Chinese husband kicks wife of 2 days out of house after air conditioning dispute, sparks divorce debate online

A domestic argument in a new marriage spurred a debate on the mainland Chinese internet over the weekend after a shouting match over air conditioning went viral.

An unnamed woman in the northern Chinese province of Henan tried to turn on the air conditioning during the heatwave in late July that saw temperatures in the country soar above 41 degrees Celsius.

Her mother-in-law refused to turn it on, saying it would be too expensive, and the two women got into an argument, with the mother-in-law eventually leaving the house in anger.

The husband later found his mother and they returned home at around midnight. At some point, before they returned, the mother-in-law complained to her son that consequently kicking off a fight between the newlyweds, who had only been married for two days.

A video of the argument was published on the online platform Miaowen on July 29 and showed the husband shouting at his wife who videotaped the dispute.

“Am I not allowed to complain about you?” The man asked, to which his wife replied, “We have already argued twice.”

The wife asked her husband if he would support her when she got into disagreements with her mother-in-law. The husband ignored the question and kept swearing and pointing at his wife, who was trying to talk through the yelling without success.

The man left the room after he warned his wife to leave their home. It is unclear if the woman ever left the flat.

After the video came out, it sparked a debate about divorce in China and relationships between wives and their mothers-in-law.

One Weibo user said: “Please divorce him as quickly as you can, otherwise, you will suffer much worse.”

Another commenter wrote: “I think a lot of couples ended their marriages because of unbearable conflicts between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law.”

The Ministry of Civil Affairs released a report in July that showed about 514,000 couples registered for divorce in the first quarter of 2022.

Sichuan province, in southwest China, had the most divorces to start this year, with 45,000 couples filing to split. Guangdong and Henan provinces had around 33,000 divorces each.

In 2021, the Chinese government passed a law that required spouses to undergo a 30-day “cooling-off period” in an effort to decrease the country’s divorce rate.

When spouses file for divorce, they must wait for 30 days and then confirm if they would like to proceed with the breakup. They are allowed to withdraw their divorce paperwork at any time during that period.

In 2021, there were 2.139 million divorces, which represented a 42.7 per cent decrease from 2020.