中国农村“外嫁女”如何争取土地权益

In Rural China, ‘Sisterhoods’ Demand Justice, and Cash

王月眉

The women came from different villages, converging outside the local Rural Affairs Bureau shortly after 10 a.m. One had taken the morning off from her job selling rice rolls. Another was a tour operator. Yet another was a recent retiree.

这些妇女来自不同的村庄，上午10点刚过，她们就聚集在当地的农业农村局门外。其中一位有一份做肠粉的工作，上午专门请了假前来。一位是旅游从业者。还有一位刚退休不久。

The group, nine in all, double-checked their paperwork, then strode in. In a dimly lit office, they cornered three officials and demanded to know why they had been excluded from government payouts, worth tens of thousands of dollars, that were supposed to go to each villager.

她们一共有九人，在仔细地检查了文件后，她们走了进去。在一间灯光昏暗的办公室里，她们把三名官员紧紧围住，要求解释为什么政府发放的补助没有她们的份，这笔数十万的款项本应发放给每位村民。

“I had these rights at birth. Why did I suddenly lose them?” one woman asked.

“我一出生就该拥有的，为啥我是半途没有？”其中一名女性问道。

That was the question uniting these women in Guangdong Province, in southern China. They were joining a growing number of rural women, all across the country, who are finding each other to confront a longstanding custom of denying them land rights — all because of whom they had married.

正是这个质疑将这些生活在中国南方省份广东的女性团结了起来，她们加入了全国各地一个正在壮大的农村女性群体，以对抗长期以来剥夺她们土地权的习俗——这一切都是因为她们所嫁的对象。

In much of rural China, if a woman marries someone from outside her village, she becomes a “married-out woman.” To the village, she is no longer a member, even if she continues to live there.

在中国的大部分农村地区，如果一个女性嫁给了外村的男性，就成了“外嫁女”。对于村里来说，她不再是其中一员，即使她继续住在那里。

That means the village assembly — a decision-making body technically open to all adults, but usually dominated by men — can deny her village-sponsored benefits such as health insurance, as well as money that is awarded to residents when the government takes over their land. (A man remains eligible no matter whom he marries.)

这造成了村委会——一个在理论上面向所有成年人但通常由男性主导的决策机构——可以拒绝她获得村里提供的福利，比如医疗保险，以及政府征用土地时给予居民的补偿金。（男性无论跟谁结婚，都有资格获得这些补贴。）

Now, women are fighting back, in a rare bright spot for women’s rights and civil society. They are filing lawsuits and petitioning officials, energized by the conviction that they should be treated more fairly, and by the government’s increasing recognition of their rights.

现在，女性们正在反击，这成为了女性权利和公民社会的一个罕见亮点。她们正在提起诉讼，向官员陈情，因为她们坚信自己应该得到更公平的对待，而且政府也越来越认可她们的权利，这些都激励着她们。

In doing so, they are challenging centuries of tradition that have defined women as appendages to men: their fathers before marriage, their husbands after. That view has persisted even as the country has rapidly modernized, and women have gone to school and sometimes even become their families’ breadwinners.

在此过程中，她们挑战了几个世纪以来将女性定义为男性——无论是婚前的父亲，还是婚后的丈夫——附属品的传统。尽管国家在迅速实现现代化，女性开始接受教育，有时甚至成为家庭经济支柱，这种观点却仍然存在。

They are also exposing a gap between the ruling Communist Party’s words and its actions. Many courts, which are controlled by the party, refuse to take on the women’s lawsuits. Even when women win favorable rulings, local officials have refused to implement them, fearing social unrest. Women have been harassed, beaten or detained for pursuing their rights in these cases.

她们还暴露出执政共产党的言行不一。许多由共产党控制的法院拒绝受理这些女性发起的诉讼。即使打赢官司，地方官员也拒绝执行这些裁决，因为他们担心引发社会动荡。在这些案件中，女性因追求自己的权利而受到骚扰、殴打或拘留。

Not long after a colleague and I met the Guangdong women and accompanied them to the rural affairs bureau, several told us they had been contacted by officials or would no longer be able to participate in this article. The Times is identifying the women only by their family names and omitting their exact location for safety reasons.

