China divorce cooling-off rule: one year after controversial law enacted authorities claim rates of separation declining

Chinese provinces have reported a significantly lower rate of divorce and claim it is due to a cooling-off period under new rules

Eastern China’s Chongqing municipality said the rate of divorce had decreased by almost half since the law was enacted a year ago

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Declining birth rates, an ageing population, and soaring seperation rates prompted a controversial law one year ago to make divorce harder. Photo: AFP

Published: 9:00am, 15 Jan 2022Updated: 9:38am, 15 Jan 2022

A year after China adopted a 30-day cooling-off period for divorce seekers amid climbing divorce rates, marriage registration authorities have seen a drop in marital dissolution that many local governments claimed was because of the controversial measure.

The civil affairs bureau in western China’s Chongqing municipality said earlier this month that over 50,000 estranged couples decided against divorcing each other during the one-month waiting period last year, contributing to a 44 per cent fall in divorce numbers since 2020.

Eastern China’s Qingdao city, Shandong province, witnessed the lowest divorce number in a decade with just 16,000 break-ups in 2021, down 33 per cent from the previous year, the government said.

In Guiyang, Guizhou province in the southwest, local authorities found roughly a quarter of the couples seeking a divorce “ended up cooling off during the ‘cooling-off’ period”, the Guiyang Daily reported, quoting a government official.

As officials trumpet the alleged success of new laws designed to curb divorce, couples complain they take away individual freedom and make getting a divorce almost impossible. Photo: Getty

Nationwide, there were over 1.58 million divorces in the first three quarters of 2021, down by over 1 million from the same period in 2020, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

In January 2021 China introduced a law requiring couples seeking a divorce to wait for 30 days before the process could be finalised, a move the government said was aimed at improving social stability, however many people regarded the rule as an interference with the freedom of marriage.