Postponement and Recuperation of First Marriage of Chinese Women

Jingyi Dan , Xi’an Jiaotong University
Quanbao Jiang, Institute for Population and development Studies, Xi'an Jiaotong University

Whether the Chinese women who have delayed marriage will eventually marry or remain unmarried is one issue that deserves attention.Using the use 2010 Chinese census and 2000 china census in Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, we calculated the differences in cumulative frequency of first marriage between benchmark and observation cohort to analyse the postponement and recuperation of first marriages among cohorts. Hernes model was further used to fit incomplete cohort data and reanalyse the postponement and recuperation of first marriage. With the 1950 birth cohort used as benchmark, analysis showed that the first marriage of women in 1930-1975 cohorts was consistently delayed. The marriage postponement among the 1955 and 1975 cohorts were serious, and the marriage recuperation became more protracted in 1975 cohort. However, the proportion of never married women in every cohort remained low, and marriage postponement was completely recuperated after the age of 40. The conclusion is that Chinese women are still universally married.

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 Presented in Session P1. Poster Session Fertility, Family and the Life Course