China’s courts have ruled that divorces won’t be granted if the spouse has cheated on the marriage. This created widespread controversy in the Chinese media. Chinese state-run newspaper Global Times reported that a court in Shandong province ruled ‘cheating is not a form of cohabitation’, since cohabitation requires a married person to live with someone without marriage relations continuously and stably.
Apparently, the court won’t recognize adultery as a cause for divorce. As the court’s ruling created a social media storm in China, the hashtag ‘No divorce because of cheating’ began trending on the country’s social media site Weibo, which is considered China’s Twitter as Netizens criticized the ruling as confusing.
Last year, China passed a divorce law making it more difficult for couples to divorce, as the new guidelines required couples to complete a ‘cooling off’ period of a month before deciding whether to divorce. Couples can then apply for a second divorce. Couples were concerned that it would complicate the divorce process because if one spouse resigned before 30 days, the divorce application would be canceled. This is because the aggrieved spouse would have to reapply for divorce, a lengthy and costly process.
After the law was passed, citizens criticized the move for interfering with their personal matters, and the hashtag ‘oppose divorce cooling-off period’ trended on Chinese social media. The divorce rate in China has risen from 0.96 divorces per 1,000 people in 2000 to 3.36 divorces per 1,000 people in 2019. According to records from the Chinese ministry of civil affairs, there were 4.15 million divorces in 2019.
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