Should the legal marriage age be lowered?

Editor's Note: Wang Liping, a law professor, has sparked an online debate by proposing in an article that China lower the legal marriage age. Two experts share their views on whether the legal marriage age should be lowered with China Daily's Yao Yuxin. Excerpts follow:

Not so easy to raise the fertility rate

An article written by Wang, a professor of law at Shandong University, in Guangming Daily proposing that China's legal marriage age for men and women be reduced from 22 years and 20 years to 20 and 18 years has sparked controversy online.

As many netizens have argued and contrary to what Wang may believe, lowering the legal marriage age will not boost the country's fertility rate. For example, in 1990 the average age of Chinese women tying the knot for the first time was 21.7 years, which increased to 25.7 years in 2017 despite the legal marriage age for women being 20, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

The rising divorce rate has coincided with a decline in the marriage rate, which was 0.72 percent last year, the lowest in the past decade. Therefore, by just lowering the legal marriage age, we cannot expect to change the views of most young men and women on having children.

Data show that an average Chinese couple prefer to have one child, and many couples opt to not have any children at all. Due to the hectic lifestyle and increasing work pressure today, couples are left with less and less time to raise more than one kid. And given the rising cost of living and very high property prices, a man alone cannot support a family, which means the wife cannot afford to stay at home to take care of kids.

Also, since maternity leave means a break in service and could hinder a woman's career development, some women with higher education and relatively high income give up the idea of having more than one child.

Therefore, to raise the country's fertility rate, we need to loosen restrictions and allow people to have more babies to make up for the demographic gap created by those who want just one child or no child at all. For instance, more crèches should be established to relieve the pressure on working mothers, and since scandals of kids' abuse in kindergartens have been exposed in recent years, supervision of kindergartens should be strengthened to instill more confidence in parents that their kids are safe.

The government should also take measures to encourage more couples to have two children, for example, by expanding the nine-year compulsory education to the high school level, and offering more subsidies for college students.

But it is very difficult to persuade those couples that have decided to have no children or just one child to have two kids, particularly because people had been told for three decades that a family of three is an ideal family.

Li Jianmin, a professor of demography at the Institute of Population and Development, Nankai University

A lower legal marriage age can boost the fertility rate

China's legal marriage age, both for men and women, is high compared with those in other countries. To control the population size and in tune with the one-child policy, the Chinese government raised the legal marriage age by two years in the marriage law of 1980 from that of 1950. But with an increasing aging population, the government could consider lowering the legal marriage age－particularly after it announced in 2015 that all couples can have two kids.

The lowering of the legal marriage age would also lower the average age of first marriage for couples, and could therefore boost the fertility rate.

Besides, the lowering of the legal marriage age will better protect the rights of women and children in some rural areas, as some women in rural areas get married below the legal age, but their children can't be registered as household members simply because the marriages are not protected by law.

In fact, there is no need to overemphasize that the fertility rate needs to be raised. In many parts of the world, the fertility rate is declining perhaps because of economic and social development.

Worries about the shrinking of the workforce should also be eased as machines and artificial intelligence technology can be used to do repetitive work of low value.

Li Yinhe, a sociologist and sexologist based in Beijing

The views don't necessarily represent those of China Daily.