In 2021, approximately 7.6 million couples registered marriages in China, the lowest number over the past 36 years according to the latest data released by the China’s Civil Affairs Bureau.
China, the world’s most populous country, has seen the number of marriage registrations decline every year since 2013, foreshadowing potential demographic problems.
The number of marriages registered in China peaked at about 13.5 million couples in 2013, and decreased every year since then, falling below 10 million in 2019 to 7.6 million this year, the lowest since the Ministry of Civil Affairs’ official website started publishing data in 1986.
Regarding why more Chinese people are opting to not get married or marry without having children, Li Yuanhua, former Beijing Normal University professor, told The Epoch Times that the major causes are “rising costs of child birthing, growing and educating a child, as well as a variety of life pressures in China.
“The problem emerges not just for today, not temporarily, but was shaped by a long-term accumulation of social pressures as a whole, which overwhelmed Chinese people almost breathless,” Li said.
The rising cost of living and the demographic imbalances stem from the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) economic system and demographic policy, respectively. The two factors interact with each other. For example, cadres in the Communist government system oversee most of the social resources, which probably led to the distribution of social resources morphing into a serious imbalance, and exacerbated the gap between the rich and the poor. Therefore, most Chinese people will find their cost of living has risen making it hard to make ends meet, and so they cannot afford to have children.
“China’s current population decline is one result of the CCP’s one-child policy,” Yang Zhi (a pseudonym), a professor at Henan University said in an interview with The Epoch Times.
According to Li, the CCP imposed the compulsory one-child policy and forced abortion measures in a bid to control population growth, which over time, resulted in a smaller labor force. Labor force is widely seen as a vital factor of social development. In this case, an insufficient workforce will affect the country’s economic development.
China implemented a nationwide one-child policy in 1980 and only ended the controversial plan in 2016. After more than three decades, side effects of the one-child policy began to emerge, with China’s population growth decreasing dramatically and serious demographic imbalances appearing.
Obviously, “the policy-maker’s decisions are lacking the foresight of the upcoming two or three decades,” Yang Said.
Ms. Cao, of Hefei, Anhui Province in south-central China, told The Epoch Times that Chinese women find it is more difficult to get married earlier because there are more men than women in China, so women have more options for a future spouse. They will seek better mate criteria, with the man’s salary, job, and even his parent’s wealth, incorporated into a woman’s selection of the best spouse.
Elevated criteria for choosing a spouse renders Chinese women less eager to get married before finding a suitable husband, as Ms. Cao said, which repeatedly delays the age of marriage, and as they get older, more and more women are getting used to being celibate.
