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Divorce Trending to Rise in China
Since the enforcement of the Marriage Law on January 1, 1981, the circumstance of divorce cases can be divided into two phrases in the past 20 years: the first phrase (1980-90), saw an average annual growth of 11.6 percent, and the second phase (1991-99) an annual growth of 4.4 percent, without obvious major ups and downs. The development of divorce has the following characteristics:
Divorce cases decrease by an annual 1 percent in terms of proportion in civil cases. While divorce cases handled by the people's court see a successive increase, its proportion in civil cases has dropped annually.
Most of the divorcing couples engage in lawsuits. In the early 1980s, divorces by agreement are numerically a little bit more than or approximately equal to divorces by legislation. However, since 1983, the number of divorces by legislation has always been higher than divorces by agreement. In recent years, in particular, with a general rise in living standards and relative enrichment of family property, people have often failed to reach agreement on the division of their complicatedly composed family property and go to court for a solution of the problem.
The divorce rate is still lower than the international level. The divorce rate in China which was 1.91 per thousand in 1998, rising at an annual 0.01 percent, but internationally, this remains at a low level and is much lower compared to developed countries.
Most of the divorce cases can be solved within one month. Due to the adoption of simplified procedure and the shortening of judging period, 890,000 divorce cases were solved through the simplified procedure, accounting for 74 percent of all such cases and most of them can be solved within one month.
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