China population: marriages fall in latest blow to Beijing’s push for couples to have more children
- Jiangsu province saw the number of marriage registrations drop for a fifth consecutive year in 2021, with a 5.16 per cent fall compared to 2020
- It is the latest blow to China’s plans to encourage more couples to have children after the number of births dropped for the fifth consecutive year in 2021
Fewer Chinese people chose to get married last year, while on average those that did postponed the age at which they tied the knot, further adding to the population crisis stemming from a plunging birth rate.
The number of marriage registrations has been declining since 2013, while data recently released by a number of local authorities confirmed a continuation of the downward trend.
In the eastern coastal province of Jiangsu, the number of marriage registrations dropped for a fifth consecutive year in 2021, with a 5.16 per cent fall compared to the numbers seen in 2020 confirmed by the Jiangsu Province Civil Affairs Department.
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In the city of Hefei in the eastern Anhui province, the number of couples getting married in 2021 dropped by 4,065, or 6.6 per cent compared to a year earlier, which represented the seventh consecutive yearly decline since 2014.
Compared to a peak in 2014, the number of marriages in Hefei dropped by 41 per cent last year.
In Hangzhou, the capital city of the eastern Zhejiang province, despite a small increase in the number of couples getting married last year compared to 2020, the figure was one of the lowest in a decade at more than 20 per cent down from 2011.
Nationally, the number of marriage registrations in the first three quarters of last year dropped slightly from the first nine months of 2020, but it was crucially 17.5 per cent down from the same period in 2019.
The number of divorces had been on the rise for the previous two decades until 2020.
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In Jiangsu province, nearly 40 per cent of divorces filed in 2021 were retracted or seen as retracted due to incompletion.
In Anhui, the number of divorces fell by more than half in 2021, compared to a year earlier.
Similar trends appeared in other cities, including the city of Yueyang in Hunan province and Wenzhou in Zhejiang.
Societal changes in China are also seeing people getting married at an increasingly older age.
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In 2020, people aged over 30 accounted for 46.5 per cent of all marriage registrations nationally compared to 2005, when 47 per cent were aged between 20 and 24.
In Xiangyang city in Hubei province, the average age for a man to be married for the first time was 35.23 in 2021, compared to 33.96 for women. This is almost six and seven years older than their counterparts in 2016, when men and women got married at 29.41 and 27.27 on average, respectively.
Last year in Wenzhou, men entered marriage for the first time at an average age of 29, compared to 26.7 for women, both slightly up compared with a year earlier.
However in Jiangsu province, the average age for women was 26.5 and 28 for men, much younger than in 2017, when people got married closer to their mid-30s.
The falling new births resulted in a decreased number of marriages, which will subsequently lead to a decline in future births,
However, the widely circulated figure that people in Jiangsu got married for the first time at the average age of 34 could be false, according to independent demographer He Yafu, who added that the calculation must have included people who remarried, which raised the average.
“The falling new births resulted in a decreased number of marriages, which will subsequently lead to a decline in future births,” He said.
“Of course, other than a lower number of young people, the dropping marriage rate has also led to the dropping numbers of marriage registrations.”
