China's Ministry of Civil Affairs has urged its local organs to speed up the establishment of a standardized digital marriage registration system in each of the country's provinces, aiming to form a national database by end of this year to help prevent fraudulent multiple marriages.

Addressing a meeting regarding the establishment of the registration system in east China's city of Huangshan, Zhang Mingliang, director of the ministry's social affairs department, called for comprehensive efforts to connect provincial marriage databases with the ministry's national system.

According to officials, the creation of the database will help to catch people who have attempted to marry multiple times by tracking their real identities and marital status information.

Marriage registration databases in the cities of Beijing and Shanghai and the provinces of Shaanxi, Hebei, Hainan and Jiangxi have already been linked to the civil affairs ministry's marriage registration system.

China has seen a surge in marriage fraud in recent years. In some cases, people have used forged identification to marry several different people in order to obtain wedding gifts.

In some regions of China, marriage registrations are handled manually or kept on a single computer.