Welcome to Sisyphus Highway: In Depth.

In this chapter, we discuss bride price and the social conditions beneath it.

On April 16, 2025, the second-instance judgment in Datong, Shanxi’s “engagement rape case” upheld the original verdict, finding that the defendant had committed rape and sentencing him to three years in prison. Much discussion of the case focused on the right to sexual consent. The presiding judge’s subsequent answers to reporters restated a basic legal principle: “Sexual relations with a woman must not violate her will, regardless of whether the two parties are engaged.” The facts were clear and the evidence sufficient.

Yet this clear-cut case provoked an enormous public reaction for reasons beyond the legal facts. Discussion repeatedly mentioned the engagement, the bride price, and its amount, connecting them to motives, social customs, and gender ideas. Recent family-dispute cases likewise show bride price to be an important factor.

Beginning with the Datong “engagement rape case,” this episode returns to bride price itself. We trace its history and introduce several principal academic approaches, asking why bride price took its present form and why it became so complicated.

 

- The Datong engagement rape case: why did bride price become the focus of public opinion?

- More than two thousand years of bride price: from betrothal gifts to the present

- How did bride price change after the founding of the People’s Republic of China?

- From the “three major items” to cash and property: why does bride price keep evolving?

- Marriage-payment theory: does bride price “compensate” women?

- Marriage-subsidy theory: how does bride price transfer wealth between generations?

- Bargaining theory and marriage-market theory: why does bride price vary so greatly by place?

- Decades of Chinese social change seen through one family’s marital history

- A quiz on bride-price jargon