Divorce rate in China increased by 3.9 percent in 2014 over the previous year, with 3.63 million couples going their separate ways, according to the latest data released by the Ministry of Civil Affairs. The rate has been rising for 12 consecutive years since 2003.
Among the couples filing for divorce, 40 percent of them took the step after married for just three years.
Statistics when broken down also reveal that the couples born in the 1980s constitute the main part of the divorced. The retired star hurdler Liu Xiang's divorce sparkled a heated debate among the Internet users just days ago. Liu was born in 1983.
Most couples born in the 1980s were pampered when they were young as they were their only child, so they have problems in tolerating and adjusting with their other half said Fang Xiaoyi, head of the Institute of Developmental Psychology in Beijing Normal University.
Some also claimed that they are not surprised by the high divorce rate among couples born in the 1980s.
Most couples born in the 1960s and 1970s are now aged between 45 and 55 and their marriage has tested the ups and downs of life, so most of their attention now is on taking care of parents and children, while couples born in the 1980s are now aged only between 26 and 35 and have just started their marital life, so they face the daunting pressure of getting along with their spouses and also taking care of their families.
As a result, it's natural that many divorcees are couples born after 1980 given that most of those born after 1990s haven't started their marriage yet, according to a comment piece in China Youth Daily.
Another major contributor to the high rate may be that improved legal system makes divorce a lot easier. After its revision in 2003, China's new marriage registration regulation simplified the divorce procedures and reduced its cost, which led to a hike in divorce rate in 2004 with 1.665 million couples choosing to divorce that year.
Additionally, the emergence of fake divorce in recent years in exchange for more benefits such as demolition compensation, more homes or evading the husband-and-wife common debts may also account for the rising divorce rate. Statistics show that 14,574 more couple were divorced in 2010 in the eastern city of Nanjing than the previous year after house purchase restrictions took effect in October of 2010 capping the maximum number of houses a couple can own.
Besides, modern people have high expectations and more emotional demands for marriage, but fail to develop more skills to bridge the long-existing communication gap between women and men as articulated in the book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. Adding that women are becoming more independent financially and the society is also becoming increasingly tolerant of divorcees. More unhappy couples choose to divorce to give themselves a second chance at happiness.
The steadily rising divorce rate is not something unique to China. Data released by Japan's Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare in early 2015 showed that the divorce rate in the country was 1.77, or 1.77 out of 1,000 couples, taking the sixth spot and just ahead of Italy, which had 0.91 rate. The other top six countries were Russia, the US, Germany, Britain and France with the divorce rate of 4.5, 3.6, 2.19, 2.05 and 1.97 respectively.
What's more, high divorce rate doesn't necessarily mean modern people lose faith in marriage because though many choose to remarry, governments rarely keep track of the remarriage rate.
