The “Escape” Behavior and Strategy of Married Lahu Women in Southwest China

Bai is a 36-year-old woman. She grew up in a family with eight children, in Lu Village, a remote ethnic Lahu settlement in Yunnan, near the Vietnamese border. When she was young, she lived in poor conditions and her family did not have enough food. She was rebellious, unlike her sisters and brothers. In December 1994, when she was only 12 years old, she ignored her parents’ wishes and resolutely married 35-year-old Wang, who came from Guangxi province. Wang was a Han; he came to Lu Village to find a wife. In an agreement between Wang and Bai's family mediated by a matchmaker, Bai immediately married Wang and migrated to Guangxi with him. Unfortunately, life in Guangxi was not what Bai had expected. Wang's home was poor and located in a small, poverty-stricken village. As an only child, he needed to support his aging parents. After she went to Guangxi, Bai was forced to find a job in a nearby town, while Wang stayed at home, supported by Bai. He warned her, “No work, no food.” After two years of marriage, she gave birth to a girl. Afterwards, Bai and Wang migrated to Guangdong—a province much farther away from Wang's home—to find a job because they needed more money with a child to take care of now. In 1998, she finally gave birth to a son. However, her life in her husband's family did not improve. After a brief period of confinement, Bai left Wang during a quarrel. She went alone back to Lu Village, without telling her husband or his family. She just escaped. Wang and his family never contacted Bai after her “escape,” and she never went back to Wang's home. After this failed marriage migration, Bai stayed in Lu Village for about two years. She found that she could not re-adapt well to life in the village. Bai's mother told me her daughter wouldn't do any housework and only watched TV or occupied herself on her mobile phone. In Bai's opinion, living in Lu Village was boring and hopeless—so she migrated again in 2000. From then until 2016, Bai had many intimate relationships with men from different regions, but she never married anyone again. In 2011, Bai met her current boyfriend, 26-year-old Chen, when they worked in Guangdong. He was 10 years younger than Bai; therefore, Bai was not too optimistic about this relationship even though they kept up an intimate relationship for 5 years. She found that Chen had many dubious relationships with other girls on WeChat. “I’m too old to find a good husband now,” she thought. During her work in Guangdong, she tried to commit suicide twice. In Lu Village, however, nobody knew what happened to her. Families and friends would say she had too many boyfriends. They told her to find a good man and marry him, but she always responded, “I know I know, don't educate me.” As she told me about her personal experiences, she was a sex worker in many places where she migrated. The villagers were also aware that she had been a known mistress to some man near Lu Village.

Introduction

In the past four decades, China has experienced consistent and rapid economic growth and dramatic social structural change, both of which have impacted ethnic minority areas in the remote and frontier regions of southwest China. Traditional cultures, values, religious beliefs, and marriage patterns of most of China's ethnic populations were relatively stable until recently due to historical and geographical isolation. But especially, since the beginning of China's Reform and Opening in 1978, the pursuit of development, bringing urbanization, and commodification have created some new social phenomena and problems in ethnic minority areas, eroding old social forms and bringing risk and precarious freedom ¹ (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Jinping county in Yunnan province and Lu village in Jinping.

Human migration has been a feature throughout Chinese history, as the result of natural disasters, wars, population stress, poverty problem, and climate changes. Over the past several decades, scholars have focused on the myriad ways in which people have migrated, including rural people working in cities, ² marriage migration, ³ ecological migration, ⁴ poverty alleviation resettlement, ⁵ political migration, ⁶ etc. However, fewer scholars have paid attention to migrant ethnic women.

In 2009, the migrant population in China was estimated at 211 million, and one-third of them were females. ⁷ By the end of 2016, there were more female migrants 20–29 years old than males. ⁸ By 2020, China's migrant population was projected to grow to 291 million, based on estimates of the industrialization and urbanization process, as well as the trend of rural–urban migration. ⁹ The gender ratio of the migrant population has thus shifted from men significantly outnumbering women to gender balanced since the end of the twentieth century. Most of the migrant women came from poor regions, many of them from impoverished ethnic minority areas in southwest China.

