Trends in the Divorce Rate and its Regional Disparity in China

Abstract

With rapid economic growth, China has undergone substantial social, cultural and ideological transformations over the recent decades. In the meantime, trends in China’s family structure have changed dramatically as well. However, due to data limitations, research on trends in divorce has been very rare in China; especially the quantitative studies at the macrolevel. The literature indicates that despite the very low divorce rate from the 1960s to the 1970s, China’s divorce rate has increased greatly in recent decades, but this increase has been uneven in both space and time. Therefore, this paper analyzes trends in China’s divorce rate at the national, regional and provincial levels. The research results suggest that China’s divorce rate has witnessed a steady and noticeable increase in the recent two decades, with the Crude Divorce Rate (CDR) increasing by 178% and Refined Divorce Rate (RDR) increasing by 211%. Among the four provincial-level municipalities, Chongqing shows strikingly high divorce rates, whereas the divorce rates of Beijing and Shanghai have leveled off in recent years. Among all the provincial level units, the Moslem-majority Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region ranks first, whereas Tibet ranks last.