The number of people marrying in China fell by a fifth last year to the lowest level in more than four decades — bad news for a country whose low birth rate threatens its long-term economic health.
Just 6.1 million Chinese couples married in 2024, according to new government figures — the lowest level ever recorded and a sharp fall from the 7.7 million from the previous year.
The number of newlyweds last year was less than half that in 2013, when there were 13.5 million marriages. Meanwhile, the number of divorces went up by 1.1 per cent to 2.82 million.
China’s overall population fell for the third year running in 2024 even though births increased a little, partly because of the superstition that the Year of the Dragon is auspicious. However, it was still the second lowest number of births since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
“Unprecedented! Even in 2020, due to Covid-19, marriages only decreased by 12.2 per cent,” Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said of the latest fall.
Analysts said that the fall in marriages would contribute to the long-term trend of fewer children. In China most local governments require a marriage certificate to register the birth of a child, meaning that babies are less commonly born outside marriage than in the West.
If this trend continues, “the Chinese government’s political and economic ambitions will be ruined by its demographic Achilles’ heel”, Yi added.
The slide in weddings comes despite a pro-family campaign promoted in October by President Xi. Last year China also tabled the draft of a law that would make it easier to register for marriages but harder to divorce.
The country’s demographic problems have complex causes and similar trends are seen in South Korea and Japan and countries in North America and Europe. In the long term, countries with lower rates of marriage have fewer children. Diminishing populations face labour shortages that shrink their economies and cause a crisis in social security, as the number of older people claiming welfare surpasses the number of younger, working tax payers.
The roots of the deficit lie in China’s increased affluence over the past 40 years — across the world, middle-class city-dwellers have fewer children than poorer, rural populations. It was accentuated by the one-child policy, by which China attempted to curb over-population from the late 1970s until 2016.
The policy reduced the population of women of child-bearing age and created a generation of families who, with only a daughter to look after, encouraged and supported them in education. With good qualifications and employment prospects, it has been harder to persuade these women to follow the traditional model of giving up their careers to marry and look after children.
In the past few years youth unemployment has increased — in December it rose to an official rate of 15.7 per cent among 16 to 24-year-olds. Falling wages and a crisis in the property market have reduced confidence and further discouraged couples from settling down to create families. Higher costs for education and childcare have also been cited as a disincentive.
