POST CORONA CHINA -Marriage Rate Very High in Wuhan -Divorce Number Down in Country

Wuhan, the Chinese city at the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic, emerged from its 76-day lockdown period last Wednesday. As the city begins to wake up from its slumber, it seems that couples are eager to celebrate the return to normalcy — by getting married in droves.

Alibaba’s Alipay marriage registration app saw a 300% increase in marriage application rates after the lockdown was lifted. According to Alipay’s Weibo microblogging account, it even caused the system to become overloaded and freeze.

The surprising surge comes after marriages in Wuhan were suspended during the months of February and March. Wuhan’s city marriage registration services reopened on April 3rd.

The news stands in hopeful contrast to reports of soaring divorce rates in cities like Xi’an, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Guangzhou, where some couples ended up with more one-on-one time than they’d bargained for.

Over the last few weeks, trending topics on Weibo — one of China’s biggest social media platforms — and the Quora-like Chinese Q&A forum Zhihu have posed the question: “When you get out of [coronavirus] quarantine, what will you do?”

Without fail, one highly upvoted comment will read: “Immediately divorce.”

While the comment is in most cases assumed to be a sardonic joke, during an unprecedented nationwide quarantine many Chinese couples have indeed been forced to reexamine their relationships in confinement — and to vent their feelings online.

In response to the novel coronavirus Covid-19 outbreak, which reached national headlines in late January, the government implemented widespread self-quarantine and enforced lockdown measures. For the past two months, most of China has been working from home — many of them, for the first time in their lives — ordering groceries to their doorstep with little human contact, and avoiding unnecessary social activities outside of their households.

But as cities gradually return to their normal routine, there has been a flurry of news and discussion about divorces rates rising all over the country, leading many to speculate that there may be a post-Covid-19 divorce phenomenon waiting in the wings.

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