China proposed this week changes to marriage and divorce laws that would simplify marriage registration and make it harder to file for divorce, according to a draft law published by the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
The revised laws would remove restrictions that required marriages to be handled at the couple’s household registration location and add a 30-day waiting period for divorces, during which either party can terminate the process.
The move comes as China’s population has dropped for the
second consecutive year amid increasing concerns about what this might mean for society.
China’s population suffered an imbalance due to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) one-child policy, which formally ended in 2016, and then again during the COVID-19 pandemic due to the CCP’s draconian lockdown measures and the resulting high death count, which official numbers are
believed to
undercount.
The birthrate was not enough to offset the high number of deaths, and from 2021 to 2022, China’s population declined for the first time in 60 years, down 850,000.
At the end of 2023, the population decreased another 2 million. China’s total population was nearly 1.41 billion by the end of 2023, according to the National Statistics Bureau.
In 2023, China saw 9 million births, or a rate of 6.39 per thousand—the lowest in China’s history since the CCP seized power in 1949.
In 2022, experts predicted China would experience
negative growth by 2025. Chinese officials reported 11 million deaths in 2023, already in excess compared to births.
Chinese media reported that the proposed policy aims to promote marriage and family, while netizens derided the move.
Indeed, marriage rates have also been on the
decline in China. According to Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs data, in the first quarter of this year, 1.97 million couples registered for marriage, down 178,000, or 8.3 percent, from 2023.
A total of 7.68 million marriages were registered in 2023, a stark decline from 13.27 million a decade ago in 2013. Meanwhile, divorces went up by half a million in 2023, totaling 2.59 million.
This is just the latest of several law proposals aimed at
increasing the population proposed by the CCP in recent years.
Although the end of the one-child policy was announced in 2015, billboards with
propaganda slogans promoting the policy, such as “better to have 10 more graves than one more newborn,” were found across China as recently as last year, when local governments drafted rule proposals to remove barriers to “individual childbearing” as well as what the offices called “historic” reasoning, alluding to the one-child policy. In 2015, Beijing allowed families to have and register two children, and in 2021, implemented a “three-child” family planning policy.
Localities have also tried to ease up on the CCP’s strict household registration system, which is tied to social programs, including education and retirement pensions, and had been used to enforce population control. Reuters contributed to this report.
