China’s state-run Global Times cited government-approved “experts” to declare that the catastrophic decline in marriages nationwide – 2021 saw the lowest rates in marriage registrations since the government began documenting them – was “a normal phenomenon” that citizens should not concern themselves with.
The Times allowed for some modest worry regarding the skyrocketing ages of those registering their marriages with the government, noting that older couples are less likely to have many children but generally shrugged off any potential panic that Millennial and Generation Z Chinese people are showing dramatically reduced interest in starting their own families.
The Chinese Communist Party has for the past decade struggled with increasingly low birth and marriage rates, primarily resulting from the aftermath of decades of imposing a brutal “one-child policy” the government credits with the “prevention” of the existence of 400 million babies. The psychological impact of the policy has largely dissuaded women of child-bearing age from starting families, and the policy itself has dramatically reduced the number of those women in society, as most couples preferred to have sons, and a majority of the 400 million people “prevented” from existing are believed to have been baby girls. Currently, China is home to about 35 million more single men than women, severely impacting marriage prospects for men and fueling human trafficking for brides from countries like Pakistan and North Korea.
The Communist Party is also attempting to combat a growing youth movement known as “lying flat” that encourages Millennials not to marry or have children and to refrain from seeking career success or any achievements whatsoever as a way of hindering the Party’s success.
The Global Times cited the Communist Party’s Ministry of Civil Affairs to report on Wednesday that fewer than 8 million couples registered for a marriage license in 2021, the first time since 2003 that the number fell below that threshold. The 7.64 million marriages registered were the fewest documented in one year “since 1986, when the ministry started to disclose the figures,” the state outlet noted.
The drop in marriage is particularly notable given that the Chinese government, while continuing to impose seemingly arbitrary coronavirus-related lockdowns throughout 2021 and to this day – locking down 21 million people in Chengdu on Wednesday – mobility increased significantly compared to 2020, when reports out of major metropolitan hubs indicated that Chinese public health officials were welding people shut in their homes and hauling them off to quarantine camps.
The Global Times also observed that, as per government data, nearly half of the people getting married in 2021 (48.2 percent) were over the age of 30, a record high that suggests a decline in fertility, as younger couples tend to have more children.
The state-run newspaper nonetheless insisted that the many records documented in these data were “a normal phenomenon and within expectations.”
“Zhai Zhenwu, chairman of the standing council of the China Population Association under the National Health and Family Planning Commission, told the Global Times on Wednesday that the trend of fewer marriages in recent years was normal,” the publication relayed, claiming Zhai also highlighted that Chinese couples are still younger than in “many developed countries,” without giving examples. The newspaper also cited Zhai saying that “the proportion of non-married people is very low” despite the new data.
The Global Times noted concerns that birth rates will continue to decline given that fewer and older couples are getting married but did not discuss the significant gender imbalance in the country that resulted directly from the “one-child policy.” Dictator Xi Jinping ended the one-child policy and has since allowed couples a maximum of three children, but the years following the expansion of legal parenthood have not resulted in an increase in birth rates.
Preliminary numbers in late 2021 indicated that the year may result in a record low number of marriages, the eighth year in a row that marriage registrations have declined. Discussing those numbers in December, the Financial Times found substantially less optimism in the Chinese government than what the Global Times presented. An anonymous “Beijing-based government adviser” told the Financial Times that it was “inevitable” that Chinese men would “remain single in their lifetime” in large quantities given the gender imbalance. The alleged adviser predicted, “we are not going to see a recovery in marriage when gender imbalance is so big.”
The Chinese National Health Commission admitted in a statement to Reuters last month that the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, and the lockdowns the government subsequently implemented, are damaging marriage rates.
“COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] has contributed to the decline in the country’s marriage and birth rates that has accelerated in recent years due to the high costs of education and child-rearing,” the NHC told Reuters in a state on August 22. “The coronavirus has also had a clear impact on the marriage and childbirth arrangements of some people.”
The Chinese government has nonetheless attempted to invest in matchmaking as a solution to dwindling marriages. The Chinese Communist Youth League debuted a matchmaking service in 2017 that screened users to ensure only the most zealous communist mates for those participating, but the marriage rate has continued to decline in the five years since.
The Communist Party has also attempted to boost marriage and birth rates by heavily censoring feminist content online.
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