Previous studies on ethnic minority migrant women of southwest China summarized by Yang ¹⁰ focused on the characteristics of migrant women, including the causal factors contributing to the decision to migrate, the ethnic women's social integration in urban areas, and the gender characteristics of the migrant population. The effects of migration on sending and receiving areas were also significant research topics, along with the nature of migration by ethnic women. More specifically, the literature emphasizes marriage migration, ¹¹ women trafficking, ¹² transnational migration, and labor export. ¹³

From the perspective of gender, women's migration has received much recent scholarly attention. With economic development and social changes, migrant women have more chances to be upwardly mobile due to more employment opportunities, which could help them achieve higher status in marriage and family. ¹⁴ This also can account for the reason why it's easier for ethnic women to find a job in urban areas than men. Likewise, some scholars have observed that sex-ratio imbalance has given women an upper hand in the marriage market, marital, and family relations. ¹⁵ Contrary to these understandings in current research articles, in my study of married Lahu women, I have found that the married Lahu women migrated from one patriarchal family and society to another, never changing their low status in marriage and family.

This paper attempts to construct a historical framework that includes both the escape of married Lahu women, and the direct causes of this phenomenon under the interaction of endogenous and exogenous factors. Before 1958, Kucong Lahu were isolated on the frontier, but their isolation was broken by the outside world progressively. The migration of the Lahu people began with women's marriage migration in the 1980s. After that, especially since the turn of the millennium, the combination of increasingly imbalanced development, continued gender imbalance and patriarchal family relations, rapid development of social media, and more formal institutional regulations has led to a new and emerging phenomenon: married Lahu women have increasingly begun to “escape” (pao 跑) from their husbands and original communities. This paper describes a paradox of “escape”: on the one hand, this behavior is an autonomous reaction of individuality, rather than a passive one. The autonomy of these women's mobility was due to the impact of external structural factors on the internal culture and to the systems and rules of the Lahu people. On the other hand, these women's agency rarely granted them actual escape from the patriarchal structures that occasioned the “escape” in the first place. This article describes Lahu women's “escape,” and explores possible determinants of this behavior.

Kucong Lahu and Lu Village

There are about 40,000 Kucong people in China. They were originally forest-dwelling foragers, and swidden cultivators, living in Jinping and nearby counties in Yunnan, and in adjacent areas in Vietnam. In 1958, Jinping's Kucong people began to move out from the primeval forest. Then, in 1966, the cultural revolution swept across China, even affecting ethnic minorities in the border of southwest China. It was not until 1983, when the People's Communes were dismantled in Jinping that a Household Responsibility System was set up in Lahu society.

There was some controversy about the “nationality” or minzu 民族 status of Kucong. Kucong studies predominantly associated the term “Kucong” with “top of the mountain,” ¹⁶ “forest people,” ¹⁷ or “soot (guocuo).” ¹⁸ In late 1953 and early 1954, the Chinese government started the work of ethnic classification, ¹⁹ but their status was not resolved until 1985, when they were absorbed into the category of Lahu Shi (Yellow Lahu). Despite this classificatory decision, Kucong society has many distinct features such as language,¹⁶ culture, traditional costumes, etc. ²⁰ Because they were originally egalitarian foragers, they are known as zhiguo minzu ²¹ (ethnic groups that jumped to socialism directly).

Lu Village is located in Jinping County, Honghe Prefecture, Yunnan, which borders Vietnam's Phong Tho, Thanh Ha, and Muong Te counties for 502km. Currently, there are 34 Kucong Lahu villages in Jinping County. Lu was a typical Lahu village established by a government relocation project in 1966. This project moved villagers from altitudes over 1500 to –1520 m so that they were merely 101 m from the county-level road. Compared to most of the Lahu villages in Jinping County, Lu was one of the three villages with altitudes lower than 800 m. By 2016, there were 136 households living in Lu Village, with 493 people, 311 of whom constituted the labor force. Lu Village had 340 mu of arable land. The per capita production of grain was 323 kg. In 2016, the annual disposable income per capita of Lu villagers was about 4,150 yuan. The largest source of income was from rubber cultivation (only half of the households), followed by land subleasing, and the Minimum Livelihood Guarantee ²² from the government of 143 yuan per person each month.

