(Adnkronos) – In China, fewer and fewer people are getting married, the demographic crisis is worsening, and the latest ‘idea’ is to lower the minimum age to be able to say ‘I do’. This would at least be one of the proposals on the table in view of the start of work on what for the Asian giant is the political event of the year, the ‘Two Sessions’, or the annual sessions of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and the National People’s Congress, which will begin tomorrow and Wednesday respectively. From the economy to artificial intelligence, delegates to the People’s Political Consultative Conference will evaluate hundreds of proposals.
One has turned the spotlight on the Global Times. Chen Songxi, a delegate to the Conference and expert at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, intends to propose lowering the minimum age at which boys and girls can get married in the People’s Republic. Today the ‘limits’ are 22 and 20 years old and Chen would like to move to 18. The proposal also includes incentives for families with children in the country which in 2015 announced the farewell to the one-child policy.
For Yi Fuxian, a demographics expert quoted by the Financial Times, these are policies that would be of little use “now that people have become accustomed to marrying and having children later”. In 2020 in China, the average age for first marriage was 29.4 years for boys and 28 for girls, the newspaper points out.
Not only that. 2024 was the ‘black year’ of marriages, despite government attempts to encourage young people to get married and promote births to counter the worsening demographic crisis. According to data released in February by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, last year in the Asian giant 6.1 million couples registered their marriages, 20.5% less than in 2023 and less than half compared to 2013, when more than 13 million couples said ‘I do’. CNN pointed out how it was the lowest figure since the Ministry began releasing statistics in 1986.
And last year in the Asian giant – official data say – there were 9.54 million new births and 10.93 million deaths. The Dragon is dealing with the consequences of the shrinking workforce (there was a drop of 6.83 million last year in the working population aged between 16 and 59) and the aging population, with over-60s representing 22% of the population (over 1.4 billion people). Official data released in February also speak of a slight increase in divorces: last year 2.6 million couples ended their union, 28,000 more than in 2023.
