Marriages down 6% while divorce rate rises

Over 98,000 couples tied the knot in Shanghai last year, a decrease of 6.09 percent from a year earlier, local civil affairs authorities announced yesterday.

A total of 61,700 couples divorced in the city last year, a rise of 4.58 percent from 2018, according to the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau.

Among the 98,700 couples who said “I do” last year, 1,300 were cross-border, or locals marrying people from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, as well as overseas Chinese and foreigners, compared with 1,400 in 2018.

The Pudong New Area, Minhang and Yangpu districts had the largest number of marriage registrations last year.

A total of 39,951 marriage registrations last year involved cross-city marriages, and 43.69 percent of those were Shanghainese tying the knot with residents in other cities in the Yangtze River Delta region, namely in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui provinces, the bureau said.

The marriage rate was 6.78 per 1,000 with Shanghai hukou, or registered residency, last year, compared with 7.21 in 2018.

The divorce rate was 4.24 per 1,000 in 2019, compared with 4.04 percent the previous year, according to the bureau.

Among those who broke up last year, 6,800 couples resorted to courts.

The bureau released the figures on the 70-year anniversary of the release of China’s marriage law, which came into effect on May 1, 1950.

Over the past 70 years, 7.61 million couples have tied the knot or divorced in Shanghai, with the marriage peak of 290,700 couples in 1981, according to the bureau.

The city’s divorce rate was stable over the past 14 years, ranging between 3.32 and 5.71 per 1,000 annually.