Married Chinese Women Are Buying Their Own Homes. Why?
On Feb. 1, 2025, China’s Supreme People’s Court officially adopted a series of new interpretations of the country’s marriage and family laws. Buried in Article 8 of the document was a line that could have major ramifications for the nation’s couples: “During the period of marital relations, where one party’s parents put forward the full amount to purchase a house for the husband and wife, and there is no (ownership) agreement or the agreement is unclear, the People’s Court may rule that the house belongs to the child of the party that paid for it when joint marital property is divided at divorce.”
The concept of a marital home has deep roots in China. Traditionally, the man’s family has been responsible for purchasing or providing a house for a newlywed couple. It’s an idea deeply rooted in patriarchal, patrilineal gender norms: Men are responsible for providing for their families, while women serve inside the home.
The latest judicial interpretation seems to entrench the interests of men and their families: If a marital house is paid for entirely by the husband’s family, then he retains ownership after divorce, at the expense of his wife. And because housing accounts for the largest share of household wealth among Chinese families, this may lead to women not receiving appropriate compensation for their contributions to a marriage in the event of a split.
But there is another side to the story: With the rise of the urban middle-class and improvements in women’s earning power, women’s families, especially those from single-child families, have begun actively buying their own marital houses — and attempting to protect those investments legally.
Over the past two years, I worked with two doctoral students — Lin Zeyu and Li Xuan — to investigate this phenomenon. Together, we interviewed 20 young women in mid-sized cities who had married in the past five years, as well as 25 of their parents. In every case, their partners’ families had provided a marital home (hunfang in Chinese). But 18 of the women said their own families had provided another property for them — though they generally avoided using the term “marital home.”
In part, that’s because the parents we surveyed still believed that the man’s family had an obligation to provide the marital house. Take He and Yu, for example. Both are middle-class urban parents, and both bought downtown apartments for their only daughters, but both also insisted that their in-laws provide the couple a “marital home.” “If the girl owns a house, then that’s a bonus, but the marital home has to be bought by the man, right?” He explained. “Without a marital home, how can you even talk about marriage? It’s the bare minimum.”
For Yu, it was more a question of attitude. “The size of the house he can buy depends on his ability, but whether he buys one or not is down to his attitude,” he said. “If it’s not a large house, I can accept that. But I can’t accept him not buying one.”
Both explanations reflect the continued influence of traditional marriage customs in modern China. Marital houses are not only a material basis for marriage; they also symbolize the commitment of the man’s family to the couple and their ability to provide for the wife, reflecting the traditional Chinese marriage pattern in which men provide and women serve.
Although the women’s parents generally require the man to provide the marriage house, many will also prepare a house for their daughter. However, they do not use the term marital house, partly out of deference to traditional marriage customs and gender roles, and partly due to legal concerns.
Jie is a senior executive at a state-owned enterprise. She purchased a house in her daughter’s name well before her daughter had even started talking about getting married. To ensure that her daughter would own the house outright, she specifically consulted friends working in China’s court system, and told her daughter not to get her marriage certificate until Jie had finished repaying the mortgage. That way, Jie explained, “No one would take advantage of anyone.”
When pressed about her reasoning, she pointed to the specter of marital discord. “There’s a lot of trouble when two families come together,” she said. “Just imagine if the young couple start fighting and can’t resolve it, how can you calculate the amount of money the woman’s family spent on renovations. Then you’ll end up with a lawsuit. I’d rather buy her a house of her own, then the two sides would be able to divide things up clearly. There’s always more trouble when people buy a house together.”
Yishu took a different approach with her own daughter. She and her husband purchased a small apartment for their daughter nearly two years after she married, then took her to a local notary office to register the house in her name. “I spoke with a lawyer I know, and she said that after my daughter gets married, if we want to give the house to just her, it’s not enough for us to simply pay for it,” Yishu explained. “What if there’s a dispute? It’s better to go to a notary office to be on the safe side.”
These practices reflect the close attention that families in China pay to even minor shifts in the law. China’s 2020 Civil Code stated that housing purchased by parents for their children prior to marriage is considered separate property, meaning that it’s not jointly owned by the couple. Middle-class parents of daughters have embraced this provision and sought to use it to protect their children’s interests — as well as their own. After all, the purchase of housing represents a major transfer of parents’ wealth to the next generation, sometimes even exceeding the value of their estate.
“Our family only has a daughter,” one interviewee explained. “Sooner or later, it’s all going to go to her anyway. We’re giving it to her now, but it’s staying within the family. It’s not like she’ll just take the money and cut us off. What’s ours is hers. Our only requirement is that it goes to her and no one else can touch it.”
This attitude reveals the importance that women’s families attach to property ownership — not only in guaranteeing the interests of their daughters, but also their own. This has created a delicate balancing act with the man’s family, which also wants to safeguard its interests.
Prior to the most recent People’s Supreme Court interpretation, many bride’s families may request her name be added to the marital home deed, thereby ensuring she would be entitled to a portion of it if the marriage ended. With that option off the table, they will have to look to their own resources in search of security. In other words, the change is likely to accelerate the transformation of the traditional patriarchal, patrilineal Chinese family into something more bilateral in nature.
Ultimately, marital houses aren’t simply cold steel and concrete structures, but a reflection of mutual negotiations between generations and genders, traditional norms and modern legal codes. In the future, as the law is refined and social concepts evolve, the role of the marriage house may change, but it will always be a window into the institutional shifts taking place within the Chinese family.
To protect the identities of our research participants, we have given them all pseudonyms.
Translator: David Ball; editor: Wu Haiyun.
(Header image: Visuals from Shijue/VCG, reedited by Sixth Tone)
