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Asian demography
亚洲人口
The flight from marriage
逃避婚姻
Asians are marrying later, and less, than in the past. This has profound implications for women, traditional family life and Asian politics
亚洲人比过去结婚更晚、更少。这对女性、传统家庭生活以及亚洲政治产生了深刻影响。
Aug 20th 2011 | SEOUL AND TAIPEI | from the print edition
WITH her filmy polka-dot dress, huge sunglasses and career as a psychologist, Yi Zoe Hou of Taiwan might seem likely to be besieged by suitors. Yet, at 35, she is well past Taiwan’s unspoken marriage deadline. “It’s a global village,” she shrugs. “If I can’t find a Taiwanese guy that accepts my age, I can find another man somewhere else.” Maybe—but since she still wants children, Ms Hou is also wondering whether to use a sperm bank or ask a male friend to be a sperm donor. She represents a new world of family life for Asians.
穿着波尔卡圆点裙装（薄而透明的短上衣），戴着大大的太阳镜，以心理医生为职业，台湾人侯宜如（音译）看上去似乎不乏追求者。但是35岁的她早过了约定俗成的台湾社会结婚年龄上限。“这是个全球村，”她耸耸肩。“如果我找不到接受我年龄的台湾男人，我可以找其他地方的男人。”或许这可能。但由于侯小姐仍然想要孩子，她也在想是否要使用精子库或者向男性朋友求助捐献精子。侯代表了亚洲人家庭生活的全新观念。
Conservatives in the West are fond of saying that the traditional family is the bedrock of society. That view is held even more widely in Asia. The family is the focus of Confucian ethics, which holds that a basic moral principle, xiushen (self-improvement), can be pursued only within the confines of the family. In an interview in 1994 Lee Kuan Yew, a former prime minister of Singapore, argued that after thousands of years of dynastic upheaval, the family is the only institution left to sustain Chinese culture. It embodies a set of virtues—“learning and scholarship and hard work and thrift anddeferment of present enjoyment for future gain”—which, he said, underpins Asia’s economic success. He feared that the collapse of the family, if it ever happened, would be the main threat to Singapore’s success.
西方的保守者喜欢说传统的家庭是社会的基石。这一观点在亚洲更为普遍。家庭是儒家道德的中心，儒家认为基本的道德准则“修身”只有在家庭范围内才可以进行。在1994年的一次采访中，新加坡前总理李光耀说，经过几千年的王朝更迭，家庭成为唯一留存下来的传承中华文化的组织。他认为，中华文化蕴含的一系列美德——“学习，学问，勤奋，节俭，吃苦在前，享乐在后”——支撑了亚洲的经济成功。他担忧如果发生家庭解体，那将构成新加坡的成功的主要威胁。
His Malaysian contemporary, Mahathir Mohamad, went further. In a book written in 1995 with a Japanese politician, Shintaro Ishihara, Dr Mahathir contrasted Asians’ respect for marriage with “the breakdown of established institutions and diminished respect for marriage, family values, elders, and important customs” in the West. “Western societies”, Dr Mahathir claimed, “are riddled with single-parent families… with homosexuality, with cohabitation.” He might well have concluded that the absence of traditional family virtues from the streets of London recently showed the continued superiority of Asia.
李光耀的同辈人马来西亚前总理马哈蒂尔•默罕默德（Mahathir Mohamad）则更进一步。在1995的与日本政治家石原慎太郎合著的一本书中，马哈蒂尔比较了亚洲的对婚姻的敬重和西方的“打破现存制度，漠视婚姻、家庭价值观、老人以及重要传统习俗”。他说，“西方社会被单亲家庭、同性恋、非法同居等等现象整得千疮百孔。”现在他或许还可以这样总结，最近伦敦街头的暴力表明西方传统家庭美德的缺失，显示了亚洲持续的优越性。
Asians, in fact, have several distinct family systems. To simplify: in South Asia it is traditional to have arranged, early marriages, in which men are dominant and the extended family is important. East Asia also has a male-dominated system, but one that stresses the nuclear family more; nowadays it has abandoned arranged marriages. In South-East Asia, women have somewhat more autonomy. But all three systems have escaped many of the social changes that have buffeted family life in the West since the 1960s.
实际上亚洲存在若干个有差别的家庭系统。简单来说包括：南亚传统上实行包办婚姻和早婚，婚姻由男人主导，大家庭具有重要地位。东亚的家庭系统也是男人主导的，但更注重小家庭；如今东亚已经抛弃了包办婚姻。在东南亚，女性从某种程度讲具有更多自主权。但是这三个系统都避免了诸多自上世纪60年代以来一直困扰西方家庭生活的社会变化。
In South Asia and China marriage remains near-universal, with 98% of men and women tying the knot. In contrast, in some Western countries, a quarter of people in their 30s are cohabiting or have never been married, while half of new marriages end in divorce. Marriage continues to be the almost universal setting for child-bearing in Asia: only about 2% of births took place outside wedlock in Japan in 2007. Contrast that with Europe: in Sweden in 2008 55% of births were to unmarried women, while in Iceland the share was 66%.
南亚和中国仍然保持着几乎全民结婚，98%的男人和女人都会结婚。相比之下，在许多西方国家，30多岁的人有四分之一选择同居或从未结婚，新婚一半以离异终结。在亚洲，婚姻仍然是抚养孩子的普遍前提：2007年日本只有约2%的新生儿为非婚生。欧洲情况迥异：2008年瑞典55%的新生儿由未婚女性所生，冰岛这一比重为66%。
Most East and South-East Asian countries report little or no cohabitation. The exception is Japan where, among women born in the 1970s, about 20% say they have cohabited with a sexual partner. For Japan, that is a big change. In surveys between 1987 and 2002, just 1-7% of single women said they had lived with a partner. But it is not much compared with America where, according to a 2002 Gallup poll, over half of married Americans between the ages of 18 and 49 lived together before their wedding day. In many Western societies, more cohabitation has offset a trend towards later marriage or higher rates of divorce. That has not happened in Asia.
