Date of Award
11-2025
Degree Type
TPG Capstone Project (Taught Postgraduate Project)
Department
Sociology and Social Policy
Supervisor
Prof. REN Chunhui
Abstract
In 2025, the Civil Code Interpretation (II) of the Marriage and Family Section was released to refine the rules for dividing property in divorce and add new quantitative standards for compensation for non-economic contributions, but the traditional gender division of labor and judicial practice bias still result in women's non-economic contributions, such as household work, being neglected and insufficient financial protection after divorce. The British property division system adheres to the principle of dynamic fairness, namely, the implementation of a separate property system for the couple's property within marriage and a common property system after marriage, with more emphasis on the protection of the weaker party and the minor children, which provides a reference for the optimization of the system. This study adopts Glaserian Grounded Theory as the core research method and extracts 101 cases of civil judgments on divorce property division in 2020-2025 from the network of Shanghai High People's Court and constructs a model to analyze the association between defects in China's current divorce property division system and women's fall into relative poverty after divorce. Also, semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with legal practitioners and marital groups to understand the cultural and judicial obstacles to the transplantation of the system and the demand for reform of the property division system. Accordingly, the study concludes that the triple structural defects of China's property division system, namely, insufficient compensation for non-economic contributions, formal equality traps, and insufficient enforcement guarantees, are the core mechanisms that lead to women's relative poverty after divorce. Further, the necessity and feasible path of reconstructing the three-dimensional system of “system-technology-culture” by drawing on the dynamic equity principle of “demand-compensation-sharing” in the United Kingdom are demonstrated.
Keywords
divorce property division, non-economic contribution, dynamic equity principle, female poverty
Language
English
Copyright
The copyright of this dissertation is owned by its author. Any reproduction, adaptation, distribution, or dissemination of this thesis without express authorization is strictly prohibited.
Recommended Citation
Su, D. (2025). The impact of Chinese and British marital property division mechanism on Chinese women's post-divorce economic security research (TPG Capstone Project, Lingnan University, Hong Kong). Retrieved from https://commons.ln.edu.hk/soc605_stdwork/26