A Chinese podcast · Same story, 4 levels
12 年的"被结婚"：张蕾的撤销之路
12 Years of "Bei-Jiehun": Zhang Lei's Six-Month Fight to Cancel a Marriage She Never Had
About this story
12 Years of "Bei-Jiehun": Zhang Lei's Six-Month Fight to Cancel a Marriage She Never Had. HSK 3 Chinese listening practice.
This is an HSK 3-4 Chinese listening episode that runs about 8 minutes. The full Mandarin script is shown with tap-for-pinyin and a line-by-line English translation, so you can listen and read at once — comprehensible input in the sense of Stephen Krashen's i+1 theory. It teaches 12 key vocabulary words such as 接受、决定、影响 and walks through 4 grammar patterns, each explained in English with examples. The same news story is retold at 4 difficulty levels — use the level selector above to find the version that is challenging but still understandable for you.
Read at your level
原文Read the complete story in Chinese. Reveal pinyin and English only when you need them.
English transcript reference
The afternoon of November 12, 2025.
Beijing, Shijingshan district.
A woman born in 1993,
let's call her Zhang Lei,
is at work.
She gets a phone call.
The voice on the line says:
"I'm with the Baoji, Shaanxi police.
"In 2013 you married a man.
"You have a 12-year-old son.
After she hung up,
Zhang Lei thought it was a scammer.
In 2013 she was a sophomore in Beijing,
just past 20.
She had never been to Baoji.
Let alone gotten married.
But she was still a little uneasy.
She looked up the phone number online —
it really was the landline of the Duanjia police station in Fufeng County, Baoji.
Then she logged into the government services platform
and looked up her own marital status.
The platform said it plainly:
Zhang Lei, married,
marriage date October 30, 2013.
She really had been "married against her will."
For a full 12 years,
she didn't know that in another province,
she had a husband in the eyes of the law,
and a 12-year-old "son."
This is a very particular social phenomenon in China in recent years.
It has a Chinese name:
"bèi-jiéhūn" — "married against your will."
Meaning:
"I didn't get married,
"but the national system says I did.
Zhang Lei's story
actually has two protagonists.
One is Zhang Lei.
The other is Liu Yongqiang, who lives in Shaanxi.
Liu Yongqiang was working in Beijing in 2008.
He met a girl who worked as a waitress at the Wangfujing food street.
She told him
her name was "Zhang Ting."
In 2012,
they had a child.
In 2013,
they went back to Liu's Shaanxi hometown for the wedding
and registered the marriage.
Around 2015,
"Zhang Ting" said she was going back to Hebei to see her parents.
Then she never came back.
13 years on,
their son is in middle school.
In November 2025,
Liu Yongqiang went to the police to file a missing-person report,
trying to find his missing wife.
The police looked up the ID number on his wife's household registration,
and the person it actually belonged to was Zhang Lei —
a complete stranger.
What came next,
every detail of it is chilling.
First,
Zhang Lei's former name
was "Zhang Ting."
That was a name typo when she was first registered as a baby,
later corrected to Zhang Lei.
Second,
the fake "Zhang Ting's" household registration
listed her former name as — Zhang Lei.
Third,
the two are from the same village.
Their household addresses are identical:
a village in Wangjing Town, Tang County, Baoding, Hebei.
That is to say,
there really is a "Zhang Ting" from her village,
who used her ID number,
got herself a completely separate household registration booklet,
and then used that booklet to register a marriage.
After discovering she'd been "married,"
Zhang Lei set out to cancel the registration.
But what followed over the next half year
is more unsettling than the "marriage" itself.
She went to the civil affairs office.
The civil affairs office said:
You're not the person who registered.
You can't cancel another person's marriage.
Cancellation requires evidence from police or judiciary.
Go to them first.
She went to the Duanjia police in Fufeng, Shaanxi.
The police said:
The ID-fraud part of this
has to be investigated starting from the fake "Zhang Ting's" Hebei household registration.
You should report it where the registration was issued.
She went back to Wangjing police in Hebei.
The Wangjing police said:
This is a Shaanxi matter.
You should go back to Shaanxi.
She went to her local Doudian police in Beijing.
Doudian accepted it at first.
But a month later they told her:
We don't have jurisdiction.
This should be handled by Shaanxi or Hebei.
That is to say,
the police in three different places —
not one of them opens a case.
She also went to court.
The court said:
You have to apply for administrative reconsideration first.
You can't come straight to court.
She filed for administrative reconsideration.
The Fufeng civil affairs office wrote her a letter.
The letter said:
The marriage registration at the time didn't violate procedure.
It is genuine and effective.
And, Zhang Lei, you weren't the registering party at the time,
you have no right to cancel another person's marriage.
She then went to the prosecutor's office for supervision.
The prosecutor's office said:
This isn't within our jurisdiction;
you should go to the courts.
Over six months,
Zhang Lei's case bounced around four departments — civil affairs, police, courts, and prosecutors.
Every department
said "not in my jurisdiction."
Every department
told her to go ask another department.
In Chinese law,
there's a phrase for this:
"chéngxù kōngzhuǎn" — "the procedure spinning empty."
But —
she isn't alone.
In 2020,
the Supreme People's Procuratorate published a similar case.
A man in Fujian, surnamed Yao.