大多东亚和东南亚国家很少有或没有同居现象。日本是例外，70后的女性中约有20%表示曾与性伴侣同居。对于日本来说这是个很大的变化。在1987-2002年的调查中只有1-7%的单身女性表示和异性同居过。但这同美国比起来可谓小巫见大巫，据2002年的一份盖洛普调查显示，18-49岁的已婚美国人中超过一半有过婚前同居。在很多西方社会，同居的增加抵消了晚婚率或离婚率的增长。这一现象还没有在亚洲发生。
Traditional attitudes live on in other ways. Compared with Westerners, Asians are more likely to agree that “women’s happiness lies in marriage”. They are more likely to say women should give up work when they get married or have children, and more likely to disapprove of pre-marital sex. Surveys by Pew Global Research, a social-research outfit in Washington, DC, show that Muslims in South and South-East Asia are more likely than Muslims elsewhere to say that families should choose a woman’s husband for her.
亚洲传统观念还以其他方式存在。和西方人相比，亚洲人更愿意同意“女人的幸福在于婚姻”，更有可能认为女人婚后或有孩子之后应该放弃工作，更有可能反对婚前性行为。位于华盛顿的社会研究团队“皮尤全球研究”的调查报告指出，南亚和东南亚的穆斯林比其他地区的穆斯林更愿意认为家庭应为女性择偶。
Over the hill婚姻正在衰落，风光难续
Yet, as Ms Hou shows, Asia is changing. Although attitudes to sex and marriage are different from those in the West, the pressures of wealth and modernisation upon family life have been just as relentless. They have simply manifested themselves in different ways. In the West the upshot has been divorce and illegitimacy. In Asia the results include later marriage, less marriage and (to some extent) more divorce. The changes in the West may be more dramatic. But both East and West are seeing big changes in the role of women and traditional family life.
然而，正如侯女士的现象所反映的，亚洲正在发生变化。尽管性观念和婚姻观念和西方不同，金钱和现代化给家庭生活带来的压力同样残酷。只是在亚洲压力通过不一样的方式显现出来。西方的表现是离婚和非婚生子。在亚洲表现为晚婚、不婚以及（一定程度上）离婚增多。西方的变化也许更加激烈。但无论是西方还是东方都正经历着女性角色和传统家庭生活的重大变化。
The first change is that people are getting married later, often much later. In the richest parts—Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong—the mean age of wedlock is now 29-30 for women, 31-33 for men (see chart right). That is past the point at which women were traditionally required to marry in many Asian societies. It is also older than in the West. In America, women marry at about 26, men at 28. If you take account of the cohabitation that routinely precedes Western marriage (but not Asian), the gap between East and West is even larger. The mean age of marriage has risen by five years in some East Asian countries in three decades, which is a lot.
第一个变化是人们结婚越来越晚，往往比过去晚得多。在最富裕的地区——日本，台湾，韩国和香港——如今女性的平均结婚年龄是29-30岁，男性为31-33岁（见图一）。这已经超过了很多亚洲社会传统上要求的女性结婚年龄，还超过了西方。美国的平均结婚年龄是女性26岁、男性28岁。如果你把西方常见、亚洲较少的婚前同居计算在内，东西方的差距更加明显。一些亚洲国家三十年里平均结婚年龄增加了五年，这是一个不小的数字。
The second change is that, among certain groups, people are not merely marrying later. They are not getting married at all. In 2010 a third of Japanese women entering their 30s were single. Perhaps half or more of those will never marry. In 2010 37% of all women in Taiwan aged 30-34 were single, as were 21% of 35-39-year-olds. This, too, is more than in Britain and America, where only 13-15% of those in their late 30s are single. If women are unmarried entering their 40s, they will almost certainly neither marry nor have a child.
第二个变化就是，一部分人群中，晚婚还不算，有的甚至不打算结婚。2010年进入30岁的日本女性三分之一是单身。或许其中一半或者更多将永不结婚。2010年30-34岁的台湾女性中有37%是单身，35-39岁中有21%是单身。这同样高于英国和美国，35-39岁的单身英美女性比例只有13-15%。如果女性未婚进入40岁，她们几乎一定不会结婚或生小孩了。
The Asian avoidance of marriage is new, and striking. Only 30 years ago, just 2% of women were single in most Asian countries. The share of unmarried women in their 30s in Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong has risen 20 points or more (see chart below), “a very sharp change in a relatively short period”, says Gavin Jones of the National University of Singapore. In Thailand, the number of women entering their 40s without being married increased from 7% in 1980 to 12% in 2000. In some cities, rates of non-marriage are higher: 20% among women aged 40-44 in Bangkok; 27% among 30-34-year-olds in Hong Kong. In South Korea, young men complain that women are on “marriage strike”.
亚洲人逃避婚姻是新近才发生的，颇引人注目。仅仅30年前，大多数亚洲国家单身女性比例只有2%。在日本、台湾、新加坡和香港等地区30多岁的未婚女性比例上升了20个百分点甚至更多（见表2）——被新加坡国立大学的盖文•琼斯（Gavin Jones）称为“在相对较短时间内发生的巨大变化”。在泰国，未婚进入40岁的女性比重从1980年的7%上升到2000年的12%。一些城市的未婚比例更大： 20%的40到44岁的曼谷女性未婚； 27%的30到34岁的香港女性单身。韩国的年轻人则抱怨女性“罢婚”。
What is remarkable about the Asian experience is not that women are unmarried in their 30s—that happens in the West, too—but that they have never been married and have rarely cohabited. In Sweden, the proportion of women in their late 30s who are single is higher than in Asia, at 41%. But that is because marriage is disappearing as a norm. Swedish women are still setting up homes and having children, just outside wedlock. Not in Asia. Avoiding both illegitimacy and cohabitation, Asian women appear to be living a more celibate life than their Western sisters (admittedly, they could also be under-reporting rates of cohabitation and pre-marital sex). The conclusion is that East Asia’s growing cohorts of unmarried women reflect less the breakdown of marriage than the fact that they are avoiding it.
