Faced with a soaring divorce rate, the ruling Communist Party in China introduced a rule last year to keep unhappy marriages together.
According to government statistics released this week, there was a steep drop in divorce filings in 2021.
The new rule has been praised by local officials as a success in the country's effort to grow families and curb a demographic crisis threatening China's economy. Fewer and fewer Chinese citizens are getting married in the first place, which is a bigger challenge for the party.
The number of marriage registration fell to a 36-year low in 2021. China's rapidly graying society and a phenomenon more familiar to countries like Japan and South Korea are signs that the fall in marriages has contributed to a plummet in birthrates.
Many young Chinese people don't want to get married as a job is harder to find, competition is more fierce and the cost of living is less manageable.
"I don't want to get married at all, I live near the border with North Korea, and I don't want to marry someone there." His parents want him to get married and have children, but he doesn't see his job as a good enough reason to do that. He said that many women don't want to get married.
The divorce rate and marriage rate in China have dropped significantly, which I think is an irreversible trend, because more and more people around me don't want to get married.
Many women think twice about marriage because of rising gender inequality at work and at home. Better educated and more financially independent than their mothers, younger women have watched as their economic position has changed while society has not.
The founding director of the Center for Family and Population Research at the National University said that a package deal is where a woman is marrying a man but the whole family.
The rising cost of education and the burden of taking care of aging parents are some of the reasons why couples in China don't want to have children. Some people are choosing to live together without the ceremony and the children instead of getting married.
A senior lecturer in the department of international development at King said that the deinstitutionalization of marriage might be signaled by the relatively lower marriage rates.
The Chinese government has spent a lot of time trying to encourage marriage and having children in order to keep the population constant. In the last decade, it has changed family planning rules twice, first by ending a decades-old policy of one child for married couples in 2015, and then by allowing married couples to have three children.
Many pregnant women still report discrimination in the work force, despite officials promising better maternity leave and protections for working mothers. Marriage leave, which gives newlyweds extra vacation days, is one of the incentives that some cities have tried.
Marriage rates have fallen every year since the beginning of the year. According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs in China, the number of marriages fell to 7.6 million in 2011.
The divorcecooling off period was put in place in January of last year because officials were worried that married couples were moving too quickly to end their relationships. The rule required couples to wait 30 days after filing for a divorce.
The president of the Guangdong Academy of Population Development told Chinese state media that some of the past divorce cases were impulsive.
The lack of common language is the result of incorrect attitude of both parties, who do not put themselves in the right position and want to divorce impulsively when their emotions come up.
The cooling-off period has been credited with slowing the divorce rate. 2.1 million couples successfully completed divorce registration in 2021, a 43 percent decline from 2020.
Additional factors may have been at play. The drop in the divorce rate may be due to the difficulty of scheduling divorce appointments during the Pandemic, according to an expert on Chinese marriage law.
The data reported by the government is limited to what is known as divorces by agreement, which are not processed by courts and can lead to lengthy legal battles. In some cases, spouses are required to apply for divorce in person. The divorce application is withdrawn if the couple returns after 30 days.
Logistical of that process was more difficult because of lock downs and social distancing rules. The demand for divorce remained strong. People rushed to get divorced in the three months before the cooling-down period began. More than a million files were made, a 13 percent increase from a year earlier. Many Chinese people took to the internet to doubt the news that the divorce rate is slowing.
A discussion about the new data was read by more than 300 million people. Many of the comments were not nice. How many people don't get divorced because they can? The number of marriages is the lowest in 36 years.
Some were concerned about the consequences of domestic violence. The cooling-off rule is bad for people living in abusive marriages. The officials countered that victims of domestic violence can ask the court to end their marriages. Many victims and stay-at- home mothers don't have the money to pay their own legal fees.
The message to women in China has been very negative.
The research was contributed by Liu Yi.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
