Vietnamese brides seek legal status
Global Times
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Two Vietnamese women at the Yunling village in Southwest China's Yunnan Province. (Photo: courtesy of Deng Youlin)

Chinese men seem to be increasingly popular in the eyes of foreign woman living in villages bordering Southwest China's Yunnan Province as the region's economic development and poverty-alleviation policies have improved the life of border villagers. 

However, not many cross-border marriages are registered, which means very few of the Vietnamese women have a legal identity in China, as many villagers believe the registration would be too difficult and expensive.  

In Yunling village of Malipo county in Yunnan, which borders Vietnam and is home to nearly 300 households, none of the 28 Vietnamese women has a legal identity in China.

"It's quite inconvenient, because it means you have limited, or no access to public services such as pensions and social insurance," Deng Fengkuan, a villager from Yunling in his 30s, who married a Vietnamese woman almost 10 years ago, told the Global Times.

"It's also hard to buy a train ticket if you don't have an ID card, which was troublesome when we wanted to go to other cities for work," he said. 

While complaining about the inconvenience, villagers also said that getting legal status for cross-border marriage is "too troublesome and costly."

Some estimated it would cost from 10,000-40,000 yuan ($1,580 - 5,980), including administrative charges, transportation fees and accommodation in China and Vietnam. 

Cross-country marriages have to be registered at Wenshan prefecture, which administers Malipo, while marriages between border residents of China and Vietnam can be registered at county level, Tang Fei, head of Malipo's civil affairs department, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Tang said the charge for cross-border marriage is not high from the Chinese side. 

The number of cross-border marriages in Malipo has not been released so far, but local officials and scholars predicted that in Malipo, only around 50 such cross-border marriages are registered out of around 2,000 couples. 

Deng Youlin, deputy Party chief of Yunling, told the Global Times that local legislators have been promoting more conveniences for the Vietnamese women's life and to streamline the procedure for cross-border marriages. 

However, there are also many difficulties ahead, Deng said. Many of the Vietnamese women are married at an early age, such as 18 or 19, younger than China's minimum legal marriage age of 20.

Most of the villagers marrying a Vietnamese woman are from a poor background, and so are their wives, so preferential policies are provided to ensure a basic living standard is secured, Tang said.

This includes access to medical insurance so the families will not drop into extreme poverty due to medical expenses. The families also benefit from many of the county's poverty-alleviation policies, she added.