Inner Mongolia Marital Rape Case Returns to Court as Victim Demands 300,000 Yuan
A court in Ergun, Inner Mongolia, will hold a second hearing on September 8 in the prosecution of a husband accused of raping his wife while the couple waited out their divorce cooling-off period — a rare marital-rape trial that is testing how Chinese law treats violence between spouses.
A court in Ergun, in China's northern region of Inner Mongolia, will hold a second hearing on Monday in one of the country's most closely watched marital rape prosecutions, the defendant's family told the Henan-based newspaper Dahe Daily over the weekend. The case — a husband charged with raping his wife while the couple sat inside the 30-day "cooling-off period" Chinese law imposes before an agreed divorce takes effect — already went through a first hearing in August without a verdict, and its outcome is being read as a signal of how Chinese courts treat violence between spouses.
According to the indictment, the defendant, surnamed Liu, and his wife, surnamed Wang, filed for divorce by mutual consent in February 2025 and were living apart while they waited out the cooling-off period — she at her father's home, he across the street. Suspecting her of an affair, Liu planted a voice recorder in her bedroom. On March 21, 2025, he played the recording back to her, beat and insulted her, forced her to undress, and then raped her while filming two videos on his phone, prosecutors say. The assault fractured vertebrae in her lower back; a forensic assessment rated the injuries a "grade-one minor injury," one step below serious injury. She reported being assaulted that same afternoon, and the next day filed a complaint citing both domestic violence and rape. Liu was detained two days later.
Prosecutors charged him with rape and intentional injury. His family repeatedly applied for his release on bail; in June 2026 the Ergun procuratorate responded that he had "a continuing need to be detained." The first hearing, on August 12 this year, ended without a judgment, and the victim is seeking more than 300,000 yuan in civil compensation.
Marital rape occupies a grey corner of Chinese criminal law. The Criminal Law contains no exemption for husbands, but prosecutions within an intact marriage are vanishingly rare; where courts have convicted, the marriage was almost always already collapsing — the couple separated, or divorce proceedings underway. That is what makes the cooling-off period the crux of this case. The rule, introduced with the Civil Code in 2021 to discourage impulsive divorces, has been unpopular since it began, blamed for trapping people in dangerous marriages. Here it gives the prosecution its frame: the divorce papers were filed, the couple lived apart — for the purposes of this trial, the marriage was already ending.
On Weibo, where Dahe Daily's report on the new hearing date was liked more than 5,000 times, much of the discussion has centered on the victim's refusal to relent. "Marriage has never been a get-out-of-jail card for assault — rape exists inside marriage too", one widely liked comment put it, noting that the defendant's family's kneeling plea for forgiveness had not moved her. The detail matters legally: Chinese courts routinely weigh a victim's forgiveness letter at sentencing, and her refusal to issue one signals she wants the full weight of the law applied. The scheduling news itself reached Baidu's trending board on Saturday, where the case has stayed for days.
No verdict followed the August hearing, and none is expected immediately after Monday's. But the question the court faces is already legible: whether a marriage in its legal final days counts as no marriage at all when a court decides what happened inside it.