China's millennials are shunning marriage at alarming rates, and it's creating a nationwide population crisis that Beijing can't magically fix

• China's marriage rate is hitting record lows, and Beijing is struggling to stop the freefall.
• As China modernizes, more women are rejecting marriage in pursuit of financial freedom.

He called it "operation warm the older men's beds."

It seemed women in Xiangyin weren't interested in staying in their hometowns and were moving away to build new lives in nearby cities. In the villages they left behind, a host of rural bachelors were worried the world had forgotten them.

Jiang Wenlai of the party-affiliated news site Red Net, felt this was a grave matter. He wrote that it was "necessary" for Xiangyin to adopt new tactics to keep its rural men happy and "revitalize" the countryside.

Enter: "operation warm the older men's beds."

Jiang highlighted a four-pronged solution originally outlined by a local government also fearing a marriage problem. It suggested a blind-date matchmaking service, simplified paperwork for starting families in villages, more high-paying rural job opportunities, and propaganda campaigns promoting "marriage and childbearing" while playing down China's tradition of expensive dowries.

Chinese social media users promptly ridiculed the "operation." They tore into Jiang's argument, asking why Xiangyin's women should be seen as a "solution" for its men.

The outrage may have shut down Jiang's plans to fix marriages, but Xiangyin's population problem underscores a nationwide crisis for China — a marriage rate that's declined for eight straight years to a 36-year low, according to official statistics.

Yet that hasn't stopped China from attempting to ratchet up its marriage rates. Across the country, social commentators and local governments have, like Jiang, publicly blamed the crisis on single women and pushed them toward marriage. Communist party youth wings launched their own matchmaking services this year, helping singles connect via ice-breaker games at official events.

But many women in China say they're no longer interested in tying the knot; they see marriage as a potential roadblock to achieving economic independence. In a Communist Youth League survey of 2,905 unmarried youths last year, 44% of urban women aged 18 to 26 said they had no plans to get married, with 25% of men answering the same.

That, coupled with a gender imbalance wrought by its cultural preference for boys and the enormous cost of raising a family nowadays, has led the country into an era where China's millennials are pursuing the financial freedoms of singlehood despite societal pressure to marry.

Marriage as a financial risk

"My parents and relatives are anxious," she told Insider. "They all think I should have a household at this age. Many, many Chinese people have this mindset."

But Chen, who works as a doctor in a hospital, says she's happy. She owns a 1,000-square-foot apartment in Zhangjiang city, where she sometimes hosts her younger sister and nephews when her brother-in-law is away on work trips.

Owning property is a major sticking point for Chinese millennials considering marriage. Not having the deed to an apartment or house can be a dealbreaker for some couples amid China's surging real estate prices, Insider previously reported.

Still, even though Chen has her own city apartment, she said finding a spouse isn't one of her life goals.

"The norm that people here feel pressured to stick to is that the woman stays home and cares for the family while the husband leaves and sends money back," she said.

"When I'm single, I have freedom. I have more time," Chen said. "The relationships I have, the places I go, I'm not tied down by anyone else. I haven't found a man I would give that up for."

Chen is not alone. Many single Chinese women are concerned that marriage will require them to sacrifice their financial freedom, said Allison Malmsten, a marketing director at Hong Kong-based Daxue Consulting.

"Over the last two decades, we've seen Chinese women become more affluent," Malmsten told Insider. "They're spending more money on themselves rather than just on family. There's an uptick in things like jewelry for fashion rather than for marriage or symbols of relationships, and more women making big purchases like cars or real estate."

"For some women, their life being single is so good and of such high quality, and they know that getting married might risk that," Malmsten added.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Mu Zheng from the National University of Singapore said there's a "double pressure" for women in China to simultaneously be successful career women and devoted homemakers.

"More highly-educated women are delaying or forgoing marriage to stay away from the pressures," she told Insider.

Malmsten pointed to a 2021 survey by Chinese job search site Zhaopin Recruiting, which found that 43.5% of unmarried women respondents were hesitant to get married because they worried it would reduce their quality of life.

Meanwhile, 53.6% of men surveyed said their main reason for staying single was they believed they lacked the financial security to support a family.

Esther Zhong, 40, told Insider her singlehood keeps her free to pursue her career and take overseas postings. The senior finance manager, who's now based in Guangzhou and earns 50,000 RMB ($7,845) a month, previously worked in Sydney and Singapore.

"Many of my colleagues working in international companies, if they have an opportunity to work overseas or in another province in China, they have to think about their family, how to make arrangements for their children," she said.

In the meantime, Chen and Zhong both say they're seeing more female friends and colleagues sticking to singlehood past their early 30s — seen by many Chinese people as a cut-off point for when one should tie the knot.

"Yeah, you might think that when you get to a certain age, you need to turn into a wife or husband or parent," Zhong said. "But have you asked yourself if you're ready to do that in your twenties? To play this role in your life?"

A perfect storm of low marriage and fertility rates, and an aging population

"If you put everything together, just the number of people getting married is not such a big deal. It's the whole package: We have very low marriage rates, very low fertility rates, [and] a population that's aging very rapidly if this is sustained," Gietel-Basten said.

