Effective May 1, the new national law gives married women equal standing in rural land rights and empowers prosecutors to challenge discriminatory village rules.
After decades of exclusion and legal ambiguity, a new national law in China bars villages from stripping women of membership and related land rights because they married and moved away.
The long-standing practice left many rural women without legal recourse or access to collective economic benefits such as land-use rights, housing plots, or compensation when village land is requisitioned.
The Law on Rural Collective Economic Organizations, which took effect on May 1, affirms that women must enjoy equal rights with men and authorizes prosecutors to file public interest lawsuits when those rights are violated.
It states: “No individual or organization may infringe upon women’s rights within rural collectives — whether they are unmarried, married, divorced, widowed, or living in households without male members.”
After three rounds of deliberation over 18 months, the law was passed by the National People’s Congress, China’s national legislature, last June and formally enacted last week.
China’s rural land system has long combined collective ownership with local self-governance. After reforms in 1978, land remained collectively owned by villages, but use rights were allocated to households based on family size.
Villages retained the power to set their own rules, including who qualifies as a member. In practice, this meant many women lost their land rights after marriage, as villages tended to deny them shares in either their birth or marital communities.
In 1985, Yang Zhijun, now 70, lost the farmland allocated to her and her daughter after her village in northern China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region voted to revoke her membership because she had married.
She spent nearly four decades trying to reclaim her rights, a long-running case emblematic of the struggles faced by thousands of chujianü, or “married-out women,” left in legal limbo by village autonomy.
“As they see it, marrying out a daughter is like tossing out a basin of water,” Yang told domestic media in 2022. “We don’t deserve anything anymore.”
As similar cases piled up across the country and more women were excluded from land rights, the pushback became harder to ignore. Rural women began challenging village rules, appealing to the women’s federation, and filing petitions with local and national authorities.
In recent years, courts in provinces like Shaanxi and Hebei have issued rulings that challenge exclusionary village rules. And in the southwestern Yunnan, a local official persuaded residents to amend regulations by posing a simple question: “Who can guarantee their family won’t have daughters? Gender equality benefits every household.”
By January 2023, China had amended national legislation to affirm women’s equal rights to land and clarify that village rules must not override legal protections.
At the end of that year, lawmakers opened a final round of public consultation on the Law on Rural Collective Economic Organizations, aimed at regulating village governance, land allocations, and membership rules. Married-out women mobilized during the process, submitting thousands of suggestions both online and by mail to ensure their voices were heard.
The final version of the new law incorporated many of their demands. Compared to the draft, it now outlines a more comprehensive dispute resolution process, combining mediation, arbitration, and judicial rulings. It also empowers prosecutors to file public interest lawsuits, giving courts the authority to strike down illegal village practices.
Editor: Apurva.
(Header image: VCG)