Two years ago, Kim Lee, the American wife of a millionaire Chinese entrepreneur, posted photos of herself on the social media site Weibo – the images showed her delicate facial features bruised and puffy, with a bloody ear and a raised bump on her forehead. She was a victim of domestic abuse, her message explained. In going public about a secret most families in China have long preferred to keep hidden, Lee bravely started a conversation and may have set an important precedent.
On Sunday Feb. 3, the final hearing of her divorce case attracted several supporters and divorce advocates in China, who gathered on a snowy morning outside Beijing’s Chaoyang District Court. Among them was a woman in a makeshift white bridal gown with splattered red paint to look like blood; she held up a sign that read, “Shame on you, perpetrator Li Yang!”
Li Yang, Lee’s former husband and the celebrity founder of the language-training program “Crazy English,” did not attend. He has previously acknowledged the abuse, at times in contrite terms and at other times saying it was a family matter. In a micro blog post on Sept. 10, 2011 Li wrote: “I wholeheartedly apologize to my wife Kim and my girls for committing domestic violence. This has caused them serious physical and mental damage.”
The court granted Ms. Lee a divorce on grounds of domestic abuse, approved her application for a three-month restraining order on Li, and awarded her $1.9 million (12 million RMB) and custody of the couple’s three children. “Chinese woman must defend their own rights,” she told reporters from Xinhua News Service.
Lijia Zhang, an author in Beijing who joined the demonstrators on Sunday, wrote in an editorial for the Guardian newspaper: “Traditional wisdom in China is to deal with domestic violence as something ‘best kept inside the house’ … now Lee has become an unlikely hero for having the courage to speak out.”
It is difficult to measure the extent of domestic violence in China, and most officially cited studies are thought to underestimate its prevalence – and still the numbers are deeply unsettling. In 2011, the All China Women’s Federation, a government-steered NGO, released its findings that 25 percent of women in China have been victims of some form of domestic violence. A survey by the China Law Society put that number at 35 percent. An academic study published in 1999 in the International Journal of Gynaecology and Obstetrics found that 16 percent of pregnant woman admitted to the clinic of Hong Kong’s Tsan Yuk Hospital had suffered domestic abuse in the preceding year. By any yardstick, the problem is severe.
The more hopeful news is that at least there’s a growing willingness to acknowledge domestic abuse – and peer support groups, if not yet adequate legal protections, do offer help to the victims. As public-information materials prepared by the anti-domestic abuse nonprofit, Half the Sky, put it: “Domestic violence is not a private matter but a crime. Physical violence in a relationship should not be accepted and everyone should intervene if they know someone who is being abused.”
There’s also a movement afoot among legal advocates in China to make it easier for women with less means and visibility than Lee – whose case as a millionaire and ex-wife of a celebrity is in some ways exceptional – to have their rights safeguarded in court. At the very least, Sunday’s verdict is being heralded as a decisive moral victory.
Larson is a Bloomberg Businessweek contributor.
