Polygamy In China Case Study

According to Chu (2010: 175) Chinese culture also practice polygyny/polygamy. Just as Church accommodations and inability to implement its policies, as well as the consent or collaboration of the Chinese mestizo or Indio wife or partner, can help explain the practice of the Catholic Chinese of having more than one “wife”, Chinese marriage customs also can contribute to our understanding of such practices. From the standpoint of Qing dynasty marriage practices, polygamy in which a man takes a wife legally and takes a concubine later on was allowed. Furthermore, it would not be implausible to think that Chinese wives back in China did not in principle oppose their husbands’ marriage to another woman from another country. Thus, from the point of view of a nineteenth-century Chinese, the practice of taking another wife overseas was regarded as a falling within the norms of Chinese social customs. Moreover, it might have even been acceptable for males to marry woman from a different race. Primary wives of Chinese migrants from South China may have “encouraged the marriage of their husbands to local women”, since this would ingrain in these men’s minds their responsibilities and lessen their prosperity to gamble, visit prostitutes or otherwise dissipate their earnings in the

Only after a matchmaker's introduction and when parents considered the two family conditions were similar and could be matched, would the marriage procedures go forward. Conditions that should be taken into consideration included wealth and social status. If a boy's family was well-off or an official family, his parents would never permit him to marry a girl from a poor family (Workman, 2010:36).

Three Letters and Six Etiquettes

Essential to the marriage process were the commonly recognized 'three Letters and six