China adviser pushes for lower marriage age to boost births

Stay informed with free updates

Simply sign up to the Chinese politics & policy myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.

China’s top political advisory body will consider a proposal to lower the country’s marriage age to help reverse falling birth rates this week, as more than 5,000 delegates gather in Beijing for the country’s annual parliamentary meeting.

In what is known as the “two sessions”, the advisory body, known as the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, will start its annual meeting on Tuesday, followed by the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber stamp parliament, on Wednesday.

While NPC delegates sign off on Communist party-formulated laws and policies, the members of the CPPCC, which brings together what is known as the United Front — representatives of wider society beyond government institutions and companies — will consider hundreds of proposals from members covering everything from the economy to social issues and artificial intelligence.

One proposal in particular has attracted controversy online this year — CPPCC member, Chen Songxi, an econometrics professor at the elite Peking University, has proposed lowering China’s legal age of marriage to 18 years old from 22 for men and 20 for women, among other measures to increase the birth rate.

China’s population fell for the first time in six decades in 2022 and has declined each year since.

Although Chen’s proposal, which was reported in Chinese media and also included suggestions to increase cash subsidies and medical support for families with children, would bring China into line with many other countries, some commentators said it would not be enough to turn the decline around.

Demographer Yi Fuxian said China’s high legal minimum age of marriage was introduced in 1980 in conjunction with the one-child policy, in which Beijing tried to curb the rapid rise of the population.

He said he had for years been lobbying parliamentarians to lower it back to the “international norm”.

“But even lowering the legal age of marriage to 18 will do nothing to boost the fertility rate now that people have become accustomed to marrying and having children later,” Yi said.

China’s average age of first marriage in 2020 was 29.4 years for men and 28 years for women, and he expected it to follow trends in Taiwan and South Korea, where people were marrying in their 30s.

Online commenters said a more important factor was extreme financial pressure to provide children with an elite education in a hyper-competitive society, which was deterring young people from getting married and having children in the first place.

“What is annoying is that the purpose of lowering the age of marriage and encouraging young people to marry early is to have children for the country,” said one online commentator, who identified themselves as Haitao.

“The subtext behind this is undoubtedly that young people are regarded as reproductive machines, which is a typical thinking of ‘instrumentalizing’ people and treating them as a ‘means’ [to an end].”

Contacted by the Financial Times, Chen said commentators should also concentrate on his other suggestions, which included subsidies for families.

While the CPPCC, whose membership includes top business people, professionals, academics and others, will kick off the “two sessions”, economists will be more focused on the opening session of the NPC on Wednesday, when President Xi Jinping’s number two, Premier Li Qiang, reads the government’s “work report”.

This is a review of the government’s achievements over the past year and its goals for the year to come.

Economists expect Li to announce a growth target of about 5 per cent for the economy this year, seen as ambitious given sluggish domestic demand and higher US tariffs on China’s booming exports.