Jean Reno seems to speak the truth in Couples Retreat when he says "a marriage is not a timeless agreement". Many people say marriage is the grave of love, and divorce, a freedom from that grave. It could be true of Chinese society today, if the media reports on the "increasing divorce rate" ever since the Ministry of Civil Affairs issued the quarterly figures in late April to be believed.

Statistics show China's civil affair organizations dealt with 465,000 divorce cases in the first quarter of this year, or an average of more than 5,000 cases a day and a 17.1 percent rise year-on-year. But statistics can be misinterpreted and thus misleading.

The media say the divorce rate hit 14.6 percent in the first quarter of 2011, and has been rising for "seven consecutive years", from 2002 to 2009, with most of them questioning the future of conjugal relationship in China, which used to be strong and lasting.

But the quarterly data are not enough to predict the divorce rate for the whole of 2011, let alone the trend, says Chen Yijun, a sociology expert with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The divorce rate tends to increase in certain periods, Spring Festival, for example, which falls in the first quarter, when conjugal conflicts are likely to intensify, says Luo Huilan, an expert with the Chinese Association of Marriage and Family Studies, affiliated to the All-China Women's Federation.

Many media reports confuse readers by mixing two measures of the divorce rate. The ratio 14.6 percent in the quarter reflects the current divorce-marriage ratio comparing the number of divorces and marriages in a given period. But to say that the divorce rate has increased for "seven consecutive years" would mean that the crude divorce rate, the number of divorces every 1,000 persons, has increased. The crude divorce rate increased from 0.9 per 1,000 persons in 2002 to 1.85 per 1,000 persons in 2009 to 2 per 1,000 persons last year.

Present in the Ministry of Civil Affairs' annual report and even the United Nations demographic yearbook, the crude divorce rate gives an overview of marriage in a country or region. But it fails to reflect the true divorce trend in a country or region because it includes too many "outside" elements such as children not of marriageable age, says Chen, who has been following China's divorce rate for nearly three decades.

Chen argues that because of the family planning policy the marriage growth rate dropped in the late 1990s when the first single-child generation reached marriageable age. The marriage growth rate began declining, but divorce growth rate increased. That created an impression among people that marriages in China were getting increasingly unstable.

The number of marriageable age people is not increasing at the natural growth rate in China because of the family planning policy and, hence, its divorce-marriage ratio cannot and should not be compared with other countries', Chen says. For the same reason, it's not possible to predict the divorce trend. To do so with precision, we have to wait for a few more decades.

Chen Xiaomin, a professor of sociology at the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, however, says the family planning policy does not directly relate to the trend but the generation born under the policy does.