‘Split up for love’: family separated by war and Covid forced by China’s complex bureaucracy to get divorced to reunite
- The war in her home country is preventing a Ukrainian citizen from getting paperwork to let her son leave China and reunite the family
- The boy has been separated from his mother for more than a year and was away from his father, who works abroad, for more than five months
Chinese government bureaucracy has forced a man separated from his son and wife in different countries due to Covid-19 and Ukraine-Russia war to get divorced to reunite.
The man, surnamed Li, is a Chinese national and lives and works in the Netherlands. His wife is Ukrainian and returned to the country to look after her ill parents when war broke out in February, while their two-year-old son has remained in China since mid-2020.
Li has now had to divorce his wife Victoria and become sole legal guardian of their son Jason so the boy can emigrate to Holland without necessary paperwork from her, who has been displaced by the war.
Victoria and her parents have been moving from one neighbouring country to another as a result, Shanghai Television reported.
Li, who runs a travel agency in Amsterdam and is an EU permanent resident, took his son to Shanghai in August 2020 to organise the child’s Chinese passport and hukou, a key identification document for Chinese citizens.
They ended up staying longer than planned as the pandemic worsened in Europe. As he waited in China, Li applied for his son to emigrate to the Netherlands, where he wants to settle permanently with his family.
However, he was unable to fulfil Chinese government requirements for legal documents as his wife has been unable to get the required Ukrainian paperwork amid the war in her home country.
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In January, Li had to return to the Netherlands to deal with some work issues, leaving the boy to his sister’s care. He was then stuck there after China tightened its travel bans amid increased Covid-19 outbreaks.
From March to early June, Shanghai was under a harsh lockdown and recorded about 600,000 Covid infections, the biggest number for a mainland city so far.
As a result, Jason has been separated from his mother for more than a year and was without his father for more than five months, Chinese television programme Court Record reported.
“The plane ticket I bought to return home cost 90,000 yuan (US$13,000). Even so, there were still a lot of cancellations. I couldn’t find a way to leave,” said Li.
He was finally able to return to China in June, at which point the now desperate couple decided to file for a divorce with a Chinese court so Li could become Jason’s sole guardian. This would remove the onerous Chinese government paperwork requirements for both parents and pave the way for the boy’s emigration to Europe.
“I didn’t expect to separate from him for so long, but we’ve been separated for nearly half a year now. I can’t bear it any more,” Li said.
Victoria said the decision had been extremely tough and made her feel like she had to choose between her parents and her son.
“I need to stay in Ukraine. My parents are here, and unfortunately, I can’t leave them for now. Of course, this is a very hard decision, but hopefully, we can get everything done. I only wish the best for Jason,” she said.
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Xu Yefang, a judge from a Shanghai district court who handled the case, granted the divorce in June and said she hoped the child could join his parents as soon as possible.
“What’s special about the case is that the parents don’t fight as we often hear. They are quite well-educated and they had to take this measure because they didn’t have another solution under the circumstances,” she said. “We made the decision based on the benefits to the child.”
Li is now reunited with the boy and is preparing to take him to the Netherlands.
