China & Divorce 中国与离婚状况

"Divorce is not accepted by Chinese traditional ideology. Consequently, divorce rate was
extremely low in China in contrast to the Western countries and other developing countries.
Table 4 shows that the divorce rate (number of the divorcees divided by total population aged 15 and above) was still less than 1 per thousand in the mid 1980s. However, this rate has been going up quickly and steadily. In the ten years from 1985 to 1995, the divorce rate was doubled. Since the early 1990s, the number of new marriages decreases significantly, while the number of divorce increased continuously from 457,938 pairs in 1985 to 1,201,541 pairs.
The newly promulgated “Marriage Law” in 2001 lowers the pre-condition for divorce which
will inevitably help to bring about more divorces. Moreover, among the new marriages, the
proportion of remarriage increased from 3% in 1985 to about 6% in 1999. A survey conducted
in 6 major cities shows that 77.4% of 2719 urban residents believe that divorce will become
easier in the future (Wang and Ling 2002). To some extent, in a monogamy system, there is
increasing number of people accomplishing polygamy by experiencing more marriages, while
others practice extra-marital sexual relationship. From either point of view, marriage in China is becoming less stable and the partnership is changing in diversified directions."

Source: "Has China Completed Demographic Transition?"
by Jiang Leiwen
Institute of Population Research
Peking University
Beijing