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Tiantian Zheng, Violent Intimacy: Family Harmony, State Stability, and Intimate Partner Violence in Post-Socialist China, Bloomsbury, 2022. 224 pgs.

Intimate partner violence is a worldwide problem. On average two women are killed every week in the United Kingdom by their partners or former partners. There are constant calls in the United Kingdom for the provision of improved training (and for changes of culture) within the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to better protect women and prosecute offenders, as well as for proper or more enhanced funding of the courts system so as to prevent delays in bringing offenders to trial. And there are constant calls for the culture of masculinity to change, it being often stated that until men change their conception of themselves, of what it means to be male, then women will continue to be at risk. And this is in a developed democratic country with a historically rights-based legal system.

What then are we to make of China, an authoritarian one-party state, with a very different culture, as well as a very different legal system that reaches back more than two thousand years—a legal system uninfluenced by Western concepts of law until the 20^th century? How commonplace is intimate partner violence in China? And what has been the political, legal, and social response in China to the problem?

In Violent Intimacy: Family Harmony, State Stability, and Intimate Partner Violence in Post-Socialist China, Tiantian Zheng, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Anthropology of the State University of New York, aims to answer the above questions. She states that this is the first ethnography of women’s experiences of intimate partner violence in post-socialist China based on interviews with women, men, government officials, police, judges, and feminist activists through the period 2014–2021. As the vast majority of intimate partner violence is male against female (95%), she makes no excuses for the fact that the book only deals with the female experience (it is estimated that 35.7% of women in post-socialist China have suffered intimate partner violence) and argues that violence against women in China is enabled by “invisible structural violence”, by “violence inherent in the legal, political, and historical, sociocultural structure”.

For the non-reader of academic works, the use of the word “violence” in this way may come as a surprise—especially when set against the actual, and very often fatal, physical and psychological violence done to the women discussed in the text. For a non-academic such as myself, I feel this is a pity, though it is a trend. In recent years I have seen in academic works the incarceration of criminals being described as a “violent act”, indeed even an autopsy being carried out on a body has been described so—the definition of “violence” being more than somewhat stretched and diluted, and in danger of being rendered meaningless.

This being said—and it is a very minor quibble, and only illustrative of the fact that this book has probably been written for researchers and students in the anthropological/China studies field rather than the general reader—Violent Intimacy is a highly ambitious work, especially in light of the difficulties of conducting fieldwork in China at this current time and in such a sensitive subject area. Zheng took the innovative approach of interviewing her female subjects via online chatgroups, and then, once a relationship had been developed, following up with phone calls and in-person interviews. The online chatgroups are interesting in themselves, for it is only in those spaces that many of the women feel safe enough to tell their stories to similarly affected women. Zheng makes no comment as to the veracity of her subjects’ stories, or to the testing of this veracity. It may be the standard approach of ethnographers to take the stories they are told at face value. I do not know. But the stories of intimate partner violence as related in the text are so familiar, so commonplace, so credible, that there is certainly no need to apply evidentiary legal tests to them for the purposes of this book. However, it is my contention—and I will return to this later—that useful and illuminating as this book is, it is a pity that Zheng is not a lawyer.

Violent Intimacy is separated into six chapters focusing on a different aspect of intimate partner violence in China: a social and cultural history; worthy versus unworthy victims; the criminal justice system; male perceptions and rationalisations; everyday resistance of women; and, finally, activism. It is probably inevitable that there is much repetition between the chapters, as making such clear delineations is nigh on impossible. For example, a social and cultural history of intimate partner violence is essentially also a legal history that takes us up to the present day. And considerations of whether a woman is considered worthy or not impacts how a woman will be treated by the legal system. And so on. Moreover, each chapter covers a subject which could form the basis of a book on its own—and, in my opinion, probably should have been. There is so much to be said, so much ground to be covered, that, ambitious as Zheng has been, a lengthier and much more focused treatment for each chapter theme is almost certainly required.

For example, in the first chapter, we are taken on an all-too-quick journey through thousands of years of social, cultural, and legal history, from foot-binding to the woeful status of women in the eyes of the law, from women being forced to leave their natal homes to marry (thereby becoming utterly vulnerable in the marriage home) to how the Confucian ideal family which, even if Confucians never actually endorsed it, actually provided the cultural bedrock for wife-beating to be excused as well as to proliferate. This is all well and good, but in absorbing all this the general reader might be forgiven for thinking that during the Imperial era the status of women was a fixed quantity, that there was no evolution in male-female relations from dynasty to dynasty. Furthermore, there is no discussion of female-on-female violence, of the very real tensions within the Inner Quarters, of mothers-in-law beating daughters-in-law, of wives beating concubines, of concubines beating maids, for example. This is not to be overly critical here. The complexity of male-female relations as well as female-female relations through the Imperial era is beyond the scope of the book. But the treatment of the social, cultural, and legal history is, to me at least, over-simplified and worthy of much more thought and consideration.

