Marriage and The Wrath of God

Is there any other kind?

In China, there’s no such thing as a joint bank account. Allison and I can’t have an account we share, and we can’t have an account with more than one debit or credit card attached to it. For practical purposes, this means we have one bank account in my name (since I’m drawing more income presently) – and one banking card, that we end up having to pass back and forth to each other all the time. It’s a minor inconvenience but a nagging one, since the solution seems so obvious – let us merge our finances, just as we’ve done comfortably for the last 15 years.

Chinese law and banking practice seem designed to keep people separate, individual, divided, at least from a fiscal standpoint. Since the country has a communist political system, this is counterintuitive. If the political ideal is that everyone owns everything equally, then everything is shared by everybody already. After all, you don’t own land in China, or houses, or apartments, you just buy the use of them for 99 years or so. Nobody knows quite what happens after that, but the principle is clear: everything ultimately belongs to the people (as embodied by the State), not to any individual person.

So why not extend that principle to married couples? Why can’t they share their money and assets – a kind of subset of “the people,” if you will?

Nobody seems to know that either, and I’ve done my share of asking around. A cynical colleague suggested it was meant to keep marriages easier to dissolve. No merged finances, no messy legal battles over assets when a union comes apart. A recent revision to China’s marriage law appears to reinforce this idea, making it clear that any assets – such as an apartment or house – that are held in only one name, belong only to that person. If your name isn’t on the deed and you’re getting divorced, you have to move out, whether you helped pay for the property or not (the new law is considered a step backward for gender equality, by the way – traditionally men buy the apartments, while women might buy a car or other major asset, so women usually end up on the short end of the stick property-wise).

But I don’t cotton to this theory. China has a pretty low divorce rate, comparatively – like 20% or so (chalk one up for the atheists I guess, if you’re into “until death do us part” – America, where over 90% of folks claim to be religious, has a 50% divorce rate). Divorce litigation doesn’t seem like a huge potential problem here. And it’s still weird, the emphasis on individual autonomy, in a society and system that at least in theory is all about the collective.

My working hypothesis is that it’s more about the primacy of the State than anything. If married couples can share their money, it makes them a truly united entity from a legal standpoint. They can’t be easily separated. And call me crazy, but I think the Chinese government is instinctively allergic to the idea of any societal construct, apart from itself, that would allow people to join together that indivisibly. A tangled marriage might be more than purely functional, and thus represent, in some sense, an alternative to the State as the one entity through which people are joined together. Keeping the finances separate keeps marriage more of a transactional enterprise, rather than a spiritual or philosophical union. Only the State truly unifies.

Meanwhile, in more exciting news, Typhoon Haiku is scheduled to slam directly into Shanghai tonight – predicted to be the worst such storm here since 2003. The government has issued an “orange” alert. 200,000 people have been evacuated, schools will be closed, people are supposed to stay inside. The sky is a lovely shade of violet-green bruise right now, and there’s an ominous hush over the normally bustling thoroughfares. We have our canned goods and floatation devices at the ready.

When huge typhoons strike

And family floats away, only

One can own the raft

                                                                                    -Ancient Chinese Proverb