亚洲正在经历的事引人注目的不是西方同样存在的女性三十未嫁，而是她们虽然未婚，却很少同居。瑞典30岁后期（35-39岁）的单身女性比例为41%，高于亚洲。但那是因为在那里婚姻作为社会准则正在逐渐消失。瑞典女性仍然组建家庭哺育小孩，不过这是在单身状态下。亚洲不是这样。亚洲女性避免非婚生子和婚前同居，似乎过着比她们的西方姐妹更加独立的单身生活（不可否认的是，她们的同居和婚前性行为的状况也许被低估）。结论就是东亚不断扩大的未婚女性大军与其说反映了婚姻遭到解体，不如说表明了她们在逃避婚姻。
But marriages are breaking down, too. In Hong Kong and Japan, the general divorce rate—the number of divorces per 1,000 people aged 15 or more—was about 2.5 in the mid-2000s, according to Mr Jones’s calculations. In Asia as a whole, the rate is about 2 per 1,000. That compares with 3.7 in America, 3.4 in Britain, 3.1 in France and 2.8 in Germany. Only in one or two Asian countries is divorce as widespread as in the West. The South Korean rate, for example, is 3.5. Because divorce has been common in the West for decades, more couples there have split up. The rise in Asia has been recent: China’s divorce rate took off in the early 2000s. In the 1980s the Asian rate was 1 per 1,000 people; now it is 2. If that rise continues, Asian divorce could one day be as common as in Europe.
但是婚姻还是在解体。根据盖文•琼斯的计算，21世纪头十年中期，香港和日本15岁以上人的总体离婚率是每千人2.5人。整个亚洲是每千人2人。美国是3.7人，英国为3.4人，法国为3.1人，德国为2.8人。只有一两个亚洲国家离婚现象和西方一样普遍。比如韩国的离婚率为每千人3.5人。因为西方离婚成为普遍现象已有几十年了，如今婚姻走向破裂就更加普遍。亚洲离婚率的上升确实是最近才发生的：中国的离婚率从2000年开始飙升。80年代亚洲的离婚率是每千人1人；现在是2人。如果继续增长，亚洲的离婚现象将有一天可能和欧洲一样普遍。
An educated choice 教育熏陶过的选择
The main function of marriage in most traditional societies is to bring up children (romantic love rarely has much to do with it). Not surprisingly, changes in child-bearing have gone along with changes in marriage. The number of children the average East Asian woman can expect to have during her lifetime—the fertility rate—has fallen from 5.3 in the late 1960s to below 1.6 now, an enormous drop. But old-fashioned attitudes persist, and these require couples to start having children soon after marriage. In these circumstances, women choose to reduce child-bearing by delaying it—and that means delaying marriage, too.
大多数传统社会里婚姻的主要功能就是传宗接代（很少和浪漫爱情沾边）。养育后代发生变化和婚姻发生变化相伴相生就不足为奇了。在东亚，女性的一生平均期待育儿数量（即生育率）从60年代的5.3,降到了如今的1.6，跌幅巨大。但是仍然存在的过时观念要求夫妻婚后立即要孩子。在这种情况下，许多女性选择通过延迟生育减轻育儿负担——也意味着延迟了婚姻。
Changing marriage patterns are also the result of improvements in women’s education and income, and the failure of women’s status to keep pace. The salient characteristic of many traditional marriage systems is that women—especially young women—have little independence. In South Asia, brides are taken into the groom’s family almost as soon as they move into puberty. They are tied to their husband’s family. Sometimes women may not inherit property or perform funeral rites (this is especially important in China). In parts of South Asia, wives may not even take their children to hospital without getting their husband’s permission.
婚姻模式的改变也是女性受教育和收入状况得到提高而女性社会地位没有相应跟上步伐的结果。很多婚姻系统的显著特点是女性——特别是年轻女性——几乎没有自主权。南亚的新娘几乎一到青春期就要被带入新郎家里。她们被束缚在丈夫家里。有时妇女可能不能继承财产或者参加葬礼（这在中国尤为重要）。南亚的有些地方，在没有得到丈夫的许可下，妻子甚至不能带孩子去医院。
Two forces are giving women more autonomy: education and jobs. Women’s education in East Asia has improved dramatically over the past 30 years, and has almost erased the literacy gap with men. Girls stay at school for as many years as boys, and illiteracy rates for 15-24-year-olds are the same for the two sexes (this is not true of South Asia). In South Korea now, women earn half of all master’s degrees.
两股力量给予女性以更多的自主权：教育和工作。东亚的女性受教育状况在过去的30年里大幅改善，几乎拉平了和男性的受教育差距。女孩入学年数和男孩相当，15岁到24岁的男女两性文盲率相同（南亚不是如此）。如今韩国所有研究生学位的一半由女性获得。
Education changes women’s expectations. Among Thai women who left school at 18, one-eighth were still single in their 40s; but among university graduates, the share was a fifth. A survey in Beijing in 2003 found that half of women with a monthly income of 5,000-15,000 yuan (roughly $600-1,800, an indicator of university education) were not married. Half said they did not need to be, because they were financially independent. South Koreans call such people “golden misses”. “Why should I have to settle down to a life of preparing tofu soup, like my mother?” asks one.
教育改变了女性对未来的期望。40多岁时依然单身的女性，在18岁就离开学校的泰国女性中比例是八分之一；但在大学毕业生中是五分之一。2003年在北京做的一份调查发现月收入5000-15000元（大概600-1800美元，表明受过大学教育）的女性中有一半未婚。这一半人表示她们没有必要结婚，因为她们在金钱上可以独立。韩国人把这类女性称为“金姐”（golden misses）。“为什么我必须安定下来，过着准备豆腐汤的生活，就像我妈那样？”有人这样问道。
Rates of non-marriage rise at every stage of education. Women with less than secondary education are the most likely to marry, followed by those with secondary education, with university graduates least likely. This pattern is the opposite of the one in America and Europe, where marriage is more common among college graduates than among those with just a secondary education.
单身率随着教育程度逐级攀升。中学以下教育程度的女性最可能结婚，中学教育程度的女性其次，大学教育程度的女性可能性最低。这一模式和欧美截然相反，在欧美较之仅为初中学历的女性，大学学历的女性结婚更普遍。
There are two reasons why education’s spread reduces women’s propensity to marry. First, non-marriage has always been more prevalent among women with more education. Now that there are more women in these higher-education groups, there are fewer marriages. Marriage rates are also lower in cities. Since education is likely to go on improving, and urbanisation to go on rising, more women will join the ranks of graduates or city folk who are least likely to marry.
