For the first khbrknews in about a decade, the number of marriages in South Korea last year increased from the previous year, according to data revealed by the country’s statistics office on Tuesday. The same thing occurred in China, according to data released earlier this month by the country’s civil affairs ministry.
The upticks were slight: in South Korea, 193,657 couples wedded in 2023, a 1% increase from 2022 and the first increase since 2011; while in China, 7.68 million couples tied the knot by late 2023, up about 847,000 from late 2022, and the first increase since 2013. But while some people may have been hopeful that this apparent shift could turn the tide for each country’s demographic misfortunes, as they suffer from declining birth rates and aging populations, in reality, the data only reinforces a broader downtrend, analysts say.
In South Korea, a government official said in a briefing that couples delaying nuptials due to the COVID-19 pandemic may have caused the rise in marriages in 2023. Meanwhile, independent Chinese demographer He Yafu pointed in a blog post to five reasons marriages have declined over the past decade—a declining youth population, more men than women among the marriage-aged cohort, the average age of first marriages being delayed, marriage costs growing too high, and more young people simply choosing not to get married as attitudes change—all of which persist, and one reason why they rose last year: “Many young people postponed marriage due to the impact of the epidemic from 2020 to 2022. As the epidemic gradually ends, the wedding economy has rebounded significantly.”
Stuart Gietel-Basten, professor of social science and public policy at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, tells TIME that marriage still looks to be on a downward trend in Asia. “What we’ve actually seen is kind of a constant decline, but then that decline was accelerated during COVID,” he says. “It’s not as if there’s been some…
