What cost love: are China’s efforts to stamp out expensive caili betrothal gifts aiming at the wrong traditions?
- Local governments and China’s top court are both tackling marriage tradition of a groom paying the bride’s family, calling it a ‘burden’ and ‘extortion’
- But women’s rights advocates say addressing gender inequalities in inheritance and property distribution, education, employment and politics may be effective
“Our love cannot be measured in terms of a betrothal gift,” Cao Fengfeng and Shi Xiaoqiang declared in their wedding vows to each other in front of hundreds of people in eastern China last month.
In a wedding live-streamed on more than 40 television channels and website, they stood with 57 other couples in the first “zero-caili group wedding” organised by the government of Fuyang in Anhui province to promote “the reform of marriage customs and new, civilised trends”.
The other couples echoed the sentiments offered by Cao and Shi. One proclaimed that in a marriage, tolerance and respect mattered more than money paid to each other’s families.
Caili is a sum of money paid by the groom-to-be to the bride’s family as a way to secure the marriage and show wealth. It has been around for thousands of years and has been hard to ban because of the skewed gender ratio – in modern China a significant number of men are competing to find wives.
But the Chinese government has been trying to stop the tradition to make weddings more affordable and encourage births. In the past, local governments held “zero-caili weddings” and sought out “the most beautiful mother-in-law” to reward a bride’s family for not seeking money. They even had women volunteer to sign letters declaring they would only marry for love.
In a fresh legal push, China’s Supreme People’s Court issued a document on how to solve conflicts involving betrothal gifts, with changes coming into effect this month.