"被结婚"13 年——程序空转下的一个普通人

The afternoon of November 12, 2025. Beijing, Shijingshan district.

A woman born in 1993

— in the Southern Weekly report she's given the pseudonym Zhang Lei —

is at work.

She gets a strange phone call.

The caller claims to be with the Baoji, Shaanxi police,

recites her ID number,

and says she married a local man in 2013,

and that the two of them have a 12-year-old son.

Zhang Lei assumed it was a scam,

and hung up.

Then she looked up that phone number —

it really was the landline of the Duanjia police station in Fufeng County, Baoji.

Then she checked her marital status on the government services platform:

married.

Registration date October 30, 2013.

At that moment she realized:

there was a marriage she had never been part of

that, in the national system,

had existed in her name for 12 years.

Southern Weekly calls this phenomenon "bèi-jiéhūn" — "married against your will."

For the next six months,

Zhang Lei tried to cancel a marriage that wasn't hers.

Police, civil affairs, the courts, the prosecutor's office —

she went to each in turn.

The process bounced back and forth between four departments.

Every department,

on its own, did nothing wrong.

Put together,

they formed an impossible maze.

This is a typical specimen of grassroots legal governance in China.

Today we'll walk through it carefully.

To see this clearly,

we first need to look at the real man in the background.

Southern Weekly gives him the pseudonym Liu Yongqiang.

Liu Yongqiang is from Shaanxi.

He went to Beijing for work in 2008.

On the Wangfujing food street he met a waitress called "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 —

and never came back.

Over a decade later,

their son is now in middle school.

Liu wants to figure out where his wife went.

In November 2025,

he went to the Duanjia police station

to file a missing-persons report.

He gave the police the copies of "Zhang Ting's" household registration booklet and ID.

Following that ID number,

the police phoned Zhang Lei.

But when the details were compared,

the two sides almost completely failed to match:

ID number identical.

But name, household address, parents' names — all different.

A few coincidences, though,

are deeply unsettling.

First,

"Zhang Ting" happens to be Zhang Lei's former name.

When her birth registration was first entered, there was a typo;

around age one, her parents corrected it to Zhang Lei.

Second,

the former name listed on the fake "Zhang Ting's" household booklet

is — Zhang Lei.

Third,

the household addresses match exactly —

the same village in Wangjing Town, Tang County, Baoding, Hebei.

That is to say,

there really is a "Zhang Ting" from her village,

who used Zhang Lei's ID number,

got herself a completely different household registration booklet,

then used that booklet to register a marriage in Shaanxi,

marrying Liu and having a child.

This is identity theft that crosses geography,

crosses household-registration systems,

and exploits gaps in real personal information.

The next six months

are where the story becomes truly suffocating.

Stop one: civil affairs.

Following procedure, Zhang Lei

submitted a cancellation request to the Fufeng civil affairs office.

Civil affairs replied:

you weren't the registering party at the time,

you have no right to cancel another person's marriage.

Furthermore,

the new Shaanxi Marriage Registration Regulations, in effect February 2026, are explicit:

cancelling a marriage registration requires evidence from police or judicial bodies.

Without that evidence,

civil affairs cannot cancel on its own.

Note this:

the 2026 new regulation

narrows the civil-affairs office's role toward "service,"

explicitly stripping out core judicial judgments like "cancelling a marriage."

That's a forward direction in policy —

whether a marriage is real

should be judged by the more specialized bodies.

But in Zhang Lei's case,

it translates to civil affairs being "unable to handle this."

Stop two: police.

Duanjia police in Fufeng, Shaanxi, said:

the ID-fraud part of this

has to be investigated starting from where the fake "Zhang Ting" got that Hebei household booklet.

You should report it where the household was issued.

She went to Wangjing police in Tang County, Hebei.

Wangjing police said:

the offense location is Shaanxi,

we don't have jurisdiction.

Go back to Shaanxi.

She went to the Doudian police station in Beijing where she now lives.

Doudian accepted it first.

A month later they told her:

we don't have jurisdiction either.

This case has to be handled by Fufeng,

or else by Wangjing.

Three police stations,

not one of them opens a case.

Per the law,

either the place of offense or the place of residence has jurisdiction.

But each one

punted the ball to the next.

By the end of April 2026,

Doudian police did one thing:

they ran a facial comparison

between Zhang Lei's photo and the photo on the original marriage certificate.

The conclusion was simple:

"Definitely not you.

But that single sentence "definitely not you"

isn't enough for civil affairs to cancel the registration.

Stop three: the courts.

In February 2026,

Zhang Lei sued the civil affairs office,

asking that the marriage registration be revoked.

Under cross-jurisdiction rules

the case went to the Mei County People's Court.

The Mei County court's ruling:

case refused.

Reason:

she should go through administrative reconsideration first,

and only then, if dissatisfied with the result, sue.