我和一位同事见到了这群广东的女性，并陪同她们前往农业局，之后没过多久，有的参与者告诉我们有官员找到了她们，有参与者则说不能再出现在本文中。出于安全原因，《纽约时报》仅以姓氏称呼这些女性，并略去她们所在的具体地方。

Often, married-out women staking claims are simply dismissed. Inside the Guangdong rural affairs office, which oversees land payouts, a middle-aged male official in a blue polo shirt tried to shoo the women away.

通常，外嫁女的诉求会被直接驳回。在前面提到的那个农业局——该部门也负责土地分配，一名身穿蓝色马球衫的中年男性官员试图将这些女性赶走。

“This is your own villages’ problem, not our problem,” he said. When the women accused the government of ignoring their plight, he warned: “Don’t talk nonsense.”

“是因为你们自己自然村的问题，不是我们的问题，”他说。当这些女性指责政府忽视她们的困境时，他警告说：“不要乱说话。”

One woman shot back: “How can you leave it entirely to the village? Then what are you all for?”

一位女士呛回道：“怎么可以把它全放到一个小村庄里面去的，要你们干嘛的呢？”

Expanding Cities, Expanding Inequality

城市扩张与不平等的加剧

Chinese women have long suffered discrimination, but the financial implications of that inequality came into sharper view after the Chinese economy’s breakneck expansion.

长期以来，中国女性一直受到歧视，但在经济飞速发展后，这种不平等带来的财务影响变得更加明显。

As China embraced market reforms starting in the 1980s, the government began taking over rural land for factories, railways and shopping centers. In exchange, villagers received compensation, often in the form of new apartments or certificates entitling them to dividends from the land’s future use.

自上世纪80年代开始实施市场改革以来，政府开始征用农村土地用于建设工厂、铁路和购物中心。作为交换，村民们获得了补偿，通常以新公寓或从土地未来使用中分红的形式。

The government mandated that female village members be given equal compensation. But it left the definition of “members” to the male-led village assemblies. And to many of those assemblies, one group didn’t qualify: married-out women.

政府规定，女性村民应获得平等补偿。但对于“成员”的定义却留给了男性主导的村委会，而在许多村委会看来，有一个群体不符合资格：外嫁女。

It is unclear how many women have been denied land rights because of marriage, but the number has grown as the population has become more mobile, with people marrying across provinces, not just villages. Government-backed surveys indicate that as many as 80 percent of rural women — hundreds of millions of people — are not listed on their villages’ land documents. That makes it hard for them to defend their claims if disputes arise, such as if they marry outsiders.

目前尚不清楚有多少女性因婚姻而被剥夺了土地权，但随着人口流动性的增强，跨省——不仅仅是跨村——的婚姻在不断增多。政府支持的调查显示，多达80%的农村妇女——数以亿计——没有被列在本村的土地文件上。这使得在纠纷发生时，例如嫁给了外村人，她们很难为自己的主张辩护。

For decades, women in this situation had little recourse. Some accepted their deprivation as normal. But there are signs of a quiet resistance unfolding as women have become more educated and found more ways to connect with one another. The number of court rulings involving the words “married-out women” jumped to nearly 5,000 five years ago from 450 in 2013, according to official data.

几十年来，这种情况下的女性几乎没有追索权。一些人认为被剥夺权利是正常的。但有迹象表明，随着女性受教育程度的提高，找到更多相互联系的方式，一种悄无声息的抵抗正在展开。根据官方数据，涉及“外嫁女”一词的法院判决书数量从2013年的450起跃升至五年前的近5000起。

Many villages, though, have clung to tradition.

然而，许多村庄仍然固守传统。

Rebutting a lawsuit from 2019, a village in Nanning, a city in southwestern China, claimed that women who married outsiders did not live off the land anymore, and thus did not qualify as village members. (Men who leave are not held to that standard.)

中国西南部城市南宁的一个村庄在反驳2019年的一起诉讼时声称，外嫁女不再靠土地生活，因此没有资格成为村民。（离开村子的男性则不适用这个标准）。

A village in Shandong Province, in China’s east, was more direct in its response to a 2022 lawsuit. “Married-out daughters do not receive our property benefits,” it said in court papers. “This is how we have done things for the last 20 years.”

