Ke Li

Through the lens of divorce litigation in rural China, my book investigates three critical questions: how has women’s participation in massive rural-to-urban labor migration impacted their legal consciousness and affected marriage, family, and gender relationships in Chinese society? How does the grassroots official justice system respond to the rapid rise of divorce among an increasingly mobile rural population? In what ways does the justice system redress or reproduce inequities and injustices? To answer these questions, I draw on over two years of dissertation fieldwork conducted in southwest China. Ultimately, by integrating insights from sociolegal studies and China studies, this book project seeks to create new frontiers in the study of power and resistance in late-socialist China.