There are historical gems to be had in this chapter, though—even if grim. For example, with the introduction of the Marriage Law in 1950, the Communists sought a complete break with the “feudal past”, the new law giving women equality in marriage, the right to divorce, as well as inheritance rights. Naturally, what happened next was many women actively sought divorce (1.17 million divorce cases in 1953 alone), which in turn led to an often-violent reaction from men imbued with traditional cultural attitudes. It is estimated that perhaps 80,000 women seeking divorce under the Marriage Law were murdered or forced to commit suicide by their husbands. And Communist officials, either imbued with traditional attitudes themselves, or just as likely wishing to avoid social unrest, would more often than not turn a blind eye to such murders and even involve women in “struggle sessions” to humiliate them and to no doubt discourage further divorce petitions—a subject worthy of a book-length treatment in of itself.

It is the third chapter, that on intimate partner violence and the criminal justice system—more properly the politico-legal system, as I will go on to explain—that really forms the heart of the book. It is here that we see the modern everyday struggles of female victims of intimate partner violence within a system that is weighted very much against them, not only in terms of defending themselves against abuse and violence (a wife who kills an abusive husband will very likely face a lengthy prison sentence or even death, as opposed to abusive husbands being released from prison after only a few years following the murder of their wives) but in seeking to free themselves from abuse by applying for Personal Safety Protection Orders, for example, or through divorce petitions via an often unhelpful or obstructive judiciary.

As I have said, this chapter forms the heart of the book. And, helpful as the other chapters are, it is a pity that this chapter—by which I mean a restructured and expanded version of it—did not form the whole of the book. For it is complicated, confused, and confusing. I have some sympathy for Zheng as the applicable law is not all to be found in the one place, and indeed just because the applicable law exists does not mean it will either be adhered to or enforced by the judiciary—more on that below—but I feel a lawyer would have approached the subject in a way that was not only more logical, but would also have provided much more clarity for the general reader. At the very least it would have been useful to have complete translations of all the relevant legislation available in the book, especially the Anti-Domestic Violence Law 2015, many of the articles of which—Zheng refers to them as “stipulations”, which I don’t think is correct—are referred to time and time again. And, in regard to the Anti-Domestic Violence Law, some history of how it came into being would have been very useful, as well as much more detail on the various articles of this law, the legal remedies under which, depending on which article is applicable, could take victims of abuse and their partners either into the criminal courts or the civil (family) courts—a source of confusion in of itself.

As Zheng alludes to in the book (but does not fully elaborate), historically Chinese law is very different to the Western conception of law, to the traditions of the European Civil Law and English Common Law. It is worth understanding how different it is, and how those differences are still meaningful today. Western law is very much concerned with disputes between individuals (rights holders), whereas Chinese law was concerned with relations between individuals (subjects) and the state. In Imperial China, people did not have rights as such, rather they had duties to the state. Each dynasty promulgated its own law codes which, from the Han dynasty onwards, remained remarkably consistent in structure and underlying philosophy—a curious amalgam of Legalism, Confucianism, and cosmological conceptions of governance. Both Legalism and Confucianism shared the same idea of a hierarchical political-social order sanctioned by Heaven, but they differed in how to achieve that order. Legalists believed that people were inherently bad and that people could only be governed effectively through the application of harsh punishments, those punishments producing such a deterrent effect that eventually all the people would abide by the law. In contrast, Confucians believed that people were essentially good and placed more of an emphasis on the examples of “morally superior men” to guide the people rather than the use of harsh punishments. From the Han dynasty onwards, both Confucianism and Legalism would be used in the writing of law: Confucianism to justify the existing political-social-moral order, and Legalism—in terms of punishments for legal infractions—used as an instrument to enforce the governance of that order. And this would remain the case until the fall of the Imperial era in 1911, when China wanting to throw off its image as the “sick man of Asia”, to deal with issues of extraterritoriality, and to be accepted into the wider world order, chose to dabble with, and then adopt, Western concepts of law and legal procedure.

