural China managed to use state legal and political institutions to obtain a divorce, despite numerous obstacles. Beginning with a legal controversy over why women from the Yi minority were going to court for “fun” and then divorcing their husbands, I proceed to look at the many factors that may have contributed to divorce in rural China, such as state ethnic policy, generational empowerment, culture, and the role of community in mediation and collective action. While such factors were influential, I argue that women's divorce in Yunnan was largely the result of a particular, time-bound confluence of revolutionary political forces that were unique to China, and not the direct product of the law or ethnic culture and status.

Type
Papers of General Interest
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , 2001 , pp. 799 - 840
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

This article was prepared while I was a post-doctoral fellow at the University Center for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh. Funding for my fieldwork was provided by the Committee for Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China (CSCPRC). I am grateful to both of these institutions for their support. I am very grateful to Frank Upham, Mark Frazier, Stevan Harrell, Elizabeth Perry, Joseph Esherick, and the two anonymous reviewers for the Law & Society Review for providing me with very helpful suggestions.

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