Clothing hangs from laundry lines as a woman walks past residential buildings in Wuhan, China, on June 14, 2017.
Qilai Shen | Bloomberg | Getty Images
BEIJING — A Chinese court ruled in a divorce case that a wife should get about 50,000 Chinese yuan ($7,700) from her husband in compensation for five years of housework.
The ruling sparked an online debate this week about whether that was a fair price.
That’s about $128 a month, or a little more than $1,500 a year. In Chinese currency terms, the payout is about 10,000 yuan a year.
China has said its poorest earned an average of 9,808 yuan per person a year in 2019. That figure is up from 3,416 yuan in 2015.
In this case, brought up in Beijing’s southwestern Fangshan district, the wife’s household work counted toward intangible property value, Judge Feng Miao told state media, according to a report Monday.
It was not immediately clear when the court ruling was made. But it was the first such decision that referenced new provisions in China’s civil code that took effect in January.
