Wedding photoshoots still crowd Beijing's Forbidden City, but fewer couples are actually walking down the aisle. China recorded fewer than 1.7 million marriage registrations in this year's first quarter, down 6.2% from 2024 and roughly half the 2017 tally. It's one more sign of a demographic squeeze that has already cost it the title of world's most populous country, NBC News reports. Couples in China generally don't have children until after they are married, partly due to rules that make it difficult to access benefits or register a birth without a marriage certificate, reports Reuters. Young adults cite "life pressure" from brutal job competition, shaky growth, and poor work-life balance, and some say they no longer feel they need a spouse—or children—for financial or emotional security.
Beijing is pushing hard in the opposite direction. After scrapping the one-child policy and allowing up to three kids, officials have added subsidies, childcare support, and extra leave, and even slapped a 13% tax on contraceptives that experts see as mostly symbolic. Universities are being told to promote "love education," and one in Beijing now offers a four-year degree in marriage services and management. In 2023, President Xi Jinping urged Chinese women to "actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbearing."
But sociologists say rising education levels, especially among women, shifting ideas about family, and a discriminatory labor market are colliding with the party's ideal of the traditional household, leaving China's marriage and birth rates stubbornly low. "Young adults have shifting ideals about what kind of family they want and have shifting ideals about what kind of life they want for themselves," demographer Yun Zhou at the University of Michigan tells NBC. Zhou says the Chinese government's measures "are unlikely to lead to a meaningful rebound in fertility" without a stronger safety net and an "unequivocal commitment to gender equality."
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