In 2024, 1.574 million fewer marriages were registered in China than in 2023 — a drop of 20.4 percent. The number of marriages, which was 6.1 million last year and 7.68 million in 2023, has been falling continuously for 10 years with the sole exception of 2023, which saw about nearly a million more marriages compared with 2022.
The newest data was released by the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs on Feb. 8.
While marriages rebounded slightly in 2023, the previous three years had seen almost all of China under intermittent “zero-COVID” lockdowns ordered by the authorities in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
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In 2019, the year before the lockdowns, China recorded 10 million marriages.
Tellingly, the number of marriages in 2024 was even smaller than 2022 (6.835 million), despite the lockdowns in that year.
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It is also the smallest number of marriages in China in 45 years.
The continued decrease in Chinese getting married suggests that the country’s demographic crisis is only worsening along with the downward economic trend. In January, Chinese authorities published statistics showing 9.54 million births in 2024 —about half a million more compared with the 9 million 2023, but prior to that, the number of births throughout the country had been declining for seven years.
2024 was the Year of the Dragon, traditionally considered an especially auspicious time to have a child.
By comparison, 16.87 million babies were born in China in 2014, and 14.65 million in 2019. The number of births in 2023 was the lowest since the communist authorities began taking such statistics in 1949, the year they seized power.
