Wife Beating Among East Asian Men

After detailing an account of a woman who was brutally beaten and slashed with a knife by her husband, Chinese writer Guo Lin (郭霖) had this to say:

"东北是出过土匪最多的地方之一, 东北人好斗, 也热情. 东北人打老婆比较普遍, 大丈夫思想严重. 据说是受了日本人与朝鲜人的影响."

(The Northeast is one of the places with the most bandits. North-easterners are militant, and gregarious. It is common for North-easterners to beat up their wives; their sense of male chauvinism is strong, and this is largely due to the influence of the Japanese and Koreans.")

Good grief. Positive cultural/social traits in Japan and Korea are often attributed to the positive and civilizing effects of Chinese culture. Yet any negative attributes are blamed on the Japanese and Koreans? Come on. At least be honest and take responsibility for one's own nasty attributes!

The above excerpt can be found in 解读罪与错 - 当代中国家庭教育与犯罪心理调查 (Interpreting Crime and Misdemeanor - A Psychological Investigation of Contemporary Chinese Family Education and Crime, Zhongguo Shehui Publishing Press, 2000)

Separately, according to a 2003 article by Cortlan Bennett, a research by the Korea Women's Hotline that same year revealed that one in three married Korean men beat their wives.

Since spousal abuse was outlawed in South Korea in 1998, the number of reported cases of domestic violence had soared from 41,497 in 1999 to 114,612 in 2002. But only two per cent of these cases went to court. Many Korean men argued it was their "marital right", while many women reasoned that women who were abused "must have deserved it."

In his 1994 biography Honey, please help me, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun admitted abusing his wife during their early married years.

As Bennett noted: "Such admissions from the man who is now president, and traditional Confucian values in this painfully patriarchal nation, go some way to explain why wife-beating is so widely accepted."