China’s efforts to reduce the cost of marriage and raise the birthrate have not resulted in more marriages, undermining a crucial public project to combat the accelerating aging of Chinese society.
The world’s most populous country faces a demographic crisis, and authorities face the economic challenges caused by the shrinking population. Chinese census data released this year show the population increase was the smallest in decades.
In April, the Ministry of Civil Affairs launched an information campaign to make marriages cheaper in 20 cities, as the cost of marriage has risen and is beyond the reach of the average household.
“A reduction in marriages will affect the birth rate and, in turn, economic and social development,” said Yang Zongtao, a senior official at the Ministry of Civil Affairs last year. “We hope to create favorable conditions for more age-appropriate people to marry.”
But the issuance of marriage licenses dropped to 5.9 million in the first three quarters of 2021 – the lowest number in 13 years. Furthermore, the number of marriages has been declining for eight consecutive years.
A five-province study by Chengdu’s Southwest Jiaotong University found that the average amount spent by rural couples to cover engagement gifts, which includes the bride’s dowry and ranges from cash to real estate, rose between 50% and 100% in the last seven years, reaching at least 300 thousand renminbi (R$262 thousand). It is more than six times the average annual household income.
“The problem is getting worse and worse,” said Wang Xiangyang, one of the authors of the Southwest Jiaotong study.
Ningling Central County, one of the areas identified by the Ministry of Civil Affairs as an “experiment zone” for the new project, has announced a suggested price of up to 30,000 renminbi (R$26,000) for engagement gifts, against 100,000 renminbi ($87K) that the county’s young women and their parents often ask for.
The county has also created hundreds of marriage councils, made up of local officials, dignitaries and marriage facilitators, to persuade couples to follow official guidance.
“We constantly tell young women and their parents that happiness has nothing to do with how many engagement gifts they receive,” said a local Ningling official.
One of the great difficulties is the gender imbalance in the country: after decades of the one-child policy, the number of boys considerably outnumber girls in the same age group.
“The chance of success of any new official policy is limited when you have more young men than women,” commented a government adviser in Beijing. “It is inevitable that many men will remain single for life.”
The aide said the country’s gender imbalance has barely eased since the 2010 census, which found 2.2 million single men aged 25-34 and 1.2 million single women in the same age bracket.
“We will not see an increase in marriages while the gender imbalance remains so great,” the aide added.
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that fewer Chinese women are interested in getting married. Many are choosing to marry later or remain single, to pursue a professional career.
In a May survey of young adults in Lishui, a rural county in the east of the country, by the local statistics bureau, 60% of women interviewed considered marriage necessary, compared to 82% of men.
Several regional and national surveys taken around 2010 indicated that more than 80% of women interviewed saw marriage as a necessity. The index of men of this opinion surpassed 85%.
Lishui office worker Olivia Wang, 35, said, “I go for what I think, not what the government says, about when and who to marry.”
Some men in Ningling also don’t believe that changing official policy will change behavior.
“No woman would marry me if I did what the official advertisement says,” said a 28-year-old man with the surname Wang, who paid his in-laws 99,999 renminbis (R$87 thousand) in cash and half that amount in jewelry. gold before your wedding in August.
“I’m happy to have a wife, but not so happy that my parents had to zero in on their savings to help me reach that goal.”
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