It is an age-old truism that growing economic wealth fuels divorce, and China, with its soaring income levels, is hardly immune to this new splittism. It is a torrent of social change that is increasingly upsetting the guardians of Chinese tradition which regards divorce as evil.
Since the Communist Party came to power in 1949, divorce cases have spiked sharply three times. The first time was in the early 1950s when the newly installed Communists denounced the centuries-old practice of arranged marriage, encouraging adults to pick their spouses on their own.
This inspired many men, including Communist officials who had so newly come to power, to divorce the wives that had been arranged for them. Few of these divorce cases were initiated by women because they were inevitably going to suffer economically. The decade of the 1950s saw more than 1.1 million divorces, most of them in the first half of the decade.
The second spike was during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. As major targets of the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Zedong, many party and government officials as well as intellectuals had been denounced as “capitalist roaders,” “traitors,” “reactionaries” or anti-party elements.
In many of these cases, those who were married would arrange for a divorce so that his or her spouse and their children would not be implicated. In other cases, spouses turned against their mates to prove themselves worthy revolutionaries.
During this period of history divorces rose to 1.8 million according to government statistics.
But, while divorces during the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution were mainly driven by dramatic political change, the current spike is rather due to social and ideological changes brought about by the country's economic reform and opening up to the outside world. It is a rise that began in the early 1990s, when Deng Xiaoping proclaimed that to get rich was glorious and which is probably still in its early stage of development. However, this time around, both divorce and marriage are respected as a private matter between the parties involved and should be their own decision.
In an effort to cope with such changes, the government revised the Marriage Law in 2001 and, respectively, its regulation governing marriage (and divorce) registration in 2003. Under the old rules, young couples planning marriage had to get written permission and have their unmarried status certified from their work units before they could file applications for registration. Those seeking a divorce also needed work-unit approval.
Now, couples can largely decide when to marry or divorce, which is no longer the business of any other party or the government. Certainly, the new laws make divorce much easier, which helps explain the climbing divorce rate in recent years. In Guangdong for example, more than 70,000 couples successfully divorced in 2004 - about 50,000 by agreement of the parties and the remainder as a result of court rulings. In 1991, by contrast fewer than 10,000 married couples in Guangdong agreed to their settlements.
The divorce trend is even more evident in major cities. In October 2003, the first month after the new regulation became effective, registered divorce cases in Guangzhou more than doubled over the previous month. In Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, and Dalian in northeast China, for every three registered marriages there was one divorce in that month.
While the sharp increase in divorce appears at odds with traditional Chinese values concerning marriage and family, it should be hailed as progress. To choose your mate - or get rid of one - is a basic human right. From the point of view of human rights and liberty, divorce is progress, giving unhappily married couples the freedom to decide on their own whether they should continue to live together. The latest statistics indicate that mainlanders are increasingly exercising their rights and, one hopes, living happier lives in the process.