China's 2005 divorce rate was 2.76 per 1,000 people. But for
2006 the figure is likely to be 1.3 per 1,000. A rekindling of the
initial love felt between two people possibly??
For years the official divorce rate released by the National
Bureau of Statistics (NBS) was calculated based on the number of
divorcees.
To the discomfiture of many in China, the rate was uncomfortably
close to the 3.7 per 1,000 in the United States and higher than the
figure of 2 per 1,000 for Japan and South Korea.
Now, to the relief of many, the true picture will emerge by
basing the figures on the number of divorced couples instead of
divorcees. This is an internationally-followed practice.
According to official figures, there were 1.61 million divorced
couples last year and using the new method of calculation this puts
the divorce rate at 1.3 per 1,000. If the calculations were
extrapolated to 2005, the figure would have been 1.38 rather
than? 2.76.
The statistical correction came about thanks to the tireless
efforts of senior researcher Xu Anqi at the Marriage and Family
Institute of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. For years
she's waged a lone battle to get the "mistake" corrected.
She started to correspond with various organizations such as the
NBS, the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the Supreme People's Court
from the 1990s, but many officials felt the miscalculation wouldn't
cause any problems, she said.
"I strongly disagreed with them," she said. "Based on the wrong
statistics, many sensational research reports came out. For
example, some even suggested that the divorce rate in China had
surpassed that in the United States."
She said that many UN and internationally-renowned research
institutes used the official statistics. This caused a lot of
international misunderstanding about marriage in China.
But her determined efforts have been rewarded and the 2006
Yearbook of Population Studies, to be released soon, will use the
correct method of calculation.
He Feng, a gender studies researcher at Fudan University said,
"Xu's effort is crucial to sociological studies. We always do a lot
of horizontal comparisons of statistics between China and other
countries. We should live up to global standards."
(China Daily January 26, 2007)