She went back and filed for administrative reconsideration.

The Fufeng civil affairs office issued a written response —

that "we can't cancel it" reply mentioned above.

Under the court's earlier ruling,

she now needs to file administrative reconsideration again

on this new response from civil affairs.

This is where the procedure starts spinning empty.

She also appealed to the Baoji Intermediate People's Court.

On May 19, 2026,

the intermediate court issued a ruling:

the Mei County court's earlier refusal-to-accept is rescinded,

and the Mei County court is ordered to open the case.

This is the first clear "forward step" in six months.

But whether the case, once opened, can actually be cancelled,

is still unknown.

Stop four: the prosecutor's office.

On April 10,

Zhang Lei applied to the Fufeng County prosecutor's office for administrative supervision.

The prosecutor's reply:

this falls outside the scope of the Procuratorial Petition Regulations,

recommend you sue in court.

Four stops down,

six months gone.

Every department,

looking at its own copy of the rules,

was acting lawfully.

But put together,

an ordinary citizen is trapped in a maze

with no exit.

Chinese legal circles have a name for this phenomenon:

"chéngxù kōngzhuǎn" — the procedure spinning empty.

Meaning:

the procedure is still running,

but no department is genuinely taking responsibility for a substantive decision.

Zhang Lei isn't the first.

In 2020,

the Supreme People's Procuratorate published a landmark case:

a Fujian man surnamed Yao registered a marriage in 2013.

The day after registration, the "wife"

ran off with 70,000 yuan of betrothal money.

He later discovered

that the woman was not at all the "Mo" on the ID card —

she was an identity thief who had set up the fake marriage for fraud.

Like Zhang Lei, Yao

ran the gauntlet of police, civil affairs, courts.

Police said there was a legitimate marriage registration,

wouldn't open a case.

Civil affairs said the conditions for cancellation weren't met.

Courts said the case was past the five-year limit.

Every door closed.

Until 2020,

when he went to the Fuzhou prosecutor's office.

A three-tier task force — provincial, municipal, county prosecutors —

finally walked it through.

In October 2020,

Yao's erroneous marriage registration was cancelled.

From scam to cancellation,

a full seven years.

What the follow-up investigation turned up is more disturbing:

the real ID number the fake "Mo" had used

had five overlapping active marriages registered to it.

Guangxi, Zhejiang, Shanxi, Fujian, Anhui.

In 2022 she was sentenced to three years and nine months for fraud.

This is a slice of an identity-marriage fraud industry.

Whether the fake "Zhang Ting" Zhang Lei encountered

has a similar story behind her —

we don't yet know.

In November 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 "marriage registration via identity theft."

The document made it explicit:

police must accept reports;

once the facts are clear,

the courts or prosecutor's office issue judicial or procuratorial recommendations;

civil affairs then cancels the registration.

That is to say,

the path, on paper,

now exists.

By November 2024,

the Supreme Procuratorate reported:

under this mechanism,

2,068 such cases have been processed nationwide.

118 criminal leads were transferred.

2,068 is an abstract-sounding number.

But when you place it inside actual stories —

each one is a Zhang Lei or a Yao,

each one having gone through years, sometimes more than a decade, of torment.

Back to Zhang Lei.

This case makes me want to say three things.

First, about ID cards.

For our generation in China, the ID number

is actually extremely sensitive personal information.

But for a long time

its protection has been weak.

Banks, hotels, telecoms, hospitals, government windows —

every one of them asks for a copy.

Any one of those leaks

can be used by someone to do something bad.

Technically, there are now more tools —

facial recognition, fingerprints, electronic IDs.

But the institutional gaps

are still being slowly patched.

Second, about procedure.

A common criticism of China's grassroots governance is this:

every department follows its own slice of "the rules,"

no one is responsible for the citizen's actual problem.

What Zhang Lei ran into

isn't malice.

It's a systemic "kicking the ball."

No single person broke the rules.

But the ordinary person is the one stuck in the middle,

unable to get out.

The Supreme Procuratorate's 2021 document

tried to fix this.

The direction is right.

But at the county level,

implementation still takes time.

Third, about this woman herself.

Zhang Lei is 33 this year.

She has no plans to get married.

But this thing is hanging there.

If she wants to marry in the future,

under current law,

she has to clear away this nonexistent "marriage" first.

The impact on her

isn't only legal,

it's also psychological.

Every day she wakes up

to a relationship that isn't hers,

and one she can't erase on her own.

The May 19 ruling

is a hopeful signal.

But for the case to actually be cancelled

still takes time.

After Southern Weekly's report came out,

media attention itself

became one of the forces pushing this forward.

Hopefully Zhang Lei is not the next Yao.

Hopefully she doesn't have to wait seven years.

Okay.

That's all for today.

See you in the next story.