Runaway Daughters-in-Law: Kinship Disjunctions and the Absence of Co-Sharable Capital in Frontier Divorce—An Ethnographic-Legal Study from the Sino–Myanmar Border
In Cang Village, located along the Sino–Myanmar border, a recurring phenomenon known locally as “runaway daughters-in-law” has become increasingly common. These married-in women leave their conjugal households without returning to their natal families, instead migrating alone to distant urban areas. Drawing on local gazetteers and ethnographic fieldwork, this study traces these silent departures to a structural condition of “no co-sharable capital”—not only the lack of jointly held property, but also the absence of symbolic, moral, and relational resources necessary to sustain belonging after marital dissolution.
Positioning Cang Village as both an ethnographic site and an analytical vantage point, the study examines the disjuncture between the normative assumptions of Chinese family law and the lived realities of frontier kinship. While the state envisions family as a stable, rights-and-obligations-bearing unit, the actual social fabric of borderland communities is shaped by patrilineal norms, informal rules, and historically sedimented moral economies. Legal intervention is often limited by geographic remoteness and the weight of local traditions, challenging the state's ideal of legal “legibility.”
Yet family law operates not solely through formal codification, but also through culturally embedded notions of family and home. This article argues that the reproduction of power, rights, and interest in Chinese familial life must be understood through the entanglement of state structures and local knowledge. Ultimately, the figure of the runaway daughter-in-law reveals how the tension between “home” (jia) and “nation” (guo) opens a space for rethinking the foundations of governance, belonging, and kinship in contemporary China.
Keywords: frontier society; divorce; legal anthropology