Marriages in China Crash, Portending Deeper Demographic Woes

Numbers of marriages in China dropped to 6.1 million in 2024, an exceptionally steep fall of 20.5 percent from the prior year. The continuing decline in marriage rates likely presages yet further declines in birth rates, intensifying China’s demographic headwinds.

The sharp one-year decline partially reflects unusual circumstances in 2023. Many couples accelerated marriage plans into 2023 in order to ensure their child would be born in 2024: the year of the dragon, an auspicious year for childbirth in Chinese culture. This produced both an artificial increase in 2023 marriages as well as 2024 births.

Even accounting for such statistical irregularities, the declines in China’s marriage rates are extreme. The 2024 numbers reflect a eleven percent decrease from 2022 and a stunning fifty five percent drop from the peak of 13.47 million marriages recorded in 2013. Collapsing marriage rates reflect a convergence of social forces: a declining population of young adults, a darkening economic outlook for recent graduates, changing attitudes towards marriage, and escalating gender polarization between men and women.

The steep decline in marriages likely heralds yet further declines in China’s birth rates. Precisely because social taboos against nonmarital births remain strong in China, just as in the rest of East Asia, marriage and childbirth trends are tightly linked. In the short-term, just as 2024 produced an artificially sharp year-on-year decrease in marriages, 2025 will almost certainly witness a similarly sharp year-on-year decrease in births (since 2024 births were artificially inflated by the dragon year effect).   

But China’s collapsing marriage rate also likely signals longer-term fertility declines. In South Korea, where numbers of marriages declined by some forty percent between 2013 and 2023 (and a fifty five percent decline from “peak marriage” in 1996), the fertility rate has fallen to 0.68 – the lowest in the world. China’s even sharper decline raises questions of whether its fertility rates (reportedly a record low of 1.09 in 2022) might equal or even exceed those of South Korea. Such trends would dramatically exacerbate escalating demographic headwinds facing China, including a declining workforce, unsustainable pension systems, and escalating eldercare needs.