Cheryl Teh
- Close to half of young, urban Chinese women don’t plan to get married.
- This is according to a survey of close to 3,000 Chinese people aged 18 to 26 conducted by China’s Communist Youth League.
- In the same survey, a third of those interviewed also said they have never been in love.
If you’re a young, city-dwelling Chinese woman, there’s a close to 50% chance you’re planning to never get married.
That’s according to a new survey of China’s young urban population conducted by a wing of China’s Communist Youth League. The survey polled 2,905 unmarried youths living in Chinese cities between the ages of 18 and 26. It found that 44% of its female respondents did not intend to get married, with a sizeable 25% of the survey’s male respondents saying the same.
As for why these Chinese Gen Z-ers don’t want to get hitched, 34.5% of those surveyed cited “not having the time or energy to get married.” Meanwhile, 60.8% of the Chinese Gen Z-ers polled said they found it “difficult to find the right person.”
Participants mentioned several other reasons for not getting married, including the financial cost of marriage and the economic burden of having children. A third of the respondents also said they did not believe in marriage, and a similar percentage said they had never been in love.
These survey results are a bad sign for China, which this year attempted to put in place new policies to ramp up its birth rate. The country reported a 70% drop in its divorce rate in the first quarter of 2021 after it put in place a “cooling-off” law, which mandated that local authorities wait one month before approving couples’ divorces. The law was implemented in a bid to boost China’s flagging birth rate by discouraging impulsive divorces.
This May, China also launched a new three-child policy, lifting its previous ban on having more than two children per couple. The scrapping of the two-child policy was the second time in five years that China made a significant change to its population control guidelines. In 2016, the Chinese government reversed its one-child policy, which was implemented in 1979 to suppress the country’s population boom.
This landmark shift in China’s population policy this year came after reports that it had recorded its slowest population growth rate since the 1950s. These numbers were revealed in its once-in-a-decade population census, which noted that the average annual growth rate of the Chinese population declined to 0.53% during the last ten years – down from 0.57% between 2000 and 2010.
However, Chinese millennials Insider spoke to in June said that the three-child policy was unlikely to have its intended effect. They told Insider that the high cost of raising children, coupled with their fast-paced “9-9-6” lifestyles (where people work 12 hours a day from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week) were what deterred them from starting families of their own.
China’s total population still stands at 1.41 billion people, though Reuters reported that it missed a target it set in 2016 to get to 1.42 billion people by 2020.
Read the original article on Insider
