Continuity and Change in Mainland China’s Recent Marriage History

The intersection of demographic change and government policy is creating new challenges for mainland Chinese in the marriage market, particularly for men. This has spawned a renewed academic interest in marriage with many studies using current demographic conditions to forecast future marriage levels. These studies forecast a large “marriage squeeze” over the next generation with up to 20 percent of men unable to marry at its peak. Using China census microdata, this dissertation provides historical context for this literature by examining actual 20th century patterns of marriage in mainland China. The empirical results show the relative contribution of marriage market conditions (measured by the unmarried sex ratio) and the propensity to marry (or “force of marriage attraction”) for changing marriage rates. This provides both context and warning for a literature that mostly considers the role of marriage market sex ratios in isolation from likely changes in marriage preferences and patterns of assortative mating. The results indicate the role of marriage market conditions was nuanced over the 1970-2000 period: marriage market conditions may have affected marriage behavior (chapter 5); but they were not responsible for most of the changes in marriage rates across yearly time periods (chapter 4). The results also show that the assumption of static female marriage behavior made in recent studies does not fully fit with the recent past. Women (and men) did modify their marriage behavior and those changes were moderately associated with changes in educational attainment (chapter 2) and marriage market conditions (chapter 5). Most men and women eventually married, but marriage rates changed markedly across periods in ways not well explained by age, education, rural-urban status, or marriage market conditions (chapter 4). Other results show continuity with China’s pre-20th century marriage regime in that long-term bachelorhood continued to be patterned by socioeconomic status (chapter 3) and marriage timing for both men and women continued to show indirect evidence of external pressures to marry and to marry at socially normative ages (chapter 2)