Divorce trends in China across time and space: an update

ABSTRACT

Despite much attention paid to the surging divorce rate in China, knowledge on divorce patterns and trends at the subnational level is still very limited. This study aims to systematically explore social and economic factors affecting divorce trends between 1990 and 2015 at the provincial level from a tempo–spatial perspective. Traditional fixed effects panel regression and fixed effects spatial autoregression are adopted. Divorce maps demonstrated great variations in the levels and trends of divorce across provinces, highlighting the spatial diversities obscured in the national divorce trend. It is further revealed that factors such as economic development, urbanisation, and employment have augmented their influence over time. Factors that reflect gender equality issues such as the gender gap in education, employment, and sex ratio at birth have different effects across the East, Central and West regions in China. These findings provide insights into the future prospects of divorce in China.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• divorce rate
• province
• gender equality
• socioeconomic
• tempo–spatial

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Queen contiguity is a criterion to define neighbouring spatial units. According to this criterion, any spatial unit sharing a common edge or a common vertex will be identified as a neighbour.

2 The three regions were classified by the Chinese government based on geographic location and the economic development level.

3 Migrant couples can apply for divorces through the local courts if either the husband or the wife or both have lived in the local place for at least 1 year.

4 Married couples can register for divorces at the local Civil Affairs Bureau if either the husband or the wife has the local hukou. If both of them do not have the local hukou, then they are not eligible to register for divorce at the local Civil Affairs Bureau.

5 The house-purchase restriction policy favours first-time buyers requiring them only to place a smaller amount of deposit and pay a lower interest rate. Married couples with one house already can divorce each other to buy their second house as their first individual property and can still enjoy the same benefit.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) under the Grant (FNRS 1.B076.19 for Mengni Chen), the Université Catholique de Louvain Grant ARC ‘Family transformations: incentives and norms’ (for Ester Rizzi) and the RGC General Research Fund (106160261 for Paul Yip).