China bashing has become a fashion. Especially with western media. ( Luckily not with European business. Big business (i.e. Volkswagen) is investing heavily in the PRC).

A recent example is from the Corriere della Sera, which reported about the  terrible treatment of women in China. A woman, who brought pictures, which showed how she was beaten by her husband, could not get immediate divorce, what a terrible country!

The truth is that China had the most liberal divorce law existing in the world until 2020 and most probably still now. Until 2020 it was enough that one partner went to the local city office, asked for divorce, signed a paper, and that was it.  Divorce done. The overwhelming  majority of partners who asked for divorce were and are women.

The government is terrorized by the idea to have a big cohort of single unsatisfied males, what it considers a source of civil unstableness. So the peoples congress decided a law this year to make divorces more complicated.

My Chinese friends are enormously upset about this new law, much more upset than about the Hongkong security laws, what they consider simply an application of procedures that were already agreed when Hongkong came back to China.

What does the new divorce law say?  After asking for divorce, you have to wait for two weeks to think about it, then you will get your divorce without any hesitation.

When I got divorced in 1990 in Italy, my partner and I needed a lawyer to get the divorce despite of being completely in agreement,costly! And I think, we had to wait 2 years, before the divorce was  legal. Still now, a divorce in Italy is not immediate, even whrn both partners ask for it and they  have to wait mch more than two weeks