A court in China has announced that infidelity or cheating is no grounds for divorce. The declaration is now creating widespread controversy. China’s state-run media, Global Times, reported that a court in China’s Shandong province ruled that “cheating is not an act of cohabitation because cohabitation refers to a married person living with someone without marriage relations continuously and stably.”
According to reports, the court will not approve infidelity as a justification for documenting for divorce. The court’s decision provoked a social media storm in China, with the hashtag “No application for divorce because of cheating” trending on the country’s social media site Weibo, which is regarded as China’s Twitter, as netizens in China criticized the declaration. China authorized a divorce law the previous year that made it complicated for couples to divorce because the new protocols expected couples to complete a “cooling off” period for a month to reexamine their status if crucial and then apply for a divorce a second time.
No divorce application on grounds of cheating
Shen Jianing, is a lawyer from the Tianni Law Office in East China’s Jiangsu Province. She said the interpretation of marriage law expressed in the article will confuse the public. Shen clarified that infidelity clearly violates the Civil Code’s requirement of mutual loyalty and respect. This includes “other occurrences leading to the break of spousal relationship” as a bottom-up prerequisite for convicting divorce, in addition to four other specific grounds, including bigamy and cohabitation.
“This means the rupture of the spousal relationship is the key for sentencing a divorce. Either occasional infidelity or continuous cohabitation will lead to the rupture of the spousal relationship. And the betrayed side has the right to file for divorce,” Shen emphasized. In China, the divorce ratio has heightened from 0.96 divorces per 1,000 people in 2000 to 3.36 in 2019. According to the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs, there were 4.15 million divorces in 2019.