A rapidly aging society has become a population emergency for China — a shrinking workforce, fewer qualified professionals, and millions of elderly in need of healthcare. But while other Asian countries like Japan and South Korea have been working on cushioning the impact of their aging population for years, China only launched its national strategy to address the issue in 2021.

"Compared with before, China is going to see low savings, low labor participation, [and] low fertility," Professor Yuan Cheng of Shanghai's Fudan University told Insider. "No quick-acting policy is available for the government. It is a long, suffering process."

China also has a very real gender imbalance problem. It has an excess of 30 million more men than women, with 111.3 boys for every 100 girls born, The South China Morning Post reported. The natural sex ratio is around 105 boys to 100 girls.

Mu said this is one of the main drivers for a falling marriage rate — an imbalance between the number of men and women in each socioeconomic rung of modern China.

There's a "persistent norm for women to marry up to more socio-economically established men," she said.

Social sciences professor Gietel-Basten said this means that as the average woman in China becomes more affluent, the poorest men in China will start finding it harder to snag a spouse, while the wealthiest women will meet fewer men whom they want to marry.

That gap explains why rural counties like Xiangyin have more keenly felt the hit.

"What happens to these guys at the bottom? In Taiwan and South Korea, they would marry foreign brides," Gietel-Basten said, noting that China is a much harder sell for single women in the region. "But in the case of China, that's not going to be enough. If your husband is a poor farmer in Gansu province, and you're moving there from Southeast Asia, your life is not gonna be much better."

Choosing dogs and cats over children

"Chinese people mostly want to have their own children. They want to have some continuation of their lineage," Chen said. And since it's still verboten in China to have a child out of wedlock, marriage inevitably becomes part of any decision to have children.

"In the English-speaking world, the relationship between marriage and child-bearing is much more fluid," Gietel-Basten said. But in Asia, "you can't really have children without being married. The process is quite linear," he continued.

Zhao Qi, 31, has been dating her boyfriend for over five years. Both work as live streamers and share a 1,000-square-foot apartment in Kunming, Yunnan province.

"I don't think there's much of a need to get married. Mostly we would make the decision only if we want to have a kid," Zhao told Insider. "But it's hard to tell if you're financially ready for it."

China has struggled to entice couples to bear more children, even after overturning its infamous one-child policy in 2016. In 2021, it further relaxed its restrictions to allow families to have up to three kids. And the government made further attempts to boost reproduction with baby bonuses and extended maternity leave. But data released in January shows the birth rate reached a record low in 2021.

"The cost is just so high," Zhong, the finance manager in Guangdong, said. "People want high quality for their children, like with education. But the resources for these things are limited."

Chinese media reports estimate the cost of raising a child until they're of college-age in a big city like Shanghai to be around 1.99 million CNY ($309,025). (In the US, the average cost of raising a child to 18 is $233,610, according to the US Department of Agriculture.)

For Zhao, many of the millennials she knows have adopted cats or dogs instead, which unmarried couples can do without enduring social stigma for getting pregnant out of wedlock.

"They want to have the happiness of raising a child, but they may not be ready for the financial responsibility to pay for the kid's needs, like if they get sick and need treatment, or when the cost of living is high," she said. "I think most young people don't have the capacity to do that."

Finding China's solution

"The age of marriage is increasing. This happens all over the world. The age at which your parents would have married, when their parents would have married, probably would be much earlier than the age that you and your friends might marry," Gietel-Basten said.

World Bank data shows that the global average age of marriage jumped by one year from 1995 to 2015. And from the 1950s to 2021, the average age of newlyweds in the US rose from 20 to just over 28 for women and from 24 to 30 for men.

So as China becomes more modern, the nation is starting to "catch up" to that postponement of marriage, driving the marriage rate even lower, Gietel-Basten said.

China also exited a phase when it had a sky-high marriage rate, Yuan said. "China had a very high marriage rate in history, maybe the highest in the world, which was very China, but definitely not normal, at least to some degree," he said. The country's number of marriages had climbed to a peak of 23.8 million in 2013, before diving consistently lower each year.

"It is correct if we say the marriage rate in China is plummeting if we use old China as the reference. But, if we use Singapore, Japan, or South Korea as the reference, China is converging at the normal rate," Yuan added.

To his point, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan recorded 5.2, 4.2, and 4.3 marriages per 1,000 people in 2020, respectively. On the other hand, China reported 5.8 marriages per 1,000 people in 2020, down from 9.9 in 2013.

The inevitability of China's falling marriage rate means it will have to dive deeper than matchmaking to repair the core issues surrounding why people won't tie the knot, Gietel-Basten said.

"You need to go back to the things that have made marriage rates so low," he said. "If women are feeling: 'This is such a bad move for my career or my life that I'm going to push it back as long as possible,' then maybe that's a symptom of other challenges, blockages, or malfunctions in society."

Yuan pegs the issue on "unhealthy urbanization" in China, which he said favors acquiring wealth over living well. "The falling marriage rate is only part of China's sad story of its 'shining and grand' urbanization," he said.

"The luckiest Chinese can get married, but they cannot get a full-sized married life due to all kinds of stress," he said. "Less lucky Chinese need to compromise more, like delaying their marriage, like getting married but living separately. The unlucky Chinese may have to surrender marriage altogether."