Why China’s marriage crisis really matters

New marriages in China reportedly plummeted in one-fifth last year, implying that the official number of births will likely fall from 9.56 million in 2024 to 7.41 million in 2025. Thus, while China represents 17.2% of the global population, it will account for less than 6% of births — comparable to Nigeria.

- Yi Fuxian

Moreover, China’s marriage rate in 2023 is expected to fall to half a billion per year (which is the standard replacement level), just half of what officials predicted in 2016. So alarming is this demographic reality that early this month Chinese Premier Li Qiang announced that the government will be rolling out new policies to boost the birth rate.

But the marriage crisis will greatly undermine these efforts. Marriages already plummeted from 13.47 million couples in 2013 to 6.83 million in 2024 — albeit with some deviation in 2020-24 — owing to the zero-Covid policy. Likewise, the overall marriage rate fell from 9.9 per 1,000 people to 4.3 over the same period, compared to 5.4 in Taiwan and 6.1 in the United States (2022).

Why is this happening? Salient factors include the steady decline in China’s child-bearing-age population; changes in lifestyle; the lingering effects of the (now-discarded) one-child policy on attitudes toward marriage and childbearing; the persistent supply of men; and high youth unemployment.

According to China’s 2020 census, 61% of babies are born to women aged 20-29. But the number of women in this cohort dropped from 111 million in 2012 to 73 million in 2024, and is slated to decline further, to 37 million by 2050.