I mention the above in reviewing Zheng’s book only in that, just because modern China now has laws and institutions that seem immediately recognisable to Western eyes, it does not mean that those laws and institutions necessarily operate in the way Westerners would expect. To give a simple example, China has a written constitution that does not seem to actually operate as a constitution. Thousands of years of culture and legal philosophy cannot be expected to have been wholly discarded during the long and tumultuous 20^th century—and nor have they been. Modern Chinese law is often very loosely written and open to much interpretation—interpretation by police, by procuratorates, by the courts, all of which are still heavily influenced by China’s long political and cultural history. Moreover, the Peoples Republic of China is an authoritarian state governed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP, or CPC depending on your preference), where the courts themselves are subject to the leadership of the Party. So, the question always needs to be asked: who do the courts serve first, the law or the Party?

This is an important question. As we shall see below, in China, in considering CCP policy and the law, it may very well be that CCP policy has much more “legal weight” than the written law itself.

Within the chapter on the criminal justice system and intimate partner violence in China, Zheng demonstrates, via often very tragic case studies, not only the subservience of the courts to the CCP policy of keeping the family unit intact at all costs, but also that the cultural attitudes toward women—their natural sphere being in the home, their natural function to be “dutiful wives and virtuous mothers” (xianqi liangmu), in essence thereby putting the responsibility for family harmony upon women and women alone—that have persisted for thousands of years have not only never gone away but are actually now being reemphasised by the CCP. In recent years, Xi Jinping has consistently stressed the pivotal role that family harmony has in maintaining state stability and social harmony. Maintaining the family, and especially the gendered hierarchy of the family, is very much CCP policy.

All very Confucian then.

Is it any wonder that police in China will turn a blind eye to reports of intimate partner violence, or tell abused wives to just behave themselves and they won’t get beaten, or for judges—female judges included – to state without embarrassment that the severe injuries a wife has received at the hands of her husband do not reach the level of abuse where a petition for divorce could be granted? Is it any wonder that officials almost always insist on informal mediation (to keep the family together), for courts to almost always accept the word of an abusive husband that he has changed or will change his behaviour, and to do their utmost to deny applications for divorce regardless of the circumstances, and when they do so to award custody of the children to the parent most able to financially support them—which is almost always the man, even if he is a serial abuser? Indeed, as Zheng relates, the situation is such that an official who went out of their way to prevent many divorces by obstructing proper procedure was actually commended for their performance even though their actions were contrary to the law as written. Such is the power of CCP policy over law in the matter of intimate partner abuse and petitions for divorces, as epitomized by the popular Chinese idiom, “Rather demolish ten temples than destroy one marriage” (ningchaibaizuomiao, buhuiyizhuanghun).

It is a pity that Zheng did not find space in the book to compare what happens in China in regard to intimate partner violence and what happens in other countries—except, that is, for leaving us with the impression that Western countries, for example, are governed by laws, whereas in China it is accepted that the judgement of wise men, wise Confucian men, is superior to the “rigidity of conventional law”. As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, intimate partner violence is a problem for all countries. Even with a very different cultural, social, and legal history there has always been a reticence in the United Kingdom, for example, to delve too deeply into what happens within a person’s home. In 1628, Sir Edmund Coke stated: “For a man’s house is his castle, et domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium [and each man’s home is his safest refuge].” This is often interpreted to mean that a man can do what he likes inside his own home—incorrectly, I should add, for what is illegal outside of the home is still illegal inside. And yet there remains this sense that there is a public realm and a very private realm, a private realm into which the state should not encroach—an imaginary divide noted by early feminist scholars as doing women no favours whatsoever.

Such a comparison with a democratic Western country would have proved useful not only in highlighting the many similarities—culturally conservative police, prosecuting authorities, and judiciary, for example—but also as a way to highlight the unusual nature of one-party authoritarian states such as China, with their capability to practise whatever form of social engineering they wish, and their brooking no argument or debate regardless of the effect on the individual or the many tragedies that might ensue because of whatever political policy is currently in vogue. In democratic countries, protests and campaigns against intimate partner violence are either listened to or ignored; in China, protesters are often imprisoned. This is an important distinction. In China the CCP can promote whatever policies it likes in its quest to create an idealised society—and, obviously, maintain its power—whether that policy is contrary to traditional values such as with the one-child policy, or, as is the case these days, to build upon traditional values by placing the family at the foundation of the state. Indeed, Zheng could have done much more to highlight the often schizophrenic policy initiatives of the CCP: for instance, where the people in China are encouraged to trust in the written law, even as we have already seen that the laws are often not much help at all; or in publicising and promotion of the issues in regard to intimate partner violence—primarily at the local government level—even when Xi Jinping is stating that the family is the foundation of the state and officials are quietly encouraged to do their utmost to preserve the family unit regardless of the abuses they often see before their very own eyes.

