17-06-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Want to get divorced in China? Good luck getting an appointment
Chinese medical office worker Qin Meng has found a lucrative side hustle: she wakes up before midnight, fills in her clients' divorce certificate applications on a government website, then hits the confirm button exactly at the top of the hour.
Miss it by seconds and the daily slots are 'gone in the blink of an eye', says the 30-year-old, who charges 400 yuan (US$56) for her service, bringing relief to couples who have sometimes spent six months trying for a slot.
Demographers say the emergence of impromptu agents like Qin, who advertise on Chinese social media, is another sign of how the slowing economy is piling financial stress on married couples and contributing to the breakdown of relationships.
China's divorce rate for 2024 has yet to be announced by the country's National Bureau of Statistics, but Yi Fuxian, a Chinese demographer and senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the United States, expects it to hit 2.6 per 1,000 people, against a low of 2.0 during
the Covid-19 pandemic . This compares with the most recent rates of 1.5 in Japan and 1.8 in South Korea.
A couple poses for wedding photos in Beijing. Photo: AFP
