Re-thinking domestic violence: Family, gender, and the state in a changing China

Yang, Wenqi

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/117559 Copy

Description

Title

Re-thinking domestic violence: Family, gender, and the state in a changing China

Author(s)

Yang, Wenqi

Issue Date

2022-11-22

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Shao, Dan

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Shao, Dan

Committee Member(s)

• Hardesty, Jennifer L
• Martin, Jeffery T
• Tierney, Robert Thomas

Department of Study

E. Asian Languages & Cultures

Discipline

E. Asian Languages & Cultures

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• domestic violence
• policing
• gender-based violence
• history
• China

Abstract

The dissertation, Re-Thinking Domestic Violence: Family, Gender, and the State in a Changing China, examines how the Chinese state and its legal system interpreted and treated domestic violence. Contextualizing the historical process by which the Chinese governments incorporated the concept of domestic violence into its legal system since the mid-Qing dynasty, I scrutinize police officers’ perceptions of and attitudes toward domestic violence, and their primary policing actions and strategies in today’s China. To examine these issues, I combine grounded theory methods with archival research and ethnographic approaches. Specifically, I interviewed 47 police officers and conducted six months of participant observations at a police station in Fish Town (pseudonym, a city in Northeast China). Chapter 2 demonstrates that the Qing government interpreted domestic violence as women’s rebellion against the Confucian ethical hierarchy. The Beiyang government in the early Republican period changed the interpretation to an unfortunate circumstance to be tolerated by women. This state of affairs continued until the Nanjing government promulgated the 1930 Civil Code, which conceptualized domestic violence as an injustice against women that needed to be remedied. An analysis of judicial practices also reveals a fundamental reconceptualization of women’s autonomy throughout this process. A retrospection of the communist/socialist governments’ responses to domestic violence in Chapter 3 indicates that the unsatisfactory legal practice in today’s courts is a continuation of the unfinished women’s emancipation movement from the 1930s to 1950s. The state first subordinated abused women’s interests to the Communist Party’s revolutionary demands and state-building by politicizing wife abuse, and then, to its governing norms by labeling domestic violence as gender-neutral interpersonal violence. Chapter 4 introduces the power and organizational structure of the policing system in Fish Town and investigates the police officers’ conceptualizations of domestic violence stemming from their occupational and personal beliefs. I argue that officers in China do not take women as the archetypal domestic violence victims as previous scholars have assumed. Chapter 5 questions the existing scholarship that blames individual officers for not being willing to respond to domestic violence cases and adopt aggressive policing actions toward the assailants. The findings suggest that the state’s pro-mediation policies, the deficient transition to community policing, and the intensive emotional labor involved in handling such cases are synergistic in nature and contribute to the officers’ negative attitudes toward policing such cases. Chapter 6 shows that the officers intentionally engender their mediation strategies by emphasizing the immorality of men’s violence and the illegality of women’s aggression. It also challenges the existing scholarship that criticizes Chinese officers for holding patriarchal attitudes toward women and indifferent attitudes toward domestic violence. Chapter 7 examines why police officers involve the concerned couple’s parents in the mediation process from two perspectives: the necessity and accessibility of such a coping strategy. It demonstrates that although the legislation does not recognize parents’ role in their adult children’s domestic violence incidents, police officers recognize the dual nature of domestic violence and consider parents stakeholders in their adult children’s marital conflicts, based on the coexisting individualism and familism in contemporary China. This dissertation reveals that despite the Chinese state’s efforts to criminalize domestic violence since the Republican period, extralegal forces (e.g., the state’s governing norms, the transition to community policing, and individual legal practitioners’ preconceptions of domestic violence) significantly influence the outcome of the legal intervention. My scholarship employs a historical and decolonial approach to study contemporary legal practices both synchronically and diachronically. It accordingly reveals that the current unsatisfactory legal practices concerning domestic violence do not appear out of thin air but are rooted in the larger historical trends since the mid-Qing dynasty. This research ultimately provides a new and nuanced perspective to the scholarly discussion on the role of extralegal forces in shaping China’s legislative transformations and legal practices.

Graduation Semester

2022-12

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2022 Wenqi Yang

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