Thursday, December 6, 2012

Chinese divorce epidemic triggered by change in local land regulation



From:  - London Times - http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/asia/article3620054.ece

"The registry office of a district in southwestern China has been forced to hire a platoon of extra security guards and commandeer the use of a large wedding hall to cope with a catastrophic surge in divorces.
Within the last fortnight, in a surprise blur of mass marital discord, the District Civil Affairs Bureau in Yunyan has been overwhelmed by a 500 per cent increase in apparent marriage breakdowns.
Many couples, citing “constant bickering” or “lack of mutual communication” on their divorce application forms, have been arriving at the registry office holding hands, laughing together and as visibly devoted to one another as the day they tied the knot. Without exception, the newly divorced couples return home together.
A veiled ethnic Buyi bride (C) supported by two girls in traditional Buyi suits goes through an array of bamboo culms during a traditional ethnic Buyi wedding in Guiyang, capital city of southwest China’s Guizhou ProvinceThe 120 divorces now being processed every day in Yunyan included a 90-year-old couple who had been married for decades but were suddenly so eager to split that they went to the Civil Affairs Bureau in a pair of wheelchairs and joined the snaking queue for a divorce. Another elderly couple watched as their two sons and two daughters all got divorced on the same day.
The Qianling divorce epidemic is the unintended consequence of a recent change in local land regulation that makes it exceptionally disadvantageous to be married.
The new rule, imposed by the Guiyang municipal government, means that farming families from that region cannot have a home larger than 240sq m. For many farming families in Qianling, the new rule was a source of immediate panic — over the years, they have invested in their properties and built larger houses.
But the rule has a loophole whereby unmarried couples count as two families and the home and property rights can be twice that size. Because the regulation applies to some 1,300 other villages in the region, fears are mounting that local bureaucracies will be inundated with divorce requests as farmers abandon their marriage vows to retain their properties.
Once the loophole was discovered by the villagers of Qianling and the queues started forming, it was immediately clear that the existing facilities for handling divorces were not big enough. Some complained that they had had been thwarted on four consecutive days in their efforts to secure a divorce."

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