教育的普及减少了女性结婚意愿有两个原因。第一，单身在较高教育程度的女性中总是更为流行。既然高等教育程度的女性增多，婚姻自然也减少。城市的结婚率也更低。随着教育可能得到持续改善，城市化继续推进，更多的女性将加入到结婚意愿最低的高学历者或市民的行列。
Marrying up高攀上嫁
Second, more education leaves the best-educated women with fewer potential partners. In most Asian countries, women have always been permitted—even encouraged—to “marry up”, ie, marry a man of higher income or education. Marrying up was necessary in the past when women could not get an education and female literacy was low. But now that many women are doing as well or better than men at school, those at the top—like the “golden misses”—find the marriage market unwelcoming. Either there are fewer men of higher education for them to marry, or lower-income men feel intimidated by their earning power (as well as their brain power). As Singapore’s Mr Lee once said: “The Asian man…preferred to have a wife with less education than himself.” In Singapore, non-marriage rates among female university graduates are stratospheric: a third of 30-34-year-old university graduates are single.
第二，女性受教育程度越高，其潜在择偶对象就越少。在大多数亚洲国家，女性一直被允许甚至被鼓励攀高枝，即嫁给收入、教育水平更高的男性。攀高枝在过去女性不能接受教育、女性识字率低的时候是有必要的。但是如今很多女性在学校表现和男性一样好甚至更好，那些顶端的女性——像“金姐”——发现婚姻市场不再那么受欢迎了。不是可供交往的教育程度更高的男性减少了，就是收入更低的男性对她们的赚钱能力（以及高智商）感到不安。就像新加坡的李光耀说的那样：“亚洲男人……传统上更愿意拥有一位教育程度比自己低的妻子。”大学以上教育程度的新加坡女性未婚率高得离谱： 30岁到34岁的大学程度的女性中三分之一是单身。
Better education also makes possible the other main trend changing marriage: female employment. Asia’s economic miracle has caused—and been caused by—a surge of women into the formal workforce. In East Asia two-thirds of women have jobs, an unusually high rate. In South-East Asia the figure is 59%. In South Korea the employment rate of women in their 20s (59.2%) recently overtook that of twenty-something men (58.5%). This surge has been accompanied by the collapse of the lifetime-employment systems in Japanese and South Korean firms, which used to ensure that a single (male) worker’s income could support a middle-class family. Now the wife’s earnings are needed, too.
更好的教育也使改变婚姻的另一重要趋势——女性就业——成为可能。亚洲的经济奇迹和一大批女性成为正式劳动力息息相关，互为因果。在东亚，三分之二的女性拥有工作，这一比例非同小可。在东南亚这一比例为59%。韩国的20多岁女性的就业率（59.2%）最近超过了同龄男性（58.5%）。女性就业的热潮伴随着日韩企业终生雇佣制的逐步解体，曾经这种终生雇佣制确保了单个男性劳动力的收入就可以支撑起整个中产家庭。如今还需要加上妻子的收入。
All things being equal, having a job increases a woman’s autonomy. She has more options, and these options include not having a husband. But it is clear from Western societies that women will not necessarily choose a job over marriage. Rather, they will struggle to balance the conflicting demands of work and family.
正常情况下，拥有工作增加了女性的自主权。女性有了更多的选择，包括不嫁人。然而从西方社会就可明确看出，西方女性不一定要为工作而牺牲婚姻，而宁愿努力平衡工作要求和家庭需要之间的矛盾，而宁愿努力平衡工作要求和家庭需要之间的矛盾。
What is unusual about Asia is that women seem to bear an unusually large share of the burden of marriage, reducing the attractiveness of family life compared with work. Certainly, this is what Asian women themselves think. Surveys about attitudes to marriage are patchy and subject to a lot of reservations. But for what it is worth, in a survey from 2011 of Japan’s three largest cities, only two-thirds of wives said they felt positive about their marriage, much less than their husbands; in America, both husbands and wives usually report higher and similar levels of satisfaction. In a survey from 2000, satisfaction levels in Japan were only half those in America. This may be because the readier availability of divorce in America has left fewer people trapped in loveless marriages. Or there may be something in the Japanese caricature of the salaryman husband working long hours and socialising all night and at weekends, while his neglected, fretful wife struggles to bring up the children at home.
亚洲不一样的地方似乎在于女性要承担的婚姻负担比例过于沉重，相对于工作来说降低了家庭生活的吸引力。当然这只是亚洲女性自己这样认为。对婚姻态度的调查中意见分散并多有保留。但不管是真是假，一份2011年关于日本三个最大城市的调查显示，只有三分之二的妻子表示对婚姻感到满意，比例远低于她们的丈夫；美国夫妻的婚姻满意度在调查中往往要更高，夫妻双方意见也更为一致。这也许是因为美国离婚更加容易，陷入无爱婚姻的人更少。或者与日本人刻画的所谓“工资男”丈夫形象有关，日本丈夫白天长时间工作，夜晚和周末都忙于社交，而备受冷落、满腹怨气的妻子不得不在家带孩子。
Whatever the problem, it is not confined to Japan. Illyqueen, a popular Taiwanese blogger, recently ranted about “Mama’s boys” in their 30s who have had “no hardships, no housework, [and who] …have lost the ability to keep promises (like marriage).” If some Asian women do indeed have an unusually negative view of marriage, it might make them more likely to choose a job over a husband, or to put off marriage while they pursue a career.
不管是何原因，这个问题不局限于日本。台湾一位有名博主Illyqueen最近在博客中咆哮：“年过30的‘妈妈的男孩’没有困难，没有家务活……失去了兑现承诺的能力（如婚姻承诺）。”如果亚洲女性确实对婚姻的态度负面悲观，那么她们更愿意选择工作而非丈夫，或者为追求事业而推迟婚姻。
Moreover, public attitudes and expectations are lagging far behind changes in women’s lives in Asia, making it even harder to strike a balance between life and work. Despite higher incomes and education, “women have lower socioeconomic status than men,” argues Heeran Chun, a South Korean sociologist. “Their lives are markedly restricted by the cultural values associated with Confucianism.” They are expected to give up work—sometimes on marriage, often after childbirth—and many do not return to the job market until their children are grown. This forces upon women an unwelcome choice between career and family. It may also help to explain the unusually low marriage rates among the best-educated and best-paid women, for whom the opportunity cost of giving up a career to have children is greatest.
