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24-09-2023
BEIJING: China’s equivalent of Valentine’s Day, known as the Qixi Festival, has traditionally been considered an auspicious time for Chinese couples to get married.
Celebrated annually on the seventh day of the seventh month in the Chinese lunar calendar, Qixi is a celebration of romantic love between the star-crossed lovers Zhinu and Niulang in Chinese mythology.
Aiming for a romantic display on a romantic day, a marriage registration office in the city of Mianyang in Sichuan Province decided to livestream the marriage registration ceremonies during this year’s festival which fell on August 22.
There was just one problem. Very few couples turned up to get married, according to those watching.
The livestream was eventually interrupted.
Instead of a largely empty marriage registration hall, the online audience was offered picturesque views of Mianyang city.
Local city authorities later denied reports that hardly any marriages were registered on the special day. By then it was too late.
The empty marriage registration hall in Mianyang had become a trending topic on China’s social media platforms and a symbol of China’s declining marriage rates.
Officials’ figures show that marriage rates are plummeting in China despite government policies to promote couples marrying and Chinese society’s traditional expectations regarding matrimony.
The number of people getting married fell from approximately 13.5 million couples annually in 2013 to approximately 6.8 million last year.
Figures indicate that people in China are also getting married later, divorce rates are rising, and the number of people choosing to remain single is growing.
Young Chinese people say they find marriage to be incompatible with their modern lives.
“Marriage is kind of dying in China,” 26-year-old Yu Zhang from Shanghai told media.
Zhang, a laboratory technician, has been together with his girlfriend for two years and they have often talked about marriage, but they always arrive at the same conclusion: “The thought of getting married makes us more stressed than happy.”
They associate marriage with the union of two families as well as buying a home and starting a family and, right now, those three goals seem unrealistic. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
