BEIJING: A Chinese woman has revealed online that her mother was married to her younger brother posthumously, who then embezzled her properties as her widower.
The 27-year-old woman from central China’s Henan province, surnamed Sun, lost her mother Zhao Fang to illness at the age of nine, in 2008.
Since her parents were divorced and she had been living with her mother, Sun was adopted by her mother’s younger sister. She said her relatives notarised her mother’s assets around the time of her death.
The day before she died, they also signed a document to sell three of Zhao’s properties to pay her debts, and let her younger sister adopt Sun and hold the rest of her assets in trust until Sun reaches the age of 18.
Sun said she used to live with her mother in northern China’s Hebei province.
After her mother died, she lived alternately with her aunt and her uncle, her mother’s younger brother, in their hometown in Henan until she went to college in 2018.
According to the medical records, her mother was diagnosed with sepsis, which could quickly cause organ failure and death. Sun only heard about her mother’s death from her aunt and did not attend her funeral.
As she reached the legal age to inherit her mother’s properties, Sun tried to initiate legal procedures but was shocked to discover that only a shop was left under her mother’s name.
All her other assets, including residential and commercial properties and jewellery, had been transferred to other names.
The notary also informed her that her mother remarried in 2009, while acknowledging the fact that her mother died in 2008.
Her mother’s new marriage meant that Sun was not her only inheritor and could not carry on the inheritance procedure by herself.
Sun then acquired a 2009 document announcing her mother’s marriage registration.
She was stunned to discover that the person whom her mother married was of the same name as her maternal uncle.
Also, Sun discovered that her mother’s identity photo in the marriage registration document was actually that of her aunt-in-law.
Around the same time, her mother’s identity card had been changed and now carried her aunt-in-law’s photograph and address, while keeping her mother’s original identification number.
Sun believed that her uncle re-registered the marriage with his wife in the name of her sister so that he could legally inherit her belongings.
According to Chinese law, successors first in order, which include spouses, children and parents, shall inherit the dead’s assets exclusively.
Siblings are successors second in order and can only inherit when there is no successor first in order.
In cases where the successor is a minor, their supervisor could hold their inheritance in trust.
It is also forbidden to marry lineal and collateral blood relatives within three generations.
However, at the executive level, newlyweds used to only provide identity cards and hukou, permanent residence registration, to prove their identities, and sign a document declaring that they are not related.
In this case, if the two names are not on the same hukou, then it was impossible for the marriage registration authorities to discover whether the two people are related.
Last year, China made it even easier to get married, no longer requiring citizens to submit a hukou to register a marriage.
After another failed attempt to notarise her inheritance of her mother’s assets in 2025, Sun decided to take the matter online.
The authorities in Henan announced on March 3 that they will investigate the case.
“Such malicious relatives, so desperately trying to occupy the money a mother left to her daughter,” said one online observer.
“What is more horrible is such illegal moves worked. The government personnel should have arrested them when they first tried to replace the dead person’s identity and register the marriage,” said another. - South China Morning Post