In 2014, I had an opportunity to enter Lu Village due to a project of Yunnan Poverty Alleviation Office named Shanghai-Yunnan Counterpart Assistance Project. Through this project, the issue of ethnic migration in Honghe Prefecture attracted my research interest. Later, I entered Lu Village with the official assistance of the Yunnan Poverty Alleviation Office. From 2015 to 2016, I conducted ethnographic research about the migration of married Kucong Lahu women in Lu Village for 10 months. At the same time, during these 2 years, I spend 1month with one of my important reporter to Suzhou, Jiangsu province, where she worked. During the fieldwork, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 “escaped” women. Because most of them returned home only for a short time, as supplementary, I had conversations with some “escaped” women's husbands, relatives, and friends. I was also able to meet with township, and county government staff, village cadres, and other community members.

The Phenomenon of Three Types of “Escape”

Recently, there has been a tendency for rural people to migrate to cities as family units in China. ²³ However, Lahu people in the border area of southwest China still migrate primarily as individuals or pairs. The circumstances of married women varied greatly from unmarried women. As wives, mothers, and daughter-in-laws, women were bound to patriarchal marital and family relationships; many of them migrated to escape these relationships. The married women, I have interviewed in Lu Village, expressed a strong desire to escape their husbands, their families, and the patriarchal society they lived in. During my field investigation, that is, from 2015 to 2016, there were no registered marriage cases in Lu Village, but there were two common-law marriage cases in which two young Kucong Lahu girls married in downtown Jinping. There were six “escape” divorces and one legal divorce. In this article, I describe three different types of married Lahu women's migration, all of which I include in the category of “escape.”

Endogenous Factors

Common-law Marriage (事实婚姻) and the Failure of Formal Institutions

Heaven and earth, sun and moon as evidence, in front of parents and the elderly inside the village. This morning, he and she got married.

—Respected Lahu elders sing traditional Lahu wedding greetings ⁴²

Traditional Lahu marriages are simple and based on the honesty and morality of the local community. Families hold traditional weddings, hosting banquets for family, relatives, and friends of both spouses, taking in the knowledge and support of the community and social network as an important prerequisite for marriage. In the process of the wedding ritual, young couples worship their parents and ancestors as an important ceremony to establish their marriage relationship. Such marriage rituals are not affected or interfered with by formal regulations at all.

As Table 1 shows, very few couples registered their marriages, and most of their marriages before 2007 are considered common-law marriage. Common-law marriage was hardly governed by formal marriage law, which facilitated escape for married Lahu women. However, Table 1 depicts that more and more couples choose to register their marriages, especially first marriages. In Lu Village, even some common-law married couples would reapply for a marriage certificate after their age reached the legal age limit for marriage—22 years of age for men and 20 for women.

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Table 1.

Marriage Registration from 2005 to 2015 by the Township Civil Affairs Office.

	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015
First marriage	–	–	35	150	25	16	26	27	20	17	24
Remarriage	–	–	3	6	8	5	6	19	–	13	–
Post-registration	–	1	0	1	103	–	388	527	531	350	275
Total	0	25	38	187	136	241	420	570	551	380	299

Source: Township Statistics Bureau.

This growth stemmed from the intervention of formal institutions. After the first Marriage Law of the PRC in 1950, the marriage registration system gradually replaced the traditional style marriage of Chinese. Before the promulgation and implementation of the Regulation on the Administration of Marriage Registration by the Ministry of Civil Affairs in China on February 1, 1994, any couples who already met the substantive conditions for marriage were regarded as common-law married. If their marriage was not registered, it would be treated as an illegal cohabitation. For the Lahu people, the designation “illegal cohabitation” is a stigma to their common-law marriage relationship. Besides that, apart from law, formal institutions such as The Minimum Livelihood Guarantee, Children Registration Policy, reduced the number of common-law marriages, but a large number still remain.

