Chinese women have been delaying wedlock over the past decade
and the average age for a woman to marry is now 24, a research
report has found.
Since 1990, Chinese women have married between at 21.9 to 22.8
years old and the age was 22.6 in 2000, says a report published by
China Youth and Children Research Center, an institution for
helping the government set youth policies.
China's economic reform and development has offered
unprecedented opportunities for women, who can have many goals to
pursue and often are too busy to marry early.
"Today's job market puts higher expectations on one's
professional skills. To get a good job, they have to work extremely
hard to beat their peers in fierce competition," said Liu Junyan, a
research fellow with the center.
"They simply miss out on the prime time for romance and
marriage," Liu said.
Others link the delay to the increasingly open society, where
sex can be openly talked about and young people no longer need to
be married before having a sexual relationship.
"Chinese are becoming sexually aware younger, and more young
couples move in together without making the marriage commitment,"
the report said.
A Beijing survey, cited in the report, shows that 48.2 percent
of the 272 young people polled admitted that they had sex before
marriage.
The report also pointed out that Internet romance had a negative
impact on real-life marriage.
Some have claimed that "a tide" of single people is flooding
society, and labeled the phenomenon the "unmarried crisis".
China has seen a trend of delaying marriage twice before over
the half century since the founding of the people's republic in
1949. The first was prompted by the 1950 marriage law, which set
the minimum age for marriage.
The second, in the late 1970s, was sparked by the return of
"educated youth" who were dispatched during the Cultural Revolution
of 1966 to 1976 to leave the cities for the countryside to learn
from the peasants.
(Xinhua News Agency January 11, 2007)