更糟糕的是，公众态度和公众期望严重滞后于亚洲女性的人生变化，要平衡生活和工作就变得更加困难。尽管她们收入增加、教育改善，但“女性的社会经济地位低于男性，” 韩国的社会学家Heeran Chun这样认为。“她们的生活明显地被儒家文化价值观所限制。”社会对她们的期待是放弃工作，有时一结婚就放弃工作，更经常的是生孩子以后，很多女性就直到孩子长大才返回职场。这就给女性施加了一个关于职业和家庭不受欢迎的选择。也有助于解释高学历高收入的亚洲女性结婚率异常之低，对于她们来说放弃职业选择生孩子的机会成本是最大的。
As in most traditional societies, women in Asia have long been the sole caregivers for children, elderly parents or parents-in-law. People generally assume they will continue to be so, even though many women have paid jobs outside the home. The result is that expectations placed on wives have become unusually onerous. Surveys in Japan have suggested that women who work full-time then go home and spend another 30 hours a week doing the housework. Their husbands contribute an unprincely three hours of effort. In America and Europe the disparity is less extreme, and has narrowed considerably since the 1960s.
就像大多传统社会，亚洲女性长期以来就是唯一给孩子、年老的父母和公婆以关怀照顾的人。即使很多女性在家庭之外拥有一份挣钱的工作，人们一般还会希望她们继续如此。结果就是妻子背负的期望变得异常艰巨。在日本的调查表明，全职工作的太太回到家里每周还要花30个小时做家务。而丈夫每周只贡献可怜的三个小时。在美国和欧洲这种差别不那么极端，从60年代以来还缩小了不少。
On top of this, many Asian couples face enormous pressure to ensure their children succeed in schools with cut-throat competition for places—pressure that falls mostly on the mother. Private child care is exorbitantly expensive. There are few state-subsidised crèches (324,000 children are on waiting lists in Seoul alone). And setting up a home is expensive because of high house prices. All this means it is harder to strike a satisfying balance between job and family in Asia than in the West.
另外，不少亚洲的夫妻面临着保证孩子在竞争激烈的学校获得成功的压力，这种压力大多压在了母亲身上；请人照顾孩子费用奇高；几乎没有国家补贴的日托项目（单单首尔就有324,000个孩子在排队等待日托服务）；高房价使组建家庭变得昂贵：这些事实意味着要在工作和家庭之间取得令人满意的平衡，在亚洲要比在西方更艰难。
The lost brides流失的新娘
Not every Asian country is affected by these trends equally. South Korea, for example, has lower rates of non-marriage, and a lower age of marriage, than its neighbours. But the big exceptions are Asia’s giants. At the moment, marriage is still the norm in China and arranged marriage the norm in India. As long as that continues to be true, a majority of Asians will live in traditional families. But how long will it continue? Signs of change are everywhere.
亚洲各国受此趋势影响的程度并非一致。比如韩国的单身比例和结婚年龄都比邻国低。但例外却是亚洲两大巨人：目前结婚仍然是中国的社会准则，包办婚姻仍是印度的社会准则。 如果这种状况持续下去，那么大多亚洲人将生活在传统家庭里。但是它将持续多久？改变的迹象到处都是。
The mean age of marriage is rising in both countries. Divorce is increasing, especially among younger people. In India, traditional arranged marriages are being challenged by online dating (shaadi.com claims to be the world’s largest matrimonial service) and by “self-arranged marriages”, hybrids in which the couple meet, fall in love and agree to marry—but then let the two families fix everything up, as in traditional arranged marriages.
在中国和印度平均结婚年龄都在上升。离婚也在增加，特别是在年轻人中间。印度的传统的包办婚姻受到了网上约会（shaadi.com自称世界最大婚介所）和“自办婚姻”的挑战，这种“自办婚姻”是一种半自主婚姻，双方见面到相爱、同意结婚，但接着让双方家庭来摆平一切，就像传统的包办婚姻那样。
In China, the migration of millions of young men and women from the countryside to cities is changing family life profoundly. It has pushed up the divorce rate because migrant workers return home to find that they and their partners have grown apart. When the husband and wife go to the city together, either they choose not to bring their children with them (since both work full time) or they may not do so, since the hukou household-registration system prevents dependants from joining them. According to a survey in 2008 by the All-China Women’s Federation, 58m children of migrant workers were being brought up hundreds of miles away, in their parents’ village, usually by grandparents. The immediate family is no longer the universal setting for child-rearing in China.
在中国，上千万年轻男女从农村流向城市深刻地改变了家庭生活。离婚率被抬高，因为农民工回到家发现自己和配偶的差别越来越大。如果夫妻双双进城，他们或者选择不把孩子带在身边（因为两人都得全职工作），或者不能带孩子在城市生活，因为户口制度使孩子不能留在自己身边。2008年全国妇联的一份调查显示，5800万农民工子女在距离父母上千公里的农村成长，通常是由祖父母带着。父母直接养育子女不再是中国抚养孩子的普遍模式了。
More important, the marriage systems of both giants risk being torn apart in future by their practice of sex-selective abortion. Tens of millions of female fetuses have been aborted over the past generation, as parents use pre-natal screening to identify the sex of the fetus and then rid themselves of daughters. In China in 2010 more than 118 boys were born for every 100 girls. In India the ratio was 109 to 100. By 2030, according to Avraham Ebenstein of Harvard University and Ethan Sharygin of the University of Pennsylvania, about 8% of Chinese men aged 25 and older will be unable to marry because of the country’s distorted sex ratio. By 2050 the unmarried share will be 10-15%. In 2030, in the two giants, there will be 660m men between the ages of 20 and 50, but only 597m women. Over 60m men therefore face the prospect of not finding a bride. That is almost as many men of 20-50 as will be living in America in that year. This alone will wreck Asia’s tradition of universal marriage.
