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China Changing Marriage Law to Increase Birth Rates
In this episode, we delve into China's new policies designed to tackle its demographic decline. We discuss recent changes to marriage and divorce laws, their implications, and how the population is reacting to these changes. We explore the easing of marriage registration, the controversial 30-day cooling-off period for divorces, and the shift in property division laws in favor of the paying spouse. We also touch upon China's broader strategies to increase fertility rates, such as providing financial incentives and lowering the legal marriage age, and analyze their potential effectiveness and social impact.
[00:00:00]
Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. Today we are going to be going into how China is attempting to deal with its demographic catastrophe it's going through, and one of the ways is through changing how marriage and divorce work in the country. And we had seen a tweet that briefly covered some of the changes that they had in this area.
But I wanted to go a lot deeper than this particular tweet into the specifics of how things are changing. How people in China are reacting to it and why they think it might work, ready to dive in, or any thoughts? We go further. I'm intrigued this would happen. We're like, look, people are going to, what's interesting about these changes is I think many red pillars would probably like a lot of them.
So we'll see how this goes. You know, they're, they're not all the worst. Oh, okay. W Marriage registration. The revised law proposed in August, 2024 and effective as of February, 2025 removes regional restrictions on marriage registration, allowing couples to register [00:01:00] anywhere in China without needing to return to their household registration.
Kuku locations. This simplifies the process aiming to encourage marriage amid demographic crises. Now, it sounds
Simone Collins: like marriage before then must have been uniquely difficult one on earth. Is this like needing to return to.
Malcolm Collins: This is actually a really interesting point. So, in China you are like sort of owned by your starting district often and to, to move to a new area, it can be quite difficult and require permission from the central government, almost like changing citizenship.
Yeah, almost like changing citizenship. And if you're like a migrant worker or something like that, you often need to go back to your home area for certain like legal things. What's really fascinating about this is where this relates to religious history. Oh. A lot of people like modern, historians and stuff like this have said that they do not believe that Joseph had to return to his hometown during the census. Because they're like, that doesn't make sense. [00:02:00] How could a Roman census work where literally everyone who had ever moved at some point in their life had to return to their hometown at the same time for a census?
And I think what they're not taking into consideration is one. We see this in other countries like China, even today, basically. Yeah. And two not as many people moved in those types of environments where your legal standing was in large part, tied to where you were born. Probably in the Roman Empire or something like that.
If you moved too far from where you were born, somebody could just take you and say you're their slave, right? Like, there, there, there wasn't a lot you could legally do. So it was quite dangerous. To move long distances during those time periods and try to live somewhere else, unless your job was trading and if you were a trader, you'd have guards and stuff like that.
And it was quite a different thing than just like moving. But anyway, I, I find that to be a good thing. They are loosening bureaucratic bloat.
Simone Collins: 100%. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: China's marriage rate has plummeted with only 6.1 million marriages [00:03
Published on 7 months, 3 weeks ago