Taking 218 years as an example, China's crude divorce rate in 2018 was no more than 3 per thousand.

The crude divorce rate is the ratio of the annual number of divorces to the total population. The fine divorce rate, on the other hand, is the ratio of the annual number of divorces to the population of married women, which excludes the population of young women under marriageable age. Due to the difficulty of conducting a large-scale census in China, the National Bureau of Statistics and the Civil Affairs Department have in the past years customarily used the number of divorces per year as the numerator divided by the average annual population.

The calculation is as follows: the number of divorces per 1,000 people over a given period of time, or by the year given. The denominator is the total population and the numerator is the number of divorces, expressed as a percentage in thousands. It is calculated as follows: divorce rate in a given year = (number of divorces in a given year/average total population in a given year) x 1,000 per 1,000

In fact, in terms of the correct divorce figures alone, China's crude divorce rate has risen from 2 per 1,000 to 3.2 per 1,000 year on year since 2010 to 2017. However, the number of divorce registration pairs in 2018 was about 3.8 million pairs, down 13 percent year-on-year from the previous year (about 4.37 million pairs), so, according to the official calculation method, the crude divorce rate in 2018 will be no more than 3 per 1,000, but rather down from the previous year.

Therefore, a record low marriage rate does not mean a record high divorce rate, and there is no direct causal relationship between the two, whether analyzed at the level of age-appropriate demographics, or socio-economic factors, or transmutation of family concepts.

Expanded information:

So why did the general public come up with the data that the divorce rate is as high as 38%? The methodology is simple: it is widely believed that the divorce rate is measured by the ratio of the number of divorces registered to the number of marriages registered. This is actually a "switcheroo", mistaking the ratio of divorces to marriages for the divorce rate, which encompasses completely different statistical extrapolations and projections.

The divorce ratio is used to compare the number of divorces with the number of marriages over the same period of time, and the divorced in the numerator are not necessarily the same as the married in the denominator and are largely unrelated, so an increase in the divorce ratio is not necessarily indicative of a significant increase in the divorce rate.

People's Daily News - Divorce rate as high as 38%? Not accurate! Marriage big data actually triggered "social anxiety