China population: marriages fall in latest blow to Beijing’s push for couples to have more children
- Jiangsu province saw the number of marriage registrations drop for a fifth consecutive year in 2021, with a 5.16 per cent fall compared to 2020
- It is the latest blow to China’s plans to encourage more couples to have children after the number of births dropped for the fifth consecutive year in 2021
Fewer Chinese people chose to get married last year, while on average those that did postponed the age at which they tied the knot, further adding to the population crisis stemming from a plunging birth rate.
The number of marriage registrations has been declining since 2013, while data recently released by a number of local authorities confirmed a continuation of the downward trend.
In the eastern coastal province of Jiangsu, the number of marriage registrations dropped for a fifth consecutive year in 2021, with a 5.16 per cent fall compared to the numbers seen in 2020 confirmed by the Jiangsu Province Civil Affairs Department.
In the city of Hefei in the eastern Anhui province, the number of couples getting married in 2021 dropped by 4,065, or 6.6 per cent compared to a year earlier, which represented the seventh consecutive yearly decline since 2014.
Compared to a peak in 2014, the number of marriages in Hefei dropped by 41 per cent last year.
In Hangzhou, the capital city of the eastern Zhejiang province, despite a small increase in the number of couples getting married last year compared to 2020, the figure was one of the lowest in a decade at more than 20 per cent down from 2011.