Marriage laws in China and the United States

What is marriage? A sacred bond fulfilling a spiritual purpose? Or a legal arrangement of personal convenience? In the United States men are beginning to question whether marriage is such a good deal. In China women might be beginning to wonder the same thing.

In the United States women usually get the kids and half the stuff upon divorce. In China a new law has been passed saying that

residential property is no longer to be regarded as jointly owned and divided equally in the event of a divorce. Instead, whoever paid for the apartment or house is the legal owner and gets to keep it in its entirety.

For a variety of cultural reasons, the legal owner tends to be the man. Chinese marriages typically occur only after the man has secured a home for the new couple. Wives labor under the cultural expectation that they care for both children and elder parents, which mostly precludes any direct financial contribution to the home. For wives, this means that their husbands now have less incentive to remain faithful, because the threat of divorce has lost most of its financial teeth.