In Southern China’s Mashan county, teen pregnancies and underage weddings are neither rare nor new
School dropout rates are high in a region when children become adults virtually, often literally, overnight
Many rural areas in Southern China face problems of underage pregnancies and informal marriages, The Beijing News reports.
Last week, as reported by the South China Morning Post and others, photos of a young couple in wedding dresses in mountainous Mashan county circulated widely on Chinese social media, with much speculation in particular about the age of the baby faced boy.
The couple, Zhang Jiale and Wu Mingmin, 16, from mountainous Mashan County, became informally married – in a country where the legal marrying age is 22 for men and 20 for women – and held their “wedding banquet” early last month, according to mainland media.
But after some investigation, The Beijing News found that Zhang and Wu’s case is far from rare in the underdeveloped autonomous region.
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Many teenaged boys and girls from Mashan county who drop out of school find themselves holding wedding banquets as early as 15, and many have children before marriage, the News reported.
With so many parents having migrated to find work in the major cities or on the coast, their teenaged children tend to drop out of school early, got romanticly involved with teens of a similar age and become informally united after their wedding ceremonies at a very early age. Some do so because of unexpected pregnancies.
Zhang, the baby-faced groom in the viral picture, dropped out of school in second year of junior high school and has already worked on construction sites for two years.
His two cousins, 20 and 22, are both fathers, while his uncle became a grandfather at 40 – now at 42 he has two grandsons and a granddaughter – according to News report.
Records from the local Maternity and Child Health Care centre show eight teenage births in January alone, with the youngest mother just 15 years old.
A doctor at the facility said the youngest teenage mother she has seen was 13: “She was too young to push during labour”.
Local schools face high dropout rates.
Huang Hanshi, an official at the local education authority said his organisation had worked to reduce the large number of dropout and teenage marriages.
But the temptation of migrating to cities to work and unexpected pregnancies ensured the dropout rate remained high.
