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Changes in the Determinants of Marriage Entry in Post-Reform Urban China

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Demography

Abstract

Using population intercensus and national survey data, we examine marriage timing in urban China spanning the past six decades. Descriptive analysis from the intercensus shows that marriage patterns have changed in China. Marriage age is delayed for both men and women, and prevalence of nonmarriage became as high as one-quarter for men in recent birth cohorts with very low levels of education. Capitalizing on individual-level survey data, we further explore the effects of demographic and socioeconomic determinants of entry into marriage in urban China over time. Our study yields three significant findings. First, the influence of economic prospects on marriage entry has significantly increased during the economic reform era for men. Second, the positive effect of working in the state-owned sector has substantially weakened. Third, educational attainment now has a negative effect on marriage timing for women. Taken together, these results suggest that the traditional hypergamy norm has persisted in China as an additional factor in the influences of economic resources on marriage formation.

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Notes

  1. Although the legal marriage age in China is among the highest in the world, at ages 22 for men and 20 for women since 1981, many studies have shown that marriage before the legal marriage age has been widely practiced, even during the most recent post-reform era (Guo 1999; Liu and Zhao 2009; Yu et al. 1994). In our data, 12.2 % of men and 13.7 % of women married before they reached the legal marriage age. To be inclusive of all marriages, we define the beginning of marriage risk at age 15 instead of the legal marriage age.

  2. By the household registration (hukou) system, society in Mainland China has been partitioned into two distinct parts: rural and urban (Wu and Treiman 2007). Almost all aspects of life differ between rural and urban areas.

  3. For the late-reform cohort, we restricted the sample to people who were over age 25 in 2005.

  4. First, we pool the three cohorts and estimate the logit model with all the other variables in Tables 2 and 3 and their interactions with dummy variables representing cohorts. Then we reestimate a restricted version of the same model, deleting the interaction between the cohort dummy variables and one particular variable at a time. We obtain chi-square test statistics from such nested models for the null hypothesis that a particular variable has the same effect on marriage entry across the three cohorts. We report the statistical significance of the tests in the last columns of Tables 2 and 3.

  5. We thank an anonymous reviewer for making this suggestion. The legal marriage ages were 18 for men and 20 for women, per the first Marriage Law of China in 1950. They were revised upward to 20 for men and 22 for women in the Amendment to The Marriage Law in 1980. Consequently, we tried different spline specifications by gender and cohorts. For the pre-reform cohort, the spline cut is set to <20, 20–26, 26–30, and >30 years old for men and to <18, 18–26, 26–30, and >30 years old for women. For the early-reform and late-reform cohorts, the spline cut is set to <22, 22–26, 26–30, and >30 years old for men and to <20, 20–26, 26–30, and >30 years old for women. We obtained similar results under the different specifications.

  6. We first derived predicted marriage probabilities by duration and then calculated cumulative survival probabilities, using estimates reported in Tables 4 and 5. We fixed other covariates at the following values: being currently employed in the nonstate sector, not being enrolled in school, having an urban hukou, Han ethnicity, and father having only primary school education.

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Acknowledgments

Jia Yu’s research was supported by a research grant from the National Social Science Fund of China (No. 15CRK022). Yu Xie’s research was partially supported by a research grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71461137001) and the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center, which receives core support from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Grant R24HD041028). We thank Zheng Mu, Xiwei Wu, Yongai Jin, and Ting Chen for suggestions and help on early drafts of this article, as well as the helpful feedback of anonymous reviewers.

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  1. Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China

    Jia Yu

  2. Department of Sociology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Yu Xie

  3. Center for Social Research, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Yu Xie

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Table 6 Descriptive statistics of main predictors for men and women a
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Yu, J., Xie, Y. Changes in the Determinants of Marriage Entry in Post-Reform Urban China. Demography 52, 1869–1892 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-015-0432-z

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