To my surprise, Lahu villagers in border areas where legal awareness is weak, even women who could not read Chinese characters, were aware through lawsuits of the divorce provisions in the marriage regulations, which stated that one side could terminate marriage relations. “Escape” as the strategy for married Lahu to end their marriage was not just about a change in geographical location; rather it also enabled them to get legally divorced. Generally, women who divorced by escape also filed divorce lawsuits in their new locations, which greatly increased the probability that their husbands would not attend hearings, due to the geographical distance and other reasons, which was conducive to the plaintiff winning the lawsuit. In the meantime, as important evidence to the breakdown of marriage, the separation of husband and wife was key to the court's decision to grant divorce. ⁴³ Consequently, married Lahu women took advantage of limited of formal institutions to achieve legal divorce.

Exogenous Factors

In addition to these endogenous factors of community disfunction, many exogenous factors connected to recent country-wide socioeconomic change have influenced Kucong Lahu women's escape behavior. China has spent over 30 years on poverty reduction, especially in rural areas and among subaltern populations. From 2001 to now, China added participatory poverty reduction to implement the “Whole Village Advance,” the “New Socialist Countryside,” and the “Targeted Poverty Alleviation” programs. Important parts of these programs were the construction of rural infrastructure and an increase in public services and facilities. In Lu Village, a relocation project in 1966 and transportation improvements since the 1980s gradually broke their isolation.

Regional Development Inequalities in China

Over the past three decades, China's miracle growth can be viewed as the most impressive, lasting, and complex in the human history of economic growth in terms of institutional changes and constraint conditions, and it is generally praised by both prestigious international organizations and economists. However, it should be stressed that such a miracle is by no means costless. Constrained by economic development and the hukou system, inequality has emerged or increased during the period of rapid development. ⁴⁴

Beginning in the mid-1950s, China began to impose various measures to stem rural outflow and retain the rural population. ⁴⁵ In the Maoist era, the ban on rural outflows, along with an array of other related institutions and measures, such as the collectivization of farmland and the restriction on its conversion to non-agricultural uses, decisively bottled up surplus labor in the countryside. ⁴⁶ The hukou system in China, beginning in the 1950s produced rural–urban class inequality, ⁴⁷ rural–urban “apartheid” ⁴⁸ , or social stratification ⁴⁹ in terms of social status and the ability to access resources. Kam Wing Chan⁴⁶ described how the hukou system as a social control system that stratified the urban class and rural class in order to exclude the rural population from many social and economic benefits. The government distributed many more goods and services to urban people than to rural people. These included housing, education, medical care, insurance, and pensions. ⁵⁰ After the hukou system reform in 1984, peasants without urban hukou could earn extra income by working in urban areas making them eligible to receive limited urban services and welfare. ⁵¹ These possibilities and inequalities have significantly affected the rural-to-urban migration.

Poverty in Jinping Lahu Villages

Migration is the oldest course of action against poverty. To understand the relationship between the escaped married Lahu women and poverty, it is important to understand how the Jinping Lahu people became poor in the last century.

As a zhiguo minzu, the Kucong Lahu people in Jinping were less financially stable than other ethnic groups or people in the neidi. They experienced a complicated and radical economic and political change after leaving their hunter-gatherer livelihood in the forest in 1958. Lahu people went straight from foraging to the attempted rapid economic development of the Great Leap Forward, changing their livelihood and lifestyle radically. Mao's totalitarian Cultural Revolution rapidly swept around the country, including ethnic minority areas in southwest China. In 1966, it forced Lahu people in Jinping county into the collectively owned People's Communes.