As I have already stated, the chapter on intimate partner violence and the criminal justice system forms the heart of the book, and the book would have been very much improved if this chapter had been restructured and expanded. With the narration of all the case studies, the experiences women have had with the police, procuratorates, and before the judiciary, far too much information is thrown at the reader and far too quickly so that the reader—or maybe it is just me—is left overwhelmed and confused and struggling to make sense of it all. This is not to say that Zheng’s ambition was misplaced in the writing of this chapter, or indeed the whole book. But I am left with an overwhelming feeling that the book was either rushed, or too little thought given to its structure. There is a tremendous amount of crossover or “bleed through” (for want of a better expression) between the chapters which I suspect could have been alleviated with better structuring and better editing. However, I am sympathetic to the scale of the problem in writing about all aspects of intimate partner abuse in China and what Zheng was trying to achieve. And, somewhat unusual for an academic book, the reader gets a real sense of her anger at the situation in China. Perhaps it is all too common for anthropologists to identify with their subjects. I have no problem with this. I would do too.

The final chapters cover issues such as male attitudes to intimate partner violence, how women fight back, and female activism in China.

When we move away from discussing how the legal system works in China, or more properly how it works against the interests of abused women, and begin to look at male attitudes and rationalisations for violence against women—popular and official discourse makes the connection between male violence and a “faulty wife”, that is a wife with a “harsh mouth”—what seems at first straightforward is not necessarily so. For we are moving out of the world of anthropology and more toward psychology and the power dynamics of relationships. The issue of why certain men beat their partners and others do not is not addressed. This is no surprise as this is a very difficult and highly contentious area. In terms of solutions for male violence, in the United Kingdom we are told that men must, as a sex, change their ways, must become more comfortable with expressing their feelings, that boys as they are growing up must be taught other ways of dealing with conflicts rather than resorting to violence. These answers have always seemed rather glib to me, and wilfully ignore pathological psychologies and biological drivers, and that as a species, as primates, human beings are highly violent animals. It does not take much in terms of stress or perceived threat for the thin sheen of civilisation to evaporate away. That is not to say that potential solutions should not be discussed, but it does not take too much thought to realise that violence, and specifically intimate partner violence, will be with us until the end of time. And that is the reason why it is important to highlight the reaction of the criminal justice system and of the state, when intimate partner violence does occur, as this book does in respect to China.

In only discussing male attitudes and rationalisations toward intimate partner violence, we are also missing one half of the equation: female attitudes toward intimate partner violence in China. As Zheng notes in her book, petitions for divorce by female victims of abuse are turned down by female judges or are denied help by female employees at the All-China Women’s Federation, for example—these female employees often espousing the same advice as would men, that if abused wives “behaved themselves” in their marriages then there would be no abuse. It would have been useful to include such a section in the book.

And, though studies of intimate partner violence usually, and with good reason, focus on female victims, it would not have been unreasonable—to make this a complete ethnographic study—to include a section on male victims of intimate partner abuse, even if, as is very often the case, male victims are often abusers themselves. One is always left with the impression that because 95% of abuse if male upon female—and because men for biological reasons are much more capable of inflicting lethal violence—that to discuss male victims is somehow to weaken the argument about female victims. This is a great pity. It would have been useful, as a comparison, to understand how male victims are treated by the criminal justice system in China, how successful they are in petitioning for divorces, whether they have the same difficulties, whether they are treated better or worse. Perhaps, and this is understandable, there were no men in the online chat rooms.

In terms of women fighting back, there are no real surprises that the women who succeed either have strong support from their natal families, the financial wherewithal to forge a life independent of their abusive partners, or a good working knowledge of the criminal justice system and applicable law that enables them to use the system, if not to their advantage, then at least not to their disadvantage.