中国东部山东省的一个村庄在回应2022年的一个诉讼时说得更为直接。“外嫁女不能享受我们的财产福利，”它在法庭文件中说。“这就是我们过去20年的做法。”

There are no authoritative estimates of the financial losses women have incurred. But especially in prosperous coastal areas, the sums could be enormous. In the port city of Ningbo, the apartments that married-out women were denied during village demolitions in 2022 were potentially worth upward of $550,000, according to official documents and average housing prices there.

关于女性遭受的经济损失目前还没有权威的估算。但特别是在繁荣的沿海地区，损失可能是巨大的。在港口城市宁波，根据官方文件和当地的平均房价，在2022年的村庄拆迁中，外嫁女被剥夺的公寓价值可能高达400万元。 Women who cannot prove their land rights also have a harder time investing or securing loans to start businesses, scholars have noted.

学者们指出，无法证明土地权利的女性在投资或获取创业贷款方面也面临更多困难。

A Growing Awareness

日益增强的意识

I wanted to see firsthand how women were fighting for their land rights, and a legal expert suggested going to Guangdong. One of the earliest provinces to urbanize, it has also seen some of the most active mobilizing by married-out women.

我想亲眼目睹女性是如何争取土地权利的，一位法律专家建议我去广东。那是最早城市化的省份之一，也是外嫁女行动格外积极的地区之一。

In the city I visited, signs of economic transformation abounded. A high-speed rail station abuts the lush rice paddies that once sustained the local economy. Two-story village homes have given way to gated apartment complexes.

在我去过的城市，经济转型的迹象比比皆是。在曾经支撑着当地经济的丰饶稻田旁矗立着高铁站。两层的乡村住宅已经被有围墙的住宅小区所取代。

When I arrived, several married-out women were gathering in one of their living rooms to plan their visit to the rural affairs bureau the next day. One attendee was a woman surnamed Ma, whose overalls and ponytail gave her a youthful air, though she was retired.

我到来的时候，几位外嫁女聚集在一间客厅里，计划第二天去农业局。其中一位与会者姓马（音），尽管已经退休，但一身工装加上马尾辫让她显得很年轻。

Her village had started distributing payouts several decades ago, after contracting its teeming fish ponds to a private company. But Ms. Ma was cut off in 1997, after she married an outsider. Even when she divorced and moved back home several years later, the village continued to refuse her.

几十年前，她所在的村子将鱼塘承包给一家私人公司后开始分红。但在1997年，马女士嫁给一名外地人，从此就没有了分红。即使几年后她离婚搬回家，村里的仍然拒绝给她发放分红。

Ms. Ma had no experience with the law and didn’t know whom to ask for help. Other villagers accused her of trying to claim what didn’t belong to her. Her brothers told her not to make a fuss.

马女士没有法律经验，也不知道该向谁求助。其他村民指责她索取不属于她的东西。她的兄弟们叫她不要小题大做。

She bought a copy of China’s civil code to educate herself. She repeatedly called and visited government offices, though they refused to accept her case. “If I waited until others came forward, I wouldn’t have anything,” she said.

她买了一本中国民法典自学。她多次致电并拜访政府部门，但他们拒绝受理她的案件。“等人家出头你啥都没有，”她说。

Then, gradually, more women began taking similar steps — not just in Guangdong, but across China. At times, they found sympathetic officials, and some won their cases.

然后，渐渐地，越来越多的女人开始采取类似的措施——不仅是在广东，在中国各地都有。有时，她们会遇到同情她们的官员，有些人还打赢了官司。

As news spread, Ms. Ma and several dozen other women nearby found each other by word of mouth. They had no leader, and only sporadic meetings. They represented a fraction of the thousands of women they estimated had been denied land rights in their villages.

随着消息传开，马女士和附近的其他几十名女性通过口口相传找到了彼此。她们没有领导者，只有零星的聚会。她们估计，在她们的村子里，数以千计的乡村女性被剥夺了土地权，她们只是其中的一小部分。

Still, their growing numbers put pressure on local courts. Ms. Ma’s case was accepted in 2020, as were those of other women.

尽管如此，她们不断增加的人数给当地法院带来了压力。马女士的案件于2020年被受理，其他女性的案件也被受理。

“Now, many courts have so many cases that they’re overwhelmed,” grinned another woman in the living room, surnamed Li.

