Br J Sociol. 2021;00:1–15. | 1 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/bjos Received: 17 February 2020 | Revised: 13 October 2020 | Accepted: 14 December 2020 DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12812 ORIGINAL ARTICLE A “Phoenix” rising from the ashes: China’s Tongqi , marriage fraud, and resistance Eileen Y. H. Tsang © 2021 London School of Economics and Political Science Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong Correspondence Eileen Y. H. Tsang, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong. Email: tsangeileen@gmail.com, eileen@ cityu.edu.hk Funding information This article was supported by General Research Fund Project “A ‘Phoenix’ Rising from the Ashes”: China's Tongqi, Resistance, and New Life project (CityU Project No. 9043098). The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the City University of Hong Kong (3-9-202003-04) Abstract There are significant numbers of women in China who have inadvertently married closeted gay men. Women in China who unwittingly marry closeted gay men are known as Tongqi (同妻), and these women often discover their husband's se- cret only after giving birth to fulfill filial obligations. These women taken into this “marriage fraud” are initially unaware of their husbands’ sexual orientation. Because China's di- vorce law favors men, even if the wife files for divorce, the husband often wins custody of children. The tendency to blame the woman who have unwittingly married gay men extends even to the woman's own immediate families. These women suffer heightened risk of not only physical death from AIDS and other diseases, but also psychologi- cal death through the loss of physical mobility, alienation of kin, and death of their heterosexual marriage identity. This article extends necropolitics to the social death situations of 12 educated and 47 low-educated Tongqi and reveals how they resist and overcome their circumstances. Tongqi are the women who have unwittingly married gay men of violations involving their own marriage, but they are not simply wait- ing for death. Taking an ethnographical approach, this work uses the social death concept of necropolitics to provide understanding of how marriage and gender laws perpetuate these dysfunctional unions. KEYWORDS China, marriage fraud, necropolitics, queer studies, Tongqi