A pivotal moment in the women’s rights movement in China came in 1995, at the United Nations 4^th World Conference on Women hosted in Beijing. Not only did the conference first introduce many of the concepts surrounding women’s rights to the Chinese attendees, but it also generated sources of foreign aid that would be used to fund women’s activism in China in the form of NGOs. The speech made by Hilary Clinton entitled “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights” was inspirational for many, that speech the turning point in terms of their careers. Prior to the conference, many senior officials denied that intimate partner violence even existed in China. Afterwards, many of the attendees would go on to lead the women’s rights movement in China, with numerous NGOs being established to promote and protect the interests of women. Much progress was made, including, as we have seen already, the drafting of the Anti-Domestic Violence Law 2015, which came into force on the 1 March 2016.

However, since 2014 the foreign funding of NGOs in China has been prohibited, forcing many of them to shut down. Furthermore, there has been increased surveillance and control of NGOs, all NGOs having to report to the police on their activities. The psychological toll on the employees of these NGOs has been intense, leading to many of them leaving their posts for good. By 2020, of the seven leading NGOs instrumental in pushing forward the Anti-Domestic Violence Law, only two have survived. In 2015, five university students were arrested and jailed for planning to disseminate stickers about sexual harassment on public transport, after which more than 300 lawyers and women’s rights activists were “targeted”—since then called the “709 repression” because the lawyers and activists were arrested on 9 July. It seems there is no room in Xi Jinping’s China for people to speak up on those issues that might undermine the image of Chinese society or embarrass the CCP.

But, as Zheng reveals in this final chapter, all is not as bleak as one might first imagine. The work of activists and NGOs still continues in the field of anti-domestic violence despite being always under the watchful eyes of the state. These activists have to tread a fine line, maintaining the argument that they are apolitical, that they are acting only as an adjunct to government, operating in a space where government does not operate, providing education on existing law and support to victims of intimate partner violence as the law requires. Activists have also cleverly turned the argument for “family harmony” and “social stability” on its head, insisting that intimate partner violence actually undermines family harmony and social stability. One cannot help but be left with admiration for the bravery and commitment of these activists. And, though not referenced by Zheng in her book, an article by Cai Yiwen for Sixth Tone (published 1^st March 2021) to mark the fifth anniversary of the Anti-Domestic Violence Act was upbeat in some respects, stating that victims are now much more likely to come forward and report abuse to hotlines and the police, despite police in many instances still considering such abuse as a “family affair”, and that 12 provinces have passed supporting legislation at the local level. It appears that the many shocking instances of intimate partner violence that feature on social media almost daily in China have had an effect and cannot continue to be ignored by local government officials despite a somewhat antagonistic indifference from Beijing at the moment and despite the prevailing cultural opinions and norms within the criminal justice system and wider society.

So, what to make of Violent Intimacy by Tiantian Zheng?

It is certainly an important book—and, as I have said, very ambitious. And there is no doubting the research that has been done, the many Chinese-language sources cited, the effort that has gone into conducting the necessary fieldwork and the difficulties of building the trust of subjects to elicit their often tragic and upsetting stories, and attempting the extremely difficult task of describing the issue of intimate partner violence in the historical political, social, and legal context leading up to the present day, and then make sense of the mass of complications, contradictions, and prejudices within the criminal justice system that victims have to somehow negotiate just to survive.

The problem is in the execution. True, it is an academic book, but I do not think that is really the issue. It just should read better than it does. And contrary to the assertion on the blurb of the book, it is not the first, or indeed the only study, on intimate partner violence in China—though, I accept, it might be the most wide-ranging (or unfocused, depending on your point of view). The subject-matter is important. It deserves a wider audience. But the text is too replete with academic/anthropological terminology and interpretations (some of which are questionable) that its value, to the general reader at least, is limited to those with the patience to struggle through the text. And, though the structure of the book seems reasonable at first glance, there are so many connections made between the chapters, so many repetitions of ideas and interpretations, that a better editor should have taken much more decisive action. The text had me wishing almost constantly that an investigative journalist had written it, someone trained to write for an audience, someone better able to convey the political, legal, and social situation in China as it is. Or, as I mentioned earlier in this review, maybe someone with the forensic eye and logical mind of a lawyer. The criminal justice system in China is a complex environment, and I never got the sense that Zheng ever really got to grips with it. If I had been editing the chapter on the criminal justice system, I think I would have said something like, “This is great, but let’s take all this information and start writing it again from scratch.”

All that being said, Violent Intimacy is worth having on the shelf, if only as a starting point in looking at the wider issues of intimate partner violence in China in one slim volume, and if you cannot read or access the many available Chinese-language sources. As a reader, you may have to work a little, though.

There are a couple of other English language single volume sources in print that will add flesh to the bones of Violent Intimacy.