China: Marriage License Applications Drop to 13-Year Low

Gabrielle ReyesDecember 11, 2021

Only 5.9 million couples in China applied for new marriage licenses in the first three quarters of 2021, marking a 13-year low for such a figure, the Financial Times reported this week.

The number of new marriages in China has declined “for eight consecutive years,” the Japanese-owned newspaper observed on December 7.

“A big challenge has been the country’s gender imbalance, with young men outnumbering women of similar age by a considerable margin after decades of China’s one-child policy,” according to the Financial Times.

“The space for new policy is limited when you have more young men than women,” an unnamed Beijing-based government adviser told the publication. “It is inevitable that a lot of men will remain single in their lifetime.”

The government official said China’s gender imbalance has “barely improved” from the country’s 2010 census. That census revealed China was home to 2.2 million single men between the ages of 25 and 34 and 1.2 million single women in the same age demographic.

“We are not going to see a recovery in marriage when gender imbalance is so big,” the Beijing government adviser predicted.

China documented 12 million births last year, according to the nation’s 2020 census data. The statistic marked a sharp decrease from 2019, when China logged 14.65 million new births and the lowest such figure since 1961.

China’s ruling Communist Party imposed a notorious “one-child policy” starting in the late 1970s, which limited couples to having just one child. Beijing enforced the austere measure with the short-sighted aim of curbing China’s then-booming population. The “one-child policy” remained in place until 2016, when Communist Party officials finally eased the measure to allow couples up to two children. China’s federal government further expanded its child allowance to three children per couple in May 2020. The changes came after Beijing realized decades of a “one-child policy” had caused harmful distortions to the Chinese population.

Residents bring their children to play in a compound near a commercial office building in Beijing on May 10, 2021. China’s ruling Communist Party will ease birth limits to allow all couples to have three children instead of two to cope with the rapid rise in the average age of its population, a state news agency said Monday, May 31 (AP Photo/Andy Wong).

“China had a fertility rate of just 1.3 children per woman in 2020, recent state data showed, on par with aging societies like Japan and Italy and far short of the roughly 2.1 needed for replacement level,” Reuters reported in May.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is now scrambling to boost its population by encouraging young couples across China to marry and procreate through state-backed incentives. The local government of Shaanxi, a province in northwestern China, proposed a plan last month to offer nearly one year of paid maternity leave to new mothers as part of the initiative.

The state-run news site China Reports Network published an editorial in November asserting all CCP members “should shoulder the responsibility and obligation of the country’s population growth and act on the three-child policy.”

“No party member should use any excuse, objective or personal, to not marry or have children, nor can they use any excuse to have only one or two children,” the article read. The editorial disappeared from the site, however, after widespread outrage in China.

Jack Ma, the founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, encouraged his own staff to marry by presiding over a mass wedding celebration at his company headquarters in Hangzhou each year from about 2004 – 2019.

“The wedding isn’t an official ceremony, but rather a celebration of all the Alibaba couples who have got married over the past year,” Business Insider reported in June 2019.

“Jack Ma drew criticism for this year’s Ali Day wedding ceremony, when he encouraged the couples to have lots of sex and bear children,” the news site noted.