客厅里另一位姓李（音）的女士笑着说：“现在很多法院开庭都开到怕。”

Ms. Li had remained in her village after marrying a factory worker from Hunan Province, to the northwest, whom she had met while he was working nearby. She now balances her job making rice rolls with trips to the courthouse, where she is suing for about $7,000 in payments she has been denied since her marriage five years ago.

李女士与一位来自湖南省的工厂工人结婚后一直留在村子里，两人是在男方来这座村子附近工作时认识的。现在，她一边做肠粉，一边去法院打官司，争取五年前结婚以来一直被拒付的约35000元。

The older women spent years searching for the right avenue for their complaints, but younger women said hearing about others’ experiences gave them a road map of sorts. A woman in her 20s, surnamed Huo, sued her village as soon as she learned that it had cut her off in 2020. (She found out when, after delivering her first child, the hospital said she no longer had village-sponsored health insurance.)

老一辈的女性花费数年时间寻找合适的投诉渠道，但年轻的一代表示，别人的经历给了她们某种意义上的指导。20多岁的霍女士（音）得知，村里从2020年起中止了她的待遇，她立即起诉了她的村子。（当她生完第一个孩子后，医院说她不再享有由该村出资的医疗保险，她才知道这个情况。）

Ms. Li’s and Ms. Huo’s stories also reflect the greater say that younger women have over where they should live. Traditionally, women moved to their husbands’ homes; older generations of married-out women returned to their villages only after divorcing or becoming widowed. Younger ones have embraced bringing their husbands to their own villages, in part to assert their independence.

李女士和霍女士的故事反映出年轻女性对于自己应该在哪里生活享有了更大的发言权。传统上，女人会搬到丈夫家里；老一辈的外嫁女只有在离婚或丧偶后才会回乡。年轻的女性开始接受把丈夫带回自己的村庄，部分原因是为了维护她们的独立性。

“It’s a woman’s backup plan,” said Ms. Huo, now working in construction. “In case anything happens, you at least have your own home.”

“女孩子的退路，”目前在建筑行业工作的霍女士说。“说句不好听的，有个万一的时候起码有个自己的家。”

An Uphill Battle

艰苦的战斗

On paper, the women’s legal chances look good. Scholarly analyses have found that many court rulings in these cases favor married-out women.

单纯从法律上看，这些女人的官司是有机会的。学者们的分析发现，在这些案件中，许多法院做出了有利于外嫁女的裁决。

But those are the cases that make it to court, not those that judges throw out or officials force into out-of-court mediation. And villages often refuse to recognize rulings against them — as was the case for several of the Guangdong women.

但这些都是法庭审理的案件，而不是那些被法官驳回或被官员强迫进行庭外调解的案件。村里经常拒绝接受对他们不利的裁决——广东那几位女性就遇到了这种情况。

Government agencies often say they cannot force the assemblies to comply, citing respect for village self-governance, the nominal guarantee in Chinese law of some democratic rights for villagers. (In reality, the party retains control.) When some of the Guangdong women staged small demonstrations outside government offices, they were physically pushed away, they said.

政府机构经常表示，他们不能强迫村委会遵守规定，理由是尊重村民自治，这是中国法律对村民某些民主权利的名义保障。（实际上，党仍然保持着控制权。）广东的几位女性说，她们在政府办公楼外举行小型示威，但被强行驱散了。

The law itself has loopholes. A top legal body last fall urged prosecutors to protect the rights of women who marry outside their villages, in line with constitutional guarantees of gender equality.

法律本身存在漏洞。去年秋天，一个最高法律机构敦促检察官根据宪法对性别平等的保障，保护外嫁女的权利。

But in June, China passed a law reaffirming that village assemblies can continue to decide who counts as a member of their village collectives, and is therefore eligible for land rights. Women’s rights advocates had called for the law to say definitively that women are members, regardless of their marriage status.

但今年6月，中国通过了一项法律，重申村委会可以继续决定谁是村集体的成员，也就是谁有资格获得土地权利。女性权利倡导者呼吁法律明确规定女性是村成员，无论其婚姻状况如何。

Because married-out women are still a relatively small group, the government has little incentive to risk angering the village majority, which also includes women who married fellow villagers and thus remain eligible for benefits, said Lin Lixia, a legal advocate at Qianqian Law Firm in Beijing who has worked on women’s land rights for 20 years.

