A Lesson on Environmental Protection

The economy in some formerly poverty-stricken regions has been presenting scenes of increasing prosperity in recent years in the wake of the developing rural commodity economy. Yet, this has been accompanied by a discordant note, that is, an increasing number of women in some mountainous regions are spending large sums of money to buy divorces. Analyses by people concerned of the divorce cases handled by the Zhouning county court in Fujian Province in 1990 show that as many as 85 percent of the women seeking a divorce had to pay a high price to "redeem" themselves. Such high-priced divorces are causing misery and unhappiness to many women.