Court Splits Only Daughter's 200-Million-Yuan Inheritance With Her Husband of One Year

A Shanghai woman inherited 200 million yuan — about 28 million dollars — when her parents died, without a will naming the inheritance as hers alone. A year into her marriage, her husband filed for divorce, citing personality incompatibility, and claimed half of it. The court agreed with him.

The case, retold by a lawyer at an event in Hangzhou on Thursday and reported by Zhejiang TV's China Blue News, was still climbing the trending charts past midnight; one version of the report drew more than 25,000 likes. Its legal mechanics are not exotic, which is exactly what unsettles people. Under the Civil Code's default rules, property either spouse inherits while married belongs to the couple jointly — unless a will explicitly says otherwise, for instance "this goes to my daughter alone and never becomes marital property." The parents had written no such clause. Their daughter, like many Chinese only children, presumably assumed her parents' money was hers by blood; the law sees it differently, and the husband, who cited nothing more dramatic than "personality incompatibility," invoked that default rule and won.

The reaction centered on an old and vicious term: 吃绝户, "eating the family line clean" — historically the fate of a family with no sons, whose property would be absorbed by relatives or in-laws once the line was extinguished. In today's usage it describes husbands who marry into families with a single daughter and position themselves to inherit. "Notarising your assets is the best protection you can give yourself," one Weibo user put it. "Gold-diggers are the real freeloaders — they take it brazenly, and nobody shames them for it."

The ruling is also the mirror image of a case this site covered earlier this week, when a court let an ex-wife share a 4-million-yuan inheritance her husband received during their marriage. The default rule cuts both ways, and neither outcome is a quirk of a particular judge: it is what the code produces whenever there is no explicit designation.

What happens next is less about this couple than about the country's parents. Lawyers filling the trending topic are urging mothers and fathers to add one line to a will — that the estate belongs to their child alone and is excluded from marital property — and to make it a notarized one. China's one-child generation is now beginning to inherit, often as the sole heir of two deceased parents, and the 2-billion-fen question is whether a single sentence in a will, written years before a marriage turns sour, becomes standard practice.