Divorce trends in China – Contrasting adults’, sons’ and daughters’ perspectives

Juho Härkönen , European University Institute
Zhiqiang Liu, Zhejiang Academy of Social Sciences

We analyse divorce in China from adults’, sons’ and daughters’ perspectives. Recent findings from Europe (Kalmijn and Leopold, 2021) have highlighted adults’ and children’s different experiences of the separation surge: separations experienced by adults have increased much more than parental separations experienced by children. To analyze whether similar patterns can be found in China, which has experienced a huge increase in divorce rates since the 1980s, we used data from China Family Panel Studies (CFPS). In addition to adults and children’s perspectives, we contrast sons’ and daughters’ perspectives, given Chinese families’ son preferences that show in sex-selective abortion, parity progression depending on the sex of the previous child, and a suppression of divorce rates among families with sons. Using event history regressions, we find that similarly to many European countries, adults’ divorce rates are higher and have increased more than children’s rates of experiencing parental divorce. These differences are particularly visible in less educated families. We also find that conditional on family size, sons experience less parental divorce than daughters. However, this sex difference is countered by daughters’ larger sibship sizes, which dampen divorce rates, so that the average son and daughter are equally likely to experience parental divorce.

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 Presented in Session 84. Union Trajectories, Separation and Divorce