World's second-biggest economy faces a threat as Chinese are not getting married
demographic crisis threatening the world’s second-biggest economy.
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The number of marriage registrations fell to 6.1 million, according to statistics released by China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs on Saturday, after a post-pandemic increase to nearly 7.7 million in 2023. The tally for last year marks the fewest marriages since public records began in 1986 and is less than half the peak reached in 2013.
The failure to encourage more people to tie the knot in the country of 1.4 billion people represents a challenge for a government struggling to arrest China’s sharp drop in births. A marriage certificate if typically required to register new babies, though some localities have moved to scrap the requirement so single parents or unmarried couples can enjoy the same rights as wedded ones.
“The combination of high youth unemployment and high barriers to marriage could have further dampened the desire for young people to wed in 2024,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ada Li. “As young people increasingly worried about their future, they might have shifted to fulfilling personal happiness instead of starting a family. We believe China’s marriage rate could continue its decline in the long term.”
The jobless rate among people aged 16 to 24 was 15.7% last December, nearly a full percentage point above its level a year earlier but declining in recent months. China changed the methodology for calculating the figure after youth unemployment hit a historic high in 2023.
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