Shirley Xinyi Cai is a researcher in comparative politics and political theory, pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science at McGill University. One of her ongoing projects is about the caili (彩礼, i.e. bride price or betrothal gift), a deep-rooted marriage custom that calls on the family of the groom-to-be to pay a sum of money to the bride’s family.
ChinaFile editorial fellow Jeremy Goldkorn did a Q&A via email with Cai about how this traditional custom has been adapted for 21st Century life, and why it appeals to some feminists even though it appears on the surface to be the very epitome of the objectification of women.
Jeremy Goldkorn: How widespread was the custom of caili before 1949? Was it always more common in rural areas? How widespread is it now?
Shirley Xinyi Cai: Before 1949, the legal system placed great importance on the role of the bride price as a necessary part of the marital ritual and even regarded it as important de facto evidence for proving the existence of a marital relationship. In the early 20th century, although this ritual system no longer held a legal status, it continued as a customary practice. For example, 63 out of 86 counties in nine provinces of the Republic of China (1912-1949) had regulations to uphold its legitimacy.
During the period of the War of Resistance Against Japan and the Democratic Revolution, most provinces repeatedly issued decrees prohibiting the solicitation of wealth through marriage and abolishing the caili system. Nowadays, over 70 percent of marriages have caili, and around 40 percent have “implicit caili” such as the groom’s contributing a house and car to the marriage.
What amounts of money are typical? Perhaps you could give two examples, one from a poor rural area, and another from a first-, second-, or third-tier city?
The price of caili varies across different regions, with no uniform standard. However, the general trend is that the bride price tends to be higher in economically poorer areas, which means that economically underdeveloped western regions often have higher prices compared to the eastern regions.
Additionally, in first-tier cities, caili often merely serves a symbolic meaning, whereas in rural areas, caili also serves the practical purpose of improving economic conditions for the bride and her family. Surveys show that the amount of caili and its proportion of the total wedding cost are as follows: In the eastern coastal provinces, the bride price is approximately 22,700 renminbi ($3,163, or 26.19 percent of the total wedding cost); in the central region, it is 27,200 renminbi ($3,790, or 30.02 percent); and in the western inland provinces, it is 28,000 renminbi($3,902 or 38.36 percent).
Do the parents of the bride typically keep the money or do they sometimes just hand it over to their daughter?
It varies. According to traditional customs, caili is money or goods given by the groom or the groom’s family to the bride’s family at the time of marriage. It is managed by the bride’s parents and is not meant for the bride personally. In some rural areas, parents hope to use their daughter’s caili money for their son’s marriage (essentially keeping the money). Often, the discussions between two families regarding the amount, form, and other aspects of the caili do not involve the participation of the daughter.
However, the practice of caili is increasingly seen as a way to bless the newlyweds, and the function of economic compensation for the bride’s family has been diminishing. As the younger generation has a strong sense of independence and no longer sees themselves as the extension of the parents under traditional patriarchy, some parents do give the money to their daughters.
You mention that in rural areas, “women will lose their own land rights after marriage.” The scholar Leta Hong Fincher, author of the book Leftover Women, has documented a different but parallel issue with urban women who sometimes find themselves written off, or never written onto the deeds of the apartments they share with their spouses, which makes them extremely vulnerable in the case of divorce.
Do these issues mean that caili is actually one of the few ways that many Chinese women can ensure some financial security as they go into marriage, if they are planning to have children and deprioritize their careers?
I think so, and this is why caili, which has been practiced since the Western Zhou Dynasty, is very complicated in contemporary Chinese society. According to current law, caili is considered the woman’s premarital property, as it is obtained before marriage. This ensures that in a divorce, the property is more likely to remain on the woman’s side. But if we’re discussing the impact of childbirth and family responsibilities on women’s careers rather than divorce, I think the benefits of caili are very limited.
Firstly, well-educated urban women often work in jobs that provide maternity benefits. Influenced by gender equality concepts, these young women are often unwilling to give up their jobs due to family roles. For them, caili is often symbolic rather than an improvement or practical guarantee of their economic situation.
In rural areas, it is questionable whether caili is used to ensure the woman’s material security and compensate for childbirth-related damage. However, from the woman’s perspective, a high price can raise the cost of marriage, making it difficult for the man to extricate himself from the marriage, thereby ensuring the woman’s life stability to some extent.
In our previous correspondence, you wrote that “women who identify themselves as feminists . . . perceive the practice as an economic compensation for the impact on their careers due to childbirth, caregiving, housekeeping, and other familial responsibilities.” What is your own view of this?
The discourse among netizens who identify themselves as “feminists” and support the practice of caili revolves around several points.
First, they believe that caili serves as a means to validate the worth of the bride, with the amount demanded reflecting the assessment of the bride’s value by both the bride herself and her family. It is also perceived as a “gesture of sincerity” from the groom’s family. If the groom is willing to expend considerable money on this marriage, it demonstrates his deep affection for his future wife.
