Number of Divorces Declines in China. NewsWire

NewsWire: 3/29/22

• From 2020 to 2021, the number of divorce filings fell sharply in China. The CCP hailed this as a sign that the “cooling off” period the party introduced last year has succeeded. (The New York Times)
  
• NH: According to China's Ministry of Civil Affairs, the number of divorces fell from 3.7M in 2020 to 2.1M in 2021. That's a -43% drop. The CCP is claiming this decline is due to a new policy that forces couples to wait 30 days before signing divorce papers. But I suspect other drivers are having a larger impact. 

• Divorces often fall during economic downturns. When financial uncertainty rises, couples will often postpone divorce until they can afford to live apart. In the United States, for example, divorces also fell in 2020 and possibly in 2021--as they did during the Great Recession and during the Great Depression. (See "Divorces Fell in 2020.”) The typical pattern is that the recession-associated decline in divorce is strongest among low-income households, which strengthens the presumption that it's lack of income that stops couples from untying the knot.
• Likewise, China's economy was slammed in 2020, slowed down YoY in 2021, and may slow some more this year. What's more, China was hit even harder than America by massive regional shutdowns. That's another reason to postpone divorce. When it's hard to meet with lawyers and counselors, it's just a lot harder to push anything through the legal process.
• One other striking feature of China's recent trend in divorce numbers is how the recent huge drop (-47% since 2019) comes after an equally striking rise (+106%) since 2010. These are much vaster swings than anything we have seen in America.
• IMO, we're seeing some of the same stresses hitting marriage as an institution in Confucian societies that we've already described hitting Japan and South Korea. As the social pressure to get married eases, young working women are deciding that they don't have to. And because raising children is increasingly perceived as unaffordable, both men and women are less incentivized to marry in order to start a family.
• Over most of the last decade, these new priorities showed up as a rise in the divorce rate as couples felt freer to get out of an obligation that their parents may have wanted more than they did. Meanwhile, younger couples may have shifted to an alternative strategy: Just don't get married in the first place. Since 2013, the number of marriages in China has fallen -40%. This is partly due to young people not wanting to get married and to the shrinking size of China's marriage-age population. (See “China Releases 2020 Population Data.”)
• Either way, it leads to the same result. The surest way to reduce divorce is to reduce marriage.