China marriages fall to ‘norm’ in first quarter after active 2023, threatening productivity as population ages

Fewer weddings mean fewer kids and a smaller labour force down the line

China's population

Ralph Jennings

Published: 3:54pm, 18 Jun 2024

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With fewer people in China saying “I do”, the country’s marriage rate fell by 8.2 per cent in the first three months of 2024, compared with the same period last year, further illustrating what is shaping up to be a major challenge to the workforce in the world’s second-largest economy.

China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs logged 1.969 million new marriages from January through March compared with 2.147 million in the first quarter of 2023. The figures track with declining birth rates, a growing number of retirees and an overall falling Chinese population.

Fewer marriages over a longer period would serve to further reduce childbirths and shrink the workforce in a country that depends heavily on manufacturing, said Gary Ng, a senior economist at Natixis Corporate and Investment Bank.

With about 1.41 billion people, China registered 7.68 million marriages in all of 2023, up by 12.4 per cent over 2022 when the pandemic sparked lockdowns, limited people’s mobility and created knock-on economic problems across China.

But marriage figures from the first quarter of this year could indicate a return to the “norm” following the post-pandemic uptick, Ng said.

“Basically it’s unavoidable to see a gradual decline,” he said, pointing to new attitudes among younger Chinese and concerns about the costs associated with raising children.

The number of marriage registrations had already nosedived before 2023. The annual total nearly halved from about 13.46 million in 2013 to 6.83 million in 2022.

Demographers have pointed to a gender imbalance and changing attitudes among young people as key causes. Data from China’s last two national censuses, in 2010 and 2020 and 2010, also showed that Chinese were getting married later in life.

With fewer marriages comes fewer childbirths, meaning a smaller workforce in the next generation – and instead a larger population of pensioners as the current workforce reaches retirement.

“The general consensus among economists is that if the age imbalance goes haywire, that’s something you worry about,” said James Chin, a professor of Asian studies at the University of Tasmania in Australia.

03:23

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An ageing population places more stress on pension plans, Ng added. The government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences warned in 2019 that the country’s major state pension fund will run out of money by 2035 due to the growing number of retirees.

A recent scrapping of limits on the number of children per married couple should help expand China’s youth, Chin said. But he said that a lack of foreign labour, relative to other Asian economies with ageing populations, stands to hobble China’s economic productivity.

Limits on the number of children per married couple were dropped in 2021 in a stark reversal of the one-child policy that Chinese leaders implemented in 1979 to control rapid population growth.

Divorces in China declined by 68,000 cases, year on year, in the first quarter of 2024 to 573,000, the Ministry of Civil Affairs said.