China: A new report has stated that the number of marriages in China last year dropped to 6.83 million, the lowest since records began in 1986. Data released by the Ministry of Civil Affairs showed the number of couples tying the knot in 2022 fell by about 800,000 compared with 2021, beating that year’s record low.

China’s marriage rate has declined rapidly over the past 10 years, since peaking in 2013 when nearly 13.5 million couples wed, nearly double 2022’s count.

Policymakers in China are increasingly worried about the stubborn downward trend in marriage and birth rates. In 2022, China’s population shrank for the first time in six decades, leading to warnings that the country would get old before it got rich.

In his article about China’s low birthrate “crisis”, Mr. James Liang, an influential economist, called for China’s school system to be shortened by two years, which, among other economic benefits, he argued would give women a “few extra years to start a family and have children”. Liang argued that this could boost China’s fertility rate by as much as 30 percent.

Under the rule of Mr. Xi Jinping, who took power in 2012, the government has pushed an increasingly conservative social agenda that encourages women to marry young to rear more children.

But between 2010 and 2020, the average age for women to get married for the first time increased from 24 to nearly 29.

In 2016, China abandoned its decades-old one-child policy and is now encouraging women to have up to three babies. Local governments have introduced a range of policies to encourage people to have more children, such as free IVF and subsidies for second and third children.

The data also showed that the number of divorces dropped to 2.1 million in 2022, a slight decrease from the previous year. China’s divorce rate has been declining since its peak in 2019. That partly reflects the fact that there are fewer marriages.

In 2021, the government also introduced a controversial law forcing couples to observe a 30-day “cooling-off period” before splitting, which seemed to have the desired effect of sharply cutting the divorce rate.

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