Valentines not so much: Marriage, babies down

Civil affairs officials in Jiangsu province are calling for more measures to reverse downward trends in marriage and fertility, as the province released new data just before Valentine's Day.

According to the Civil Affairs Department of Jiangsu province, 412,286 couples got married last year — down from the 637,000 couples who tied the knot in 2018. The province has a population of more than 85 million.

Marriages in Jiangsu dropped by 11.7 percent last year, the fifth consecutive year of a downward trend.

The average age for all people getting married in Jiangsu in 2022 was 31.04 — with males at 31.68 years and females at 30.4 years.

Meanwhile, the fertility rate in the country has been on a downward trend for years. Women on average planned to have 1.64 babies in 2021, down from 1.76 in 2017, according to data from the third China Population and Development Forum, which was held in Beijing recently.

The ideal number of offspring for people born in the 1990s and 2000s was 1.54 and 1.48, respectively, while the percentage of women with no children over their lifetimes increased from 6.1 percent in 2015 to nearly 10 percent in 2020.