Evidence shows that collective production was less effective for most rural areas in China. ⁵² However, it had a positive effect on the Lahu people in Jinping during the period of the People's Commune. Lu Village used to be a good model village that enjoyed government support. The government utilized its authority to manage the economy directly. Despite the shortage of food under the collective economy, the unified management protected the basic necessities for Lahu people who lacked market awareness. The hegemonism of the government was necessary for the survival of the Lahu people, who were no longer self-sufficient as they had been before 1958. On the other hand, collectivism well matched the egalitarian ideology and shared labor principles of traditional Lahu culture. Therefore, Lahu people adapted to collectivism quickly and developed steadily compared with other nearby ethnic minorities in Jinping County such as Dai, Zhuang, and Hani.

In 1983, the Dingqing Commune, of which Lu Village was a part, collapsed. Lahu people returned to making all livelihood decisions for themselves, as individual families. At the same time, a market economy with a system of household responsibility, and unified management combined with independent management was established. After the market-oriented reform and the privatization, Lahu people became poor, specifically in comparison to their neighbors of other ethnic groups, due to a shortage of market and competition awareness.

As Table 2 shows, Dai planted hybrid rice beginning in 1996, which greatly improved the food security of the Dai people. At the same time, the Lahu people still planted ordinary rice, which meant that they begged for a living from Dai people. By the rubber and banana planting at the end of 1990s, Dai villagers in Jinping were becoming millionaires. However, Lahu people began to plant hybrid rice and rubber only in 2000 and 2007, and until now, they still have not planted bananas. This delay was driven first by difficulties in adapting technologies for crops such as hybrid rice and rubber at high altitudes. Also, the villagers I interviewed expressed that they needed several years to follow Dai's success. Finally, in 2006, riots took place in two Lahu villages, due to the large economic inequality that caused the intensification of conflicts among ethnic groups.

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Table 2.

The Livelihood Comparison Between Dai and Lahu in Jinping County.

Year	1996	End of 1990s	2000	2007
Dai	Hybrid rice	Rubber, banana	Rubber, banana	Rubber, banana
Lahu	Rice	Rice	Hybrid rice	Rubber

Source: Interviews of Lahu villagers.

In Jinping county, most of Lahu villages are in mountainous areas around 1000 m in altitude. On the contrary, Dai villages mainly resided in flat areas near the river.

Economy as a Pull Factor

It is generally agreed that a significant number of reasons for rural people to migrate to urban areas were economic in character. ⁵³ More specifically, opportunity, available employment and higher living standards in destination locations are pull factors. ⁵⁴ In the context of migration, China's family planning and One Child Policy in the neidi area of Han people was one of the main reasons for the gender imbalance, which made the marriage market in neidi increase the demand for females as resources. When the migration of Lahu women in border areas became possible, the women came to present an alternative to the missing women in the neidi marriage market.

Many Lahu women escaped from villages to cities, due to poverty in the villages. The data in Table 3 show that the number of Lahu women who married to neidi increased gradually during the years 1976 to 2006, especially in the last decades.

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Table 3.

Female Marriage Destinations Every 10 Years in Lu Village During 1966–2006.

Date	1966–1975	1976–1985	1986–1995	1996–2006
Intermarriage
Village	44	50	18	10
Township	1	1	13	8
County	0	0	2	2
Province	0	0	1	0
neidi	0	3	20	41
Intermarriage and groups
Homogamy	46	51	28	16
Ethnic Intermarriage	1	4	26	45
Total	47	55	54	61

Source: Township Civil Affairs.

With respect to the Urban Escape phenomenon, the working experience in urban areas broke the harmonious marital relationships of the Lahu people. In observing the relationship between spouses in Suzhou, I found that a big divergence emerged in future plans. As I mentioned before, the traditional inheritance and elder support system made the men more inclined to return to their hometowns. In addition, the wealthy living conditions in urban areas attracted Lahu women to stay in the cities. More and more migrant women stayed in urban areas, concerned more with their own development than for their children's education or family incomes, ⁵⁵ and not as dependents of men. ⁵⁶ These divergent interests of spouses lead to the broken-down relationships and thus to the women's escape.