北京千千律师事务所从事妇女土地权维权工作20年的律师林丽霞说，由于外嫁女仍然是一个相对较小的群体，政府没有什么动力去冒险激怒村里的大多数人，这些大多数中也包括与本村人结婚的妇女，她们仍有资格获得补贴。

“From the perspective of maintaining social stability, local governments or courts are definitely more inclined to protect the benefits of the majority,” said Ms. Lin. She said she received 40 to 50 inquiries a year, and that about 90 percent of her lawsuits were unsuccessful.

“所以从社会稳定维护来看，可能地方政府或者法院它更倾向于保护多数人的利益，”林丽霞说。她说，她每年都会收到40到50个咨询，其中约90%的诉讼都以失败告终。

Finding Solidarity, and Some Humor

找到团结，还有一些幽默

Amid the difficulties, the women have also found community.

在困难中，这些女人也找到了集体。

In the living room, as they planned their visit to the bureau, some of the women referred to each other as “sisters.” Over bowls of lychees, a local specialty, they laughed darkly about their treatment by fellow villagers, who piled trash at their doors. They competed over whose village assembly was worse. When Ms. Huo said that people in her village had not abused her, Ms. Ma teased her: “They’re so good to you.”

在客厅里商讨去农业局的计划时，一些女人以“姐妹”相称。她们吃着当地特产荔枝，拿村民们对待她们的方式开起苦涩的玩笑——他们把垃圾堆在她们门口。她们争论谁的村委会更糟糕。当霍女士说村里的人没有苛待她时，马女士取笑她：“那么好，对你。”

Ms. Huo replied: “I always say, you all aren’t mean enough. I’m mean, so nobody dares treat me like that.”

霍女士回答说：“我就说你他们不够凶，我说我够凶，谁敢对我那样。”

They debated tactics. If they wrote a letter about their situation to a higher-level government office, should they lay out all the details, or keep it general? Some were skeptical about going to the bureau, given how many times they had been rebuffed. But others said the point was documenting every step, successful or not, to bolster their case.

她们讨论策略。如果她们向上级政府部门写信陈述自己的情况，应该把所有的细节都写出来，还是概括一点？考虑到她们被拒绝了多次，有些人对找农业局表示怀疑。但也有人说，重要的是记录每一步，来支持她们的案子，无论成功与否。

Several women emphasized that they were not a unified movement. They speculated that some among them had been threatened or bought off into becoming government informers — a sign of how surveilled and fractured civil society has become in today’s China.

几个女人强调，她们不是一个统一的运动。她们猜测，她们当中有一些人受到威胁或者收买，成了向政府告密的人——这是当今中国公民社会受到监控、日益分裂的一个体现。

But the women have faced intimidation before, and they said it would not put them off.

但这些女人以前也曾面临过恐吓，她们说这不会让她们却步。

At the bureau the next morning, the women seemed to be a familiar presence for the officials, who required little explanation of their grievances. For nearly two hours, the women laid them out anyway.

第二天早上，在农业局，官员们似乎已经熟悉了这些女人，他们不需要她们解释自己的不满。但在将近两个小时的时间里，女人们还是把这些不满都说了出来。

Finally, shortly after noon, they emerged, triumphant. They hadn’t secured their payouts — far from it. But an official had agreed to give them written acknowledgment of their visit, which they could now bring to the next government office they visited.

中午过后不久，她们终于凯旋而归。她们还没有得到赔偿——远远没有。不过，一位官员同意书面确认她们的来访，她们现在可以带着这份确认去下一个政府办公室了。

“We take it one step and one place at a time,” one of the women said.

“我们每个地方一步一步来，”其中一个女人说。

They piled into cars, to head to lunch, and to plan their next move.

她们挤进车里，去吃午饭，并计划下一步的行动。

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Siyi Zhao对本文有研究贡献。 王月眉(Vivian Wang)是《纽约时报》驻华记者，常驻北京，撰写关于中国的崛起及野心如何塑造普通人日常生活的报道。 翻译：纽约时报中文网

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