The 2021 CEIBS piece by Michael Kwan, link below, documents a sharp rise in China's registered divorces: from 2.7 million in 2010 to 4.7 million in 2019 (a 75.5% increase). The divorce-to-marriage ratio reached 50.7% that year, with some north-eastern provinces and cities like Tianjin, Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing higher still. This sits below the historical peaks of places such as the US, UK or France, but while those Western rates have stabilised or declined, China's was still climbing at the time of writing.
The central drivers are modernisation and the rising economic and social autonomy of women, both of which are, treated as non-negotiable features of developed societies.
In lower-productivity settings, marriage functioned heavily as a risk-pooling and production unit. Divorce could threaten basic survival. Once incomes rise, urbanisation proceeds, social insurance expands and markets handle more of what families once did, the material penalty for exit falls. Partners face higher opportunity costs and lower joint returns from remaining married. Kwan notes the relationship is not mechanically linear; Northeast China has had high rates despite lower average development than Beijing or Shanghai, and some studies find income or education negatively correlated with divorce in certain datasets, but the directional pressure from development is clear. Urbanisation, broadband/mobile penetration and a market-oriented mindset that treats relationships more instrumentally all push in the same direction.
This is the classic pattern observed in the West during the post-war decades and in East Asia more recently: the "second demographic transition" in which individual fulfilment, leisure and self-realisation gain priority over the older institutional functions of marriage.
Kwan highlights the gender dimension most explicitly. Rising female educational attainment (and the narrowing of the gender gap in higher education) changes the calculus. Better-educated women have stronger outside options: they can support themselves, and research indicates they are more likely to exit an unsatisfactory marriage and re-partner rather than accept long-term compromise. This is not unique to China. Across many societies, women's labour-force participation and relative earnings are associated with higher divorce propensities, especially in the earlier stages of the transition, because the traditional specialisation gains from marriage shrink. In the US data, women initiate the large majority of divorces (around 70% overall, higher among the college-educated). The same logic applies wherever female human capital rises rapidly.
Because both modernisation (continued urbanisation, technological diffusion, market mentalities) and women's economic autonomy are durable features of developed societies, the pressure on traditional marriage is structural rather than cyclical. In the West the crude divorce rate rose sharply with no-fault laws and female employment in the 1960s–80s, then largely plateaued or declined as marriage became more selective: higher-educated groups now have lower divorce rates, while less-educated groups have higher instability, later or fewer marriages, and more cohabitation. Overall fertility and marriage rates remain depressed relative to the mid-20th century.
China's cooling-off period produced a sharp temporary drop in registered divorces in early 2021, illustrating that policy can slow the flow, but it does not reverse the underlying preferences or economic incentives. Places that still have lower rates (such as Poland, whose crude divorce rate has hovered around 1.5–1.7 per 1,000 in recent years) are not immune; they simply sit at an earlier or different point on the same modernisation curve, or retain stronger residual cultural or legal constraints. As those constraints loosen and female autonomy continues to rise, further increases or persistently elevated divorce-to-marriage ratios are the default expectation, not an anomaly.
The essay's caveats remain relevant: the income–divorce link is messy, media commodification of divorce can amplify trends, and high rates carry secondary costs (fertility, elderly care). But the primary engines: development that reduces the survival value of marriage, plus women's ability to exit, are unlikely to reverse. The developed world has already largely adjusted to the new equilibrium of later, more selective marriage and higher lifetime rates of union dissolution. China is moving along a similar path, with the usual lag and local variations.
https://www.ceibs.edu/new-papers-columns/20503