In terms of the Village Escape phenomenon, China's developing service and tourist industries created a large number of employment opportunities for married Lahu women, especially after the export-processing industry boomed in China at the end of the twentieth century. ⁵⁷ Hardworking, docile women workers were exactly what export manufacturing sectors needed. ⁵⁸ Migrating to a city to find a job or husband was a good way for married Lahu women to escape from their violent and alcoholic husbands, as well as from the patriarchal society.

The Failure of the Escape Strategy

In the current context of rapid social change in China, it is clear that great changes have taken place in the demographic structure, gender relations, family structure, marriage, and divorce. In recent years, under conditions of gender imbalance, improvement of infrastructure, and the development of new social media in rural areas of southwest China, married Kucong Lahu women in the border area have begun to “escape” when they are unable to endure the abuses of patriarchy and patriarchal society, and have experienced the expectations of better-off life in urban areas. In the rural-to-urban migration context, migration can bring gains and losses for escaped married Kucong Lahu women. In the destination areas, most immigrant women were employed in the labor market with low status and incomes, such as factory work, house cleaning, cooking, housekeeping; caring for sick, disabled, elderly, or children; or sex work.⁶⁰ No matter what kind of work they do in neidi, marriage is their foundation for settling down, and the final destination for their escape. The reason is that women's belonging and identity in rural areas are determined by their consanguine family. Therefore, the institutional arrangement of resources and welfare based on patriliny is the fundamental reason why Kucong Lahu women cannot escape the fate of “returning to the family” (回归家庭)and “ending in marriage” (止于婚姻), even though they have autonomy of mobility.

However, contemporary family processes continue to be shaped by gender and generational hierarchies in the Han area in China. Unlike most ethnic minorities in southwest China, Han people have a strong “son preference.” ⁶⁰ In China, the long-term basis of a small-peasant economy further strengthened their requirements of the male inheritor. In escaping, Kucong Lahu women escaped into a different, more complex system of patriarchal Han families, especially in rural areas. For example, one aspect of Han patriarchal involves “female patriarchs,” what Stafford calls “matriarchy,” ⁶¹ to discipline their in-migrating minority daughter-in-laws.

In 2009, Ping married a poor famer from Henan province who was “tao xifu” in Lu Village. After she was married in Henan, her husband's family did not allow her to leave the house in order to prevent her escape. She did a lot of housework at home, but despite this, her husband often beat her. Her mouth was swollen from the beatings, and sometimes she was even tied up for a long time. Additionally, her mother-in-law treated her badly and often complained to her husband. “In his family, even when I was seven months pregnant, I had to do farm work from six in the morning to two or three in the afternoon with my mother-in-law. She always scolded me and told her son that I was a lazy woman.” The worst time he beat Ping when she was in confinement. He dragged her by her hair into the yard until a neighbor called the police. Since Ping had been in poor health for a long time, she finally became pregnant after six months of marriage. Before that, her husband told her, “if you don't get pregnant, I will slowly abuse you.” Finally, in 2016, Ping escaped from her husband and his family and returned to Lu Village.

Ping's story illustrates one of the tragedies of escaped women marrying into Han families. On the one hand, generally speaking, men and their families who go to ethnic minority areas to “tao fixu” tend to treat their wives as a substitute for local women. As a result, most of their marriage rituals are neglected by their husbands, and they face social exclusion in the village they married into. Moreover, the increase of the bridewealth has made women more and more commoditized. On the other hand, although the migration of Kucong Lahu women seems to be from an impoverished area to a developed areas in neidi where the living conditions and environment have been improved, in fact, the marriages in neidi are still full of poverty and inequality. Renbing Shi ⁶² calls the further poverty caused by this kind of poor-to-poor marriage as “vulnerable accumulation.”

Therefore, married Lahu women who have escaped from the patriarchal marriage and family in their original communities, are inserted into another patriarchal family relationship in neidi and continue to be dominated. Thus, even though “escaping” was a way for married Lahu women to challenge their predicament in the face of patriarchal society and rural–urban difference, the paradox emerges that in escaping one context of patriarchal oppression, they end up in a different one; in a sense, they rarely “escape” at all.