The prevalence and determination of wife abuse in urban China

INTRODUCTION Wife abuse as an enduring social issue and an institutionalized form of violence against women transcends national and cultural boundaries. In recent decades, despite an increasing public effort combating against it, wife abuse persists, dauntingly imperiling the very foundation of our society - the stability of marital union and the family. In the West, students of the family science contend that frequent violence against wives is largely due to culturally approved use of violence, social isolation, lack of access to resources of social support, and structurally constructed gender inequality (Sidel, 1992; Straus and Gelles, 1990; Williams, 1992). The current article attempts to systematically test these claims in a socialist society -- mainland China, and to examine the actual extent to which wife abuse exists under the communist regime. because comprehensive statistics on wife abuse are unavailable and theoretical treatments about the extent and the nature of domestic violence are poorly documented, the current article will first delineate the prevalence of and changing trends in wife abuse in one major Chinese city, and then try to establish the important linkages between wife abuse and the underlying social mechanisms. Since the 1970s, a respectable amount of academic research has accumulated on wife abuse in North America. The conceptualization and operationalization of wife abuse found in the family violence literature in the United States (Straus and Gelles, 1990) has a great relevance to the study of wife abuse cross-culturally. However, efforts to define and specify what actions undertaken by husbands are abusive often have relied on vignettes. In the current article, I offer a working definition that tentatively defines wife abuse as the actions taken by individuals (abusers) that result in either emotional (psychological) or physical trauma, such as verbal aggression and physical injury. The emotional component of wife abuse encompasses both verbal and non-verbal-symbolic abuse, such as lack of emotional attention and support, name calling, and downgrading, whereas the physical component of wife abuse exclusively refers to physical punishment, namely wife beating or wife battering - the most visible manifestation of wife abuse. Because wife abuse is broadly defined in such a manner, it will cover a wide range of actions that husbands take against their wives. I believe that this definition is suitable, if not entirely, for studying wife abuse in contemporary Chinese society.' THEORETICAL REASONING AND HYPOTHESES In the West, theories that have been proposed and used to explain the origins of domestic violence and wife abuse are numerous, such as social learning theory, conflict theory, resource theory, and gender role theory, to name only a few. Because the subject matter of this article is concerned with wife abuse in socialist China, direct borrowing or testing one or more of these theories may not be productive. Instead, I will first lay out some theoretical mechanisms that are potentially important and relevant to understanding domestic violence in urban Chinese society. Then, based on my theoretical reasoning several empirically testable hypotheses will be developed. Social and Cultural Legitimacy and Wife Abuse Sociocultural approaches to family violence suggest that dominant values and norms that embrace the use of violence in a given society can contribute to wife abuse (Levinson, 1989; Erchak and Rosenfeld, 1994; Steinmetz, 1995). In an analysis of 86 primitive societies. Masumura (1979) reported that wife abuse was positively correlated with the prevalence of societal violence. Even though the orthodox Chinese culture in known for its emphasis on harmony and nonviolence, using force against women in the family can be historically rooted in the culture of Confucianism. Likewise, in contemporary China the continuing practice of wife abuse can be attributed to a social approval of using violence for the purpose of an ideological hegemony and social control under the socialist system, particularly in the ten-year period of the Cultural Revolution. …