- China's cracking down on the custom of the "bride price" to facilitate marriages and boost birth rates.
- The custom can be onerous for some as it could cost tens of thousands of dollars.
China's trying out different ways to boost its birthrate and stem a demographic crisis — it's now targeting a customary practice that requires a man to pay his prospective in-laws a "bride price."
The issue even made it into the ongoing National People's Congress meeting in China. A delegate from the state-backed All-China Women's Federation proposed that authorities look into measures to curb expensive betrothal gifts, the women's rights organization said in a Wednesday statement.
A prospective bridegroom would give betrothal gifts — called caili in Chinese — to the family of his bride in a show of his wealth and sincerity. This tradition of paying a "bride price" has a long history in China and is viewed as the groom's compensation to the bride's family for raising a daughter.
Various provinces in China have recently started actively promoting a halt to what it deems to be unsavory practices.
On January 30, authorities in Daijiapu, a town in the southeastern province of Jiangxi, got 30 single women to sign a pledge resisting expensive betrothal gifts, media outlet The Paper reported on February 8.
In the central province of Hebei, authorities are "reforming" marriage customs, including clamping down on "unhealthy marriage customs" — such as expensive betrothal gifts and vulgar wedding games — People's Daily, the Chinese Communist Party's flagship newspaper, reported on January 19.
Beijing has long discouraged the practice of caili, the state-run China Daily said in 2015. Still, nearly three-quarters of marriages involve the custom of betrothal gifts, according to a 2020 survey of 1,846 China residents by Tencent News.
With 2022 data showing China's population started shrinking for the first time in six decades, state intervention in curbing betrothal gifts has returned with renewed fervor to facilitate marriages and boost birth rates. Having children out of wedlock is culturally unacceptable in China.
The bride price custom has become onerous for some people as the groom's family could end up forking out tens of thousands of dollars in a country where the annual disposable income per person was 36,883 Chinese yuan, or $5,300, in 2022. This is because betrothal gifts — which are typically given after negotiations between the two families — can include cash, jewelry, cars, and even real estate, according to the Tencent News survey.
The financial strain is seen as a deterrent for marriages — especially in rural regions where there are more men than women due to China's one-child policy that was in effect from 1980 to 2015, leading some families of prospective brides to ask for exorbitant betrothal gifts, the South China Morning Post reported in April 2022.
China's desperate for more babies
China is also rolling out other incentives for people to have babies. For instance, the Chinese city of Hangzhou is giving a $2,900 grant to parents welcoming a third child this year. Some other cities are giving almost 30 days of marriage leave to boost the birth rate.
But, it'll likely take more than monetary incentives to get people to have kids.
Many Chinese millennials are not getting married in the first place due to a variety of reasons like costs and personal choices, Insider's Matthew Loh reported in April 2022.
"You need to go back to the things that have made marriage rates so low," Professor Stuart Gietel-Basten, who specializes in population policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, told Insider at the time. "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," he said.