In 2013 he registered a marriage.
The day after registration, the "wife"
ran off with 70,000 yuan of betrothal money.
Yao later discovered
that the woman wasn't actually the "Mo" on the ID card —
she was an identity thief who'd come to defraud through marriage.
Yao also tried the police, civil affairs, and the courts — nothing worked.
Until 2020,
when he went to the prosecutor's office.
In the end it took seven years
to cancel that marriage registration.
This case later turned up more:
the real "Mo" person's ID card
had five overlapping marriages registered to it.
Guangxi, Zhejiang, Shanxi, Fujian, Anhui.
Later "Mo" was sentenced to three years and nine months for fraud.
In 2021,
the Supreme Procuratorate, Supreme Court, Ministry of Public Security, and Ministry of Civil Affairs —
the four agencies jointly issued a document
specifically to handle these "married-by-fraud" cases.
By November 2024,
nationwide, 2,068 such cases had been processed.
118 criminal leads were transferred.
That is to say —
Zhang Lei isn't alone.
Across China,
there are at least two thousand other Zhang Leis.
It's just that most of them
don't make the news.
That said,
Zhang Lei's case has seen a bit of progress.
On the morning of May 19, 2026,
the Baoji Intermediate People's Court issued a new ruling:
the lower court's earlier refusal to accept the case
is rescinded.
The case must be opened.
That is to say,
the courts are now engaging.
But what happens next
nobody yet knows.
Reading this story,
what makes me saddest
isn't the ID fraud itself.
What makes me saddest is the six months that came after.
Every department,
viewed individually,
was following the rules.
Every one said: "not in my jurisdiction.
Put together,
they trapped an ordinary person
in the middle.
There's a Chinese phrase:
"go by procedure.
Procedure is supposed to protect people.
But when procedure starts "spinning empty,"
procedure becomes a wall that keeps the person on the outside.
Zhang Lei will keep waiting.
Maybe after May
she really will get that "marriage" — that isn't hers — canceled.
Hope that day comes soon.
Okay.
That's all for today.
Talk tomorrow.
Listen again
Try it without the transcript and notice what sounds clearer.
What vocabulary does this episode teach?
词汇To accept. Zhang Lei was unable to 接受 — accept — a system that says she's married when she isn't. The legal system, in turn, refuses to 接受 each other's evidence.
To decide. Various 决定 by various bureaus build up the maze: the new Shaanxi regulation, the Mei Court ruling, the Baoji Intermediate Court ruling.
Impact. This kind of 影响 — being registered in someone else's marriage — affects her future plans, her psychology, even how the government sees her.
To experience; a personal experience. Zhang Lei has 经历 the bureaucratic runaround over half a year; Yao 经历 a 7-year version of the same.
Serious, severe. The legal consequences of someone misusing your ID — if it's 严重 — range from administrative fines to criminal charges.
Ordinary. The closing thesis: this is what happens when a 普通人 (an ordinary person) collides with bureaucratic procedure that nobody owns.
The government agency for marriage registration. The new 2026 Shaanxi rule explicitly narrows its role — leaving harder cases like cancellation for other agencies.
Legal jurisdiction. The three police stations all claimed not having 管辖权. The word becomes the polite uniform of bureaucratic deflection.
To revoke (an official act). Zhang Lei wants the marriage 撤销 — but no single agency is empowered to do it on her testimony alone.
To use something (a name, an ID) fraudulently, pretending you are the owner. Compound: 冒 (impersonate) + 用 (use). The legal name for what happened to Zhang Lei.
Marriage fraud — pretending to marry, usually to take money. The Fujian 'Mo' case in the episode is a classic 骗婚 — registered with stolen identity, ran with the betrothal money the next day.
Procedure (legal / administrative). The episode pivots on the phrase 程序空转 — 'the procedure spinning empty,' i.e., the process moves but nothing is decided.
* beyond level超纲词
What grammar patterns appear in this episode?
语法被 + Verb (passive without agency)
被 marks the subject as something that has been acted upon, often unwillingly. 被结婚 — 'be-married,' i.e., she became married without doing anything. One of the most loaded recent neologisms in Chinese: 被结婚, 被代表, 被自杀 — all express 'something done to you in your name without your consent.'
她被结婚了。
他被代表了。
也就是说 + clause
Restates a fact in plainer language. The episode uses it to unpack each twist: 'civil affairs needs evidence from police; police won't accept the case — 也就是说, the case is stuck.'
也就是说，三个地方的警察，谁都不立案。
X 看 Y，Y 看 Z (procedural deflection)
Vivid bureaucratic idiom. The episode uses it for the four-bureau loop: 民政局看警察。警察看法院。法院看民政局. Useful any time you need to describe deflected responsibility.
民政局看警察。警察看法院。法院看民政局。
按程序办
按 + procedure + 办 = handle it 'by the book.' Sounds neutral, even virtuous. The episode reveals the dark version: when every department only handles its own piece 'by procedure,' the citizen falls into the gap. Critical to know in any contemporary China discussion of bureaucracy.
按程序办。
程序就这样开始空转。
Proper Nouns
专有名词Free account
Keep learning from this story
Create a free account to keep saved words and your preferred level together.
- Keep words with their story context
- Remember your preferred level
- Build your vocabulary over time