Marriage in China: Young people reject tying knot, but why?

China's slow economy, high unemployment rate and the wave of corporate layoffs have become major decision drivers in the younger generation's lives that they continue postponing major life decisions and contribute to a record-low marriage-rate">marriage rate, The New York Times reported.

Grace Zhang, a tech worker who had long been ambivalent about marriage, spent two months in the barricaded space during the lockdown of Shanghai last year. And when she came out of lockdown, her sense of optimism faded.

When China reopened in December, Zhang felt that working back in the office could help her in restoring the positive outlook but the rising layoffs have just confused her.

She has a boyfriend but no immediate plans to marry, despite frequent admonishments from her father that it’s time to settle down, according to New York Times.

“This kind of instability in life will make people more and more afraid of making new life changes,” she said.

The number of marriages in China declined for nine consecutive years, falling by half in less than a decade. Last year, about 6.8 million couples registered for marriage, the lowest since records began in 1986, down from 13.5 million in 2013, according to government data released last month.

Although the numbers have risen so far in 2023 compared with the year before, more marriages are ending, too. In the first quarter of this year, 40,000 more couples married compared with the same period a year earlier, while divorces rose by 127,000.

The figures have shown that young people are deterred by the toll of putting a child through China’s cutthroat education system. As women in cities achieve new levels of financial independence and education, marriage is less of an economic necessity to them. And men say they cannot afford to get married, citing cultural pressure to own a home and a car before they can even begin dating.

The instability of the last three years has compounded these pressures, reshaping many young people’s expectations about building a family. China has imposed an increasingly tight grip over every aspect of society under its leader, Xi Jinping — with effects that could weigh on the marriage-rate">marriage rate, New York Times reported.

“If young people are not confident about the future, it’s very difficult for them to think about settling down and getting married,” said Xiujian Peng, a senior research fellow at Australia’s Victoria University.

In China, where it is extremely rare for an unmarried couple or a single person to have children, the marriage decline is tied to the country’s falling birthrate. Last year, China’s population shrank for the first time since the early 1960s, when there was widespread famine.

Last month, a video, showing a Chinese man killing his wife by repeatedly driving over her with his car after a domestic dispute made the marriage a hot topic on China’s micro-blogging site, Weibo. The app flooded with comments warning women against getting married.

A recent Weibo hashtag about rejecting marriage generated 92 million views, with commenters citing the lack of protections for women in China’s divorce and domestic violence laws, as per the New York Times.

The share of women age 25 to 29 in urban China who have never been married rose to 40.6 per cent in 2020 from 8.6 per cent in 2000, according to an analysis by Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine.

Many men say they are delaying marriage because they feel economically insecure. Because of a cultural preference for boys during the government’s one-child policy, which ended in 2016, China has around 35 million more men than women, fueling a sense of economic competition for marriage, New York Times reported.