更重要的是，这两个大国的婚姻系统在未来都有可能面临着被择性堕胎撕裂的危险。父母使用产前扫描技术辨别胎儿性别、打掉女胎，结果上一代人中有几千万女胎被打掉。2010年中国男女出生比是118比100。印度的男女出生比是109比100。2030年，根据哈佛大学的Avraham Ebenstein和宾夕法尼亚大学的Ethan Sharygin所称，由于扭曲的性别比，近8%的25岁以上的中国男性将不能结婚。到2050年不能结婚的男性比例将达到10%-15%。2030年这两个大国将有6.6亿20岁到50岁的男性，但只有5.97亿的同龄女性。超过6000万男人将由此面临找不到新娘的局面。6000万几乎是那时居住在美国20岁到50岁的男性总和。仅仅这一点就将打破亚洲传统的普遍婚姻模式。
Parasites and bare branches寄生虫和光棍
The big question remains: how much is this a problem? And if it is, why? Arguably, the most important thing is that women who do not want to marry are no longer being forced to. And that must be a benefit: to them, to men spared an unhappy marriage; perhaps to society as a whole.
问题仍然在于：这种趋势多大程度上成为一个问题呢？如果它是，那为什么呢？可以论证，最重要的是不愿结婚的女性不再被强迫结婚了。这必须是件无论对她们自己还是对于得不到一个幸福婚姻的男性、或许还对于整个社会都有利的事情。
Against that, there are several reasons for worry, some of them extremely disturbing. Social attitudes in Asia change slowly, and many people think it wrong to remain unmarried. “Parasite singles” is the unflattering term in Japan. The reluctance to marry seems to have unleashed spiteful hostility, an attitude that makes the decision not to wed a tough one.
有诸多对女性单身对自身、男性及社会三者兼顾抱有疑虑的理由，有些还令人非常不安。亚洲的社会观念改变缓慢，不少人仍认为单身可耻。“单身寄生虫”是日本人对单身者直白的称法。不愿结婚似乎引发了社会的抵触情绪，决定不结婚也需三思而后行。
Contraception is a particular problem. Several Asian countries restrict state-provided family planning to married couples. A few even demand to see the wedding certificate before dispensing condoms (that has happened in Europe, too). This is not a sensible policy when so many men and women will remain unmarried throughout their 20s and 30s.
避孕措施是一个特别的问题。一些亚洲国家的政府提供的家庭生育计划（发放安全套）仅限于婚后夫妻。少数国家甚至要求发放安全套前检查结婚证（这也已经发生在欧洲）。在大批男女在二三十岁都保持单身的情况下，这一政策显然不明智。
Then there are the educational and social aspects of changing marriage patterns. Because women tend to marry up—that is, marry men in an income or educational group above them—any problems of non-marriage are not dispersed throughout society but concentrated in two groups with dim wedding prospects: men with no education and women with a lot.
婚姻模式的变化还表现在教育和社会层面。由于女性倾向于攀高枝——即嫁给收入和教育水平都高于自己的男性——不结婚带来的任何问题都不会在整个社会平铺开来，而是集中在结婚可能性较低的两个人群中：文化低的男性和文化高的女性。
Almost every East Asian country is worried about the decline of marriage among its best-educated daughters. In Singapore the government even set up an online-dating service, lovebyte.org.sg, to boost marriage rates among graduates. The problem is no less acute among poor or ill-educated men. South Korean women seem to be no longer interested in marrying peasant farmers, for instance.
几乎每个东亚国家都对高学历女性不断下降的结婚率忧心忡忡。新加坡政府甚至建立了一个婚恋网站（lovebyte.org.sg）来提高高学历人士的结婚率。贫穷或者文化水平低的男性难找对象的苦恼和高学历女性的问题不相上下。比如韩国女性似乎不再愿意和农民结婚。
China has coined new terms to describe the two groups: sheng-nu (left-over women) and guang gun (bare branches, or men who will not add to the family tree). “Bare branches” is most commonly used in China to refer to men who will be unable to marry because of sex-selective abortion. And that encapsulates the biggest worry about Asia’s flight from marriage. If (when?) it spreads to China and India, it will combine with the surplus of bachelors to cause unheard-of strains. Prostitution could rise; brides could be traded like commodities, or women forced to “marry” several men; wives could be kept in purdah by jealous, fearful husbands.
中国人生造了两个描述这两类人群的词：“剩女”和“光棍”。“光棍”是指代由于择性堕胎而难找对象的中国男性使用最为普遍的词。这一状况集中体现了对于亚洲人逃避婚姻的担忧。如果（何时？）逃避婚姻的情况扩散至中国和印度，它和严重过剩的单身汉一起将导致前所未有的紧张局面：卖淫增加；新娘像商品一样可以买卖，或者女人被迫“嫁给”几个男人；妻子被吃醋、揪心的丈夫深藏家中。
This may sound alarmist. But the reluctance of women to marry, together with men’s continuing desire for a wife, is already producing a surge of cross-border brides. According to “Asian Cross Border Marriage Migration”, a book edited by Melody Lu and Wen-Shan Yang (Amsterdam University Press), 27% of Taiwanese marriages in 2002 involved foreign women; one in eight births that year was to a “mixed” family. Many girls are illiterate teenagers sold (in practice) by their families to older, richer foreigners. Back in their home villages, therefore, young men’s marriage chances are lower. Arranged marriages with foreigners fell in Taiwan after the government cracked down on them, but they continue to rise elsewhere. In South Korea, one-seventh of marriages in 2005 were to “Kosians” (Korean-Asians). In rural areas, the share is higher: 44% of farmers in South Jeolla province who married in 2009 took a foreign bride. If China or India were ever to import brides on this scale, it would spread sexual catastrophe throughout Asia. As it is, that catastrophe may be hard to avoid.
