Divorce Now Acceptable in China as Once-Rigid Standards Dissolve

A 34-year-old woman who works for a foreign company recalls her parents’ reaction when she told them she wanted a divorce. Her father thought she was being rash and would eventually reconcile with her husband. Her mother tried to intervene--becoming upset, angry, even phoning the woman’s husband with advice on how to patch up the marriage.

“My mother really liked my ex-husband, and she thought divorce would not be a credit to the family,” the woman said. “It’s more difficult for old people to accept this.”

She divorced anyway, after five years of marriage. By choosing to follow her heart instead of family advice and tradition, she reflects the modern, more educated, more affluent face of a new generation of Chinese who are rapidly jettisoning old ideas and dogma and embracing concepts once considered alien here--such as the idea that a marriage might be for less than eternity.

“Why stay married if you’re not in love?” the woman said. “Ten or 20 years ago, people stayed together even if they were miserable. They sacrificed for the marriage.”

She is not unusual these days. Statistics show that divorce--once largely unheard of in China or kept as a dark family secret--is on the rise; 10 of every 1,000 couples in Beijing divorce, and statisticians expect one in every five new marriages to end in divorce. The divorce rate in Beijing is officially put at 1%, and most divorces involve the 30-to-39 age group.

The numbers are still tiny by Western standards, particularly compared with the United States, where nearly half of all marriages are projected to end in divorce. But China is taking the rising divorce rate seriously, not only because of the social consequences--such as the increase in single-parent families and the added burden on congested urban housing--but because of what is widely seen here as a breakdown of traditional values.

“The society is developing, and a lot of the ethics the society was founded on are also changing,” said Zhu Jingwen, who works at the Beijing Matchmaking Center, a computerized service that helps unmarried people, including many divorcees, find new partners.

One of the biggest changes is that divorce--once a source of shame, particularly for the extended family--is now commonly accepted. “I would say there’s no stigma anymore whatsoever,” said a 33-year-old divorced man who runs his own business here. “It’s almost become a status thing among some classes, like the yuppies, the urban professional classes.”

“It’s not a sensitive topic anymore, especially in the [Beijing] metropolitan area among young people,” said Chen Yiyun, a sociology professor who runs a family support center with help from the Ford Foundation. “They talk about divorce like they talk about food.”

Researchers and divorced people cite several factors--economic, social and psychological--to explain why so many more marriages in China are breaking down.

A major reason, they say, is economics; in the past, before Deng Xiaoping opened China’s doors to foreign investment and launched an era of prosperity, this was a desperately poor country, and everyday survival was a struggle for most people. Divorce was technically made legal when the Communists took power in 1949, but for the vast majority it was practically impossible, since all family members had to work together to provide basic necessities.

Then, too, families were much bigger--before the government instituted a strict one-child policy as a way of controlling China’s spiraling population. “Having so many children was a bond,” Chen said.

Even though divorce was legal, it was frowned upon by the puritanical Communist leadership. Having an affair or wanting to leave a spouse for a lover was considered a bourgeois concept, and someone seeking a divorce might be demoted in the workplace or banished to a rural area.

“In the 1950s and ‘60s, it was almost impossible to get a divorce,” said the 33-year-old man. “It was almost counterrevolutionary.”

Since Deng’s reforms have created new levels of affluence, however, many such traditions are fraying. The old sense of collectivism is being replaced by a sense of individualism and personal freedom. Women are better educated, working at higher-paying, professional jobs, and no longer need the security of a family structure to survive. In the cities, people have more disposable income than ever before, and some of the old mores are collapsing under the weight of the new prosperity.

The single-child policy also has affected couples’ attitudes about staying together, said Chen, the sociologist. “Now when a couple gets divorced, they don’t have to worry about how to feed the kids; there’s only one,” she said.

China’s most recent marriage law, enacted in the 1980s, has made getting a divorce relatively quick and simple. If there is no disagreement, the couple need only go to the district office where marriages and divorces are registered, fill out a form and pay a fee of about $6.

The 33-year-old man said his divorce was “very, very easy. China is probably the easiest country in the world in which to get divorced.” He said there was no child involved and no argument over assets: “Basically, I just took my shoes.”

Chen said the government should look at making divorce a bit less easy, perhaps by requiring a waiting period and counseling beforehand. But China lacks trained marriage and family counselors. Social work as a discipline was proscribed in the 1950s and was reestablished only in 1988, she said.

“The traditional ideas are too old; Confucius is from 2,000 years ago,” she said. “Nor are materialism and consumerism and individualism the solution to the problems with the family. I hope we can find a common solution--not just for China, but for the global society.”