China's Divorce and Remarriage Rates: Trends and Regional Disparities

China's rapid economic growth and significant increase in divorce and remarriage rates since the early 1980s provide an excellent case for studying the divorce and remarriage patterns in economic transition. Following extremely low divorce and remarriage rates in the 1960s and 1970s, China's crude divorce rate increased from 0.33 in 1979 to 1.59 in 2007, and the percentage of remarriages among the people who married each year increased from 3.05% in 1985 to 10.24% in 2007. Our graphical and econometric analyses based on the most recently available data suggest that the variations in divorce rate and remarriage rate across regions and over time were associated with regional factors, per-capita income, and education level. Also, there was a positive trend in both divorce and remarriage rates across all regions in China over the study period.