Learn Chinese - Chinese women waiting longer to marry

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Chinese women waiting longer to marry

(china.org.cn)
Updated: 2007-01-17 10:26



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.










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