这听起来显得过分担心，大惊小怪。但是女性不愿结婚和男性对妻子持续的渴望已经产生了一大批跨境新娘。一本由Melody Lu和杨文山（Wen-Shan Yang）编辑、阿姆斯特丹大学出版社出版的书《亚洲跨境婚姻》指出，2002年27%的台湾婚姻都涉及外国新娘；当年八分之一的新生儿来自“混合”家庭。很多女孩都是没有受过教育的青少年，被家人“卖给”了年龄更大、更加富裕的外国人。结果她们家乡年轻男性的结婚机会减少。有组织的涉外婚姻在台湾当局的打击之下呈下降趋势，但在其他地方继续上升。2005年韩国七分之一的婚姻属于“韩亚联姻”。在农村地区涉外婚姻比例更高：庆尚南道2009结婚的农民中有44%都拥有一位外国新娘。假如中国和印度也以这个规模进口新娘，那将导致整个亚洲的性别灾难。这种灾难或将难以避免。
There is an historical precedent for falling and low marriage rates. It happened in Ireland in the late 19th century and in America and much of Europe in the 1930s. American and European marriage rates bounced back between 1945 and 1970. But Europe and America were different: marriage rates fell during an economic crisis and recovered as the economy did. The Asian peculiarity is that marriage rates have been eroding during a long boom. And as Asia gets richer, traditional marriage patterns are only likely to unravel further.
结婚率下降和低结婚率有其历史先例：19世纪末的爱尔兰和20世纪30年代的美国及欧洲部分国家。美国和欧洲的结婚率在1945年到1970年间反弹。但是欧美与亚洲不同：欧美的结婚率在经济萧条时期下降，经济复苏后反弹。亚洲的独特性在于结婚率在长期的经济繁荣期一直在下降。当亚洲变得更加富裕，传统的婚姻模式只可能继续解体。
亚洲人口
The flight from marriage
逃避婚姻
Asians are marrying later, and less, than in the past. This has profound implications for women, traditional family life and Asian politics
亚洲人比过去结婚更晚、更少。这对女性、传统家庭生活以及亚洲政治产生了深刻影响。
Aug 20th 2011 | SEOUL AND TAIPEI | from the print edition
WITH her filmy polka-dot dress, huge sunglasses and career as a psychologist, Yi Zoe Hou of Taiwan might seem likely to be besieged by suitors. Yet, at 35, she is well past Taiwan’s unspoken marriage deadline. “It’s a global village,” she shrugs. “If I can’t find a Taiwanese guy that accepts my age, I can find another man somewhere else.” Maybe—but since she still wants children, Ms Hou is also wondering whether to use a sperm bank or ask a male friend to be a sperm donor. She represents a new world of family life for Asians.
穿着波尔卡圆点裙装（薄而透明的短上衣），戴着大大的太阳镜，以心理医生为职业，台湾人侯宜如（音译）看上去似乎不乏追求者。但是35岁的她早过了约定俗成的台湾社会结婚年龄上限。“这是个全球村，”她耸耸肩。“如果我找不到接受我年龄的台湾男人，我可以找其他地方的男人。”或许这可能。但由于侯小姐仍然想要孩子，她也在想是否要使用精子库或者向男性朋友求助捐献精子。侯代表了亚洲人家庭生活的全新观念。
Conservatives in the West are fond of saying that the traditional family is the bedrock of society. That view is held even more widely in Asia. The family is the focus of Confucian ethics, which holds that a basic moral principle, xiushen (self-improvement), can be pursued only within the confines of the family. In an interview in 1994 Lee Kuan Yew, a former prime minister of Singapore, argued that after thousands of years of dynastic upheaval, the family is the only institution left to sustain Chinese culture. It embodies a set of virtues—“learning and scholarship and hard work and thrift anddeferment of present enjoyment for future gain”—which, he said, underpins Asia’s economic success. He feared that the collapse of the family, if it ever happened, would be the main threat to Singapore’s success.
西方的保守者喜欢说传统的家庭是社会的基石。这一观点在亚洲更为普遍。家庭是儒家道德的中心，儒家认为基本的道德准则“修身”只有在家庭范围内才可以进行。在1994年的一次采访中，新加坡前总理李光耀说，经过几千年的王朝更迭，家庭成为唯一留存下来的传承中华文化的组织。他认为，中华文化蕴含的一系列美德——“学习，学问，勤奋，节俭，吃苦在前，享乐在后”——支撑了亚洲的经济成功。他担忧如果发生家庭解体，那将构成新加坡的成功的主要威胁。
His Malaysian contemporary, Mahathir Mohamad, went further. In a book written in 1995 with a Japanese politician, Shintaro Ishihara, Dr Mahathir contrasted Asians’ respect for marriage with “the breakdown of established institutions and diminished respect for marriage, family values, elders, and important customs” in the West. “Western societies”, Dr Mahathir claimed, “are riddled with single-parent families… with homosexuality, with cohabitation.” He might well have concluded that the absence of traditional family virtues from the streets of London recently showed the continued superiority of Asia.
李光耀的同辈人马来西亚前总理马哈蒂尔•默罕默德（Mahathir Mohamad）则更进一步。在1995的与日本政治家石原慎太郎合著的一本书中，马哈蒂尔比较了亚洲的对婚姻的敬重和西方的“打破现存制度，漠视婚姻、家庭价值观、老人以及重要传统习俗”。他说，“西方社会被单亲家庭、同性恋、非法同居等等现象整得千疮百孔。”现在他或许还可以这样总结，最近伦敦街头的暴力表明西方传统家庭美德的缺失，显示了亚洲持续的优越性。
Asians, in fact, have several distinct family systems. To simplify: in South Asia it is traditional to have arranged, early marriages, in which men are dominant and the extended family is important. East Asia also has a male-dominated system, but one that stresses the nuclear family more; nowadays it has abandoned arranged marriages. In South-East Asia, women have somewhat more autonomy. But all three systems have escaped many of the social changes that have buffeted family life in the West since the 1960s.
实际上亚洲存在若干个有差别的家庭系统。简单来说包括：南亚传统上实行包办婚姻和早婚，婚姻由男人主导，大家庭具有重要地位。东亚的家庭系统也是男人主导的，但更注重小家庭；如今东亚已经抛弃了包办婚姻。在东南亚，女性从某种程度讲具有更多自主权。但是这三个系统都避免了诸多自上世纪60年代以来一直困扰西方家庭生活的社会变化。
In South Asia and China marriage remains near-universal, with 98% of men and women tying the knot. In contrast, in some Western countries, a quarter of people in their 30s are cohabiting or have never been married, while half of new marriages end in divorce. Marriage continues to be the almost universal setting for child-bearing in Asia: only about 2% of births took place outside wedlock in Japan in 2007. Contrast that with Europe: in Sweden in 2008 55% of births were to unmarried women, while in Iceland the share was 66%.
