UNLIKE SOME of her friends, Kalinda Duan, a 28-year-old woman from Shanxi province, is not opposed to marriage. Having grown up without siblings, she thinks the companionship of matrimony wonderful. But she has one firm requirement of a future husband—he must also be an only child.
No one can persuade her otherwise—“Even if it’s the son of the party secretary of the State Council”.
These attitudes may seem heartless or mercenary. But good jobs are scarce—and a date’s financial standing is important. Economic anxiety will not help China’s marriage rate. For a government worried about the shrinking population, sibling-phobia is yet another headache. Oh, brother.
Though China had a one-child policy from 1979 to 2015, it was never uniformly enforced, especially in the countryside. Only children make up little more than 40% of all university-age students, according to a nationally representative survey in 2019. In the first half of this year 3.3m couples got married, down by 7.5% from a year earlier, and the lowest number on record.
From 1984 a “1.5-child policy” also allowed some rural couples to have a second child if the first was a girl. Contrary to popular belief, only children are not even in the majority among young Chinese today, so they do have the choice.
