A couple pose for photos with their marriage certificates at a marriage registration office in Shijiazhuang, north China's Hebei Province, Aug. 22, 2023. Many couples chose to get married on Tuesday, which is the traditional Qixi Festival, or the Chinese Valentine's Day.(Photo: Xinhua)

 
According to the Beijing Statistical Yearbook 2023, there were 91,000 couples registered for marriage in Beijing, and 44,000 couples divorced in the year of 2022, both of which decreased compared to the numbers in 2020 and 2021, media reported on Monday. 

Recently, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics released the Beijing Statistical Yearbook 2023. The data shows that in 2022, there were 91,000 couples registered for marriage in Beijing, compared to 114,000 couples in 2020 and 103,000 couples in 2021. In 2022, there were 44,000 couples divorced in Beijing, compared to 82,000 couples in 2020 and 53,000 couples in 2021. 

According to the Hunan Daily, the number of marriages in China has been continuously decreasing, and the age of first marriage has been postponed. Data shows that last year, a total of 6.835 million couples registered for marriage according to the law, a decrease of 10.6 percent compared to the previous year. 

According to the China Statistical Yearbook 2023 published by the National Bureau of Statistics of China, in 2022, the number of first marriages in China came in at 10.5176 million, a decrease of 9.16 percent compared to the previous year, which was also the first time that the number of first marriages was less than 11 million. 

South China's Guangdong Province had the highest number of marriages in the country last year, reaching 573,100 couples, and was also the only province with a total number of marriages exceeding 500 thousand, followed by Henan and Sichuan provinces. 

The number of marriage registrations in China has been declining over recent years. According to statistics from the Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA), the national marriage registration data has been decreasing year by year since 2014. In 2022, the number of national marriage registrations was 6.833 million couples, a decrease of about 10.5 percent compared to the previous year.   

In the first half of this year, the number of marriages in China has shown signs of recovery. Statistics from the MCA shows that the national marriage registration volume in the first half of this year was 3.928 million couples, an increase of 196 thousand couples compared to the first half of last year.