Second, they contend that caili seems to be a “retributive justice” for women, who are supposed to balance their careers and family roles in an era when traditional values such as “men working outside, women managing the household” (男主外，女主内, nan zhu wai, nu zhu nei) coexist with an absolute, neo-liberal general equality (neoliberal feminism argues that women can have meaningful careers and also be good family care-takers).
Third, caili serves as compensation for women’s physical damage in reproduction and related labor such as taking care of their children. It also serves as a protection against domestic violence for the bride, the compensation of the right to children’s surnames, and other prevalent feminist issues in China.
However, I would argue that we need to be careful interpreting caili as economic compensation. First, I believe that caili should only be interpreted as compensation for the potential physical and mental risks of women’s reproductive labor. This means that first, caili is not about putting a price tag on the womb, and second, reproductive labor is not the same as other forms of domestic labor.
Gestational labor—the “work” of pregnancy and giving birth—is a biologically determined role performed only by women. If caili is considered as compensation for any type of domestic labor, such as nurturing kids and looking after elders, then it presupposes a gender-specific division of labor within the family, that women are naturally supposed to be homemakers. If it is seen as compensation for women’s reproductive labor, it can commodify gestational labor.
Second, I argue that the bride price is actually a hybrid product that merges characteristics of both pre-modern and modern Chinese societies. It is not simply a transaction or buying of labor like other market behavior, but also simplifies a relational change and power dynamic shifting between the payer and the payee in the form of a “gift.” I would argue that, unlike a dowry (嫁妆, jiazhuang), which is when the bride’s family gives money to the groom’s family, caili is accompanied by an asymmetrical change in both families’ structures, as the bride is expected to distance herself from her maternal family and integrate into her husband’s family after marriage. Moreover, I believe the current discussion about caili actually creates tension among Chinese feminists and even redefines “feminists” in a Chinese context. This brings a new question: Who can define feminism in China?
Since the early 2000s, it has become commonplace for women to expect men who hope to marry them to have an apartment, a car, and a certain amount of savings or salary. How do these expectations relate to the caili? If the groom brings better material conditions to the marriage, is the expected caili lower, or is there no relationship between the two?
Apartments, cars, and other financial or material resources a groom brings to the marriage are implicit forms of caili, which can make it easier for the bride’s family to ask for caili in this form than it would be to simply ask for money. On the other hand, just as people in economically developed areas tend to make lower demands for caili, for a financially well off groom’s family, the requirement for caili is actually lower. The underlying psychology is that the bride’s family feels assured about the groom’s family background, believing that the bride will be well taken care of after marriage.
Can you summarize the Supreme People’s Court’s (SPC’s) 2023 judgements on four cases related to caili, and the guiding documents released by the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the All-China Women’s Federation?
In December 2023, the SPC of China issued a draft law on handling disputes over bride prices, regulating the practice and stipulating conditions for its return, such as whether marriage registration has been completed according to legal procedures and whether the couple has de facto cohabitated for a while.
Following this, the SPC, the Ministry of Civil Affairs, and the All-China Women’s Federation held a joint press conference to release four typical cases involving disputes over bride price. In these four cases, factors such as the couple’s cohabitation, the possibility of continuing the marriage, whether marriage registration was completed according to legal procedures, and special situations such as abortion or unexpected termination of a pregnancy during the marriage influenced the SPC’s decision on whether caili should be returned.
The U.S., like China, is going through a strange period where women’s rights are both regressing and progressing at the same time. What is the big takeaway from your research when it comes to understanding how women are doing in China in 2024?
I believe that women’s rights are simultaneously progressing and regressing in China as well.
Resisting tradition is difficult. A current paradox is that although awareness of gender equality has improved, women still more often seek to shoulder less family expenditure within households and aspire to marry up—that is, to marry men with better economic and educational backgrounds than themselves. Various cultural products like “tradwife literature” (娇妻文学, jiaoqi wenxue), which advocates for women to return to domestic roles, continue to emerge and be welcomed by consumers. Popular cultures promote the distinction between “male competition” (雄竞, xiongjing) and “female competition” (雌竞, cijing), where “male competition” primarily refers to a man’s family background, educational background, wealth, and social status, while “female competition” often points to a woman’s genetic value, reproductive value, aesthetic value, and emotional value, emphasizing that women own the “privilege” that they can achieve class mobility through marriage while men cannot.
In this context, the practice of caili seems to become an excuse to perpetuate the Confucian tradition of male superiority and female inferiority in the guise of “protecting women’s rights.” Considering current national policies (such as the divorce cooling-off period) and the continuously declining marriage rate, it appears that attempts by public authorities to intervene in people’s private lives have not been welcomed.
The big takeaway from my research is that these narratives of progress and regression seem to exist on different layers of the same canvas. Gender discrimination in the workplace in China is still prevalent, while the #MeToo anti-sexual harassment movement continues to flourish in universities, and voluntary groups initiated by the younger generation of women (particularly the single children born after the 1980s) are dedicated to concrete goals aimed at improving women’s lives, such as providing sanitary pads to girls in mountainous areas.