南亚和中国仍然保持着几乎全民结婚，98%的男人和女人都会结婚。相比之下，在许多西方国家，30多岁的人有四分之一选择同居或从未结婚，新婚一半以离异终结。在亚洲，婚姻仍然是抚养孩子的普遍前提：2007年日本只有约2%的新生儿为非婚生。欧洲情况迥异：2008年瑞典55%的新生儿由未婚女性所生，冰岛这一比重为66%。
Most East and South-East Asian countries report little or no cohabitation. The exception is Japan where, among women born in the 1970s, about 20% say they have cohabited with a sexual partner. For Japan, that is a big change. In surveys between 1987 and 2002, just 1-7% of single women said they had lived with a partner. But it is not much compared with America where, according to a 2002 Gallup poll, over half of married Americans between the ages of 18 and 49 lived together before their wedding day. In many Western societies, more cohabitation has offset a trend towards later marriage or higher rates of divorce. That has not happened in Asia.
大多东亚和东南亚国家很少有或没有同居现象。日本是例外，70后的女性中约有20%表示曾与性伴侣同居。对于日本来说这是个很大的变化。在1987-2002年的调查中只有1-7%的单身女性表示和异性同居过。但这同美国比起来可谓小巫见大巫，据2002年的一份盖洛普调查显示，18-49岁的已婚美国人中超过一半有过婚前同居。在很多西方社会，同居的增加抵消了晚婚率或离婚率的增长。这一现象还没有在亚洲发生。
Traditional attitudes live on in other ways. Compared with Westerners, Asians are more likely to agree that “women’s happiness lies in marriage”. They are more likely to say women should give up work when they get married or have children, and more likely to disapprove of pre-marital sex. Surveys by Pew Global Research, a social-research outfit in Washington, DC, show that Muslims in South and South-East Asia are more likely than Muslims elsewhere to say that families should choose a woman’s husband for her.
亚洲传统观念还以其他方式存在。和西方人相比，亚洲人更愿意同意“女人的幸福在于婚姻”，更有可能认为女人婚后或有孩子之后应该放弃工作，更有可能反对婚前性行为。位于华盛顿的社会研究团队“皮尤全球研究”的调查报告指出，南亚和东南亚的穆斯林比其他地区的穆斯林更愿意认为家庭应为女性择偶。
Over the hill婚姻正在衰落，风光难续
Yet, as Ms Hou shows, Asia is changing. Although attitudes to sex and marriage are different from those in the West, the pressures of wealth and modernisation upon family life have been just as relentless. They have simply manifested themselves in different ways. In the West the upshot has been divorce and illegitimacy. In Asia the results include later marriage, less marriage and (to some extent) more divorce. The changes in the West may be more dramatic. But both East and West are seeing big changes in the role of women and traditional family life.
然而，正如侯女士的现象所反映的，亚洲正在发生变化。尽管性观念和婚姻观念和西方不同，金钱和现代化给家庭生活带来的压力同样残酷。只是在亚洲压力通过不一样的方式显现出来。西方的表现是离婚和非婚生子。在亚洲表现为晚婚、不婚以及（一定程度上）离婚增多。西方的变化也许更加激烈。但无论是西方还是东方都正经历着女性角色和传统家庭生活的重大变化。
The first change is that people are getting married later, often much later. In the richest parts—Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong—the mean age of wedlock is now 29-30 for women, 31-33 for men (see chart right). That is past the point at which women were traditionally required to marry in many Asian societies. It is also older than in the West. In America, women marry at about 26, men at 28. If you take account of the cohabitation that routinely precedes Western marriage (but not Asian), the gap between East and West is even larger. The mean age of marriage has risen by five years in some East Asian countries in three decades, which is a lot.
第一个变化是人们结婚越来越晚，往往比过去晚得多。在最富裕的地区——日本，台湾，韩国和香港——如今女性的平均结婚年龄是29-30岁，男性为31-33岁（见图一）。这已经超过了很多亚洲社会传统上要求的女性结婚年龄，还超过了西方。美国的平均结婚年龄是女性26岁、男性28岁。如果你把西方常见、亚洲较少的婚前同居计算在内，东西方的差距更加明显。一些亚洲国家三十年里平均结婚年龄增加了五年，这是一个不小的数字。
The second change is that, among certain groups, people are not merely marrying later. They are not getting married at all. In 2010 a third of Japanese women entering their 30s were single. Perhaps half or more of those will never marry. In 2010 37% of all women in Taiwan aged 30-34 were single, as were 21% of 35-39-year-olds. This, too, is more than in Britain and America, where only 13-15% of those in their late 30s are single. If women are unmarried entering their 40s, they will almost certainly neither marry nor have a child.
第二个变化就是，一部分人群中，晚婚还不算，有的甚至不打算结婚。2010年进入30岁的日本女性三分之一是单身。或许其中一半或者更多将永不结婚。2010年30-34岁的台湾女性中有37%是单身，35-39岁中有21%是单身。这同样高于英国和美国，35-39岁的单身英美女性比例只有13-15%。如果女性未婚进入40岁，她们几乎一定不会结婚或生小孩了。
The Asian avoidance of marriage is new, and striking. Only 30 years ago, just 2% of women were single in most Asian countries. The share of unmarried women in their 30s in Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong has risen 20 points or more (see chart below), “a very sharp change in a relatively short period”, says Gavin Jones of the National University of Singapore. In Thailand, the number of women entering their 40s without being married increased from 7% in 1980 to 12% in 2000. In some cities, rates of non-marriage are higher: 20% among women aged 40-44 in Bangkok; 27% among 30-34-year-olds in Hong Kong. In South Korea, young men complain that women are on “marriage strike”.
亚洲人逃避婚姻是新近才发生的，颇引人注目。仅仅30年前，大多数亚洲国家单身女性比例只有2%。在日本、台湾、新加坡和香港等地区30多岁的未婚女性比例上升了20个百分点甚至更多（见表2）——被新加坡国立大学的盖文•琼斯（Gavin Jones）称为“在相对较短时间内发生的巨大变化”。在泰国，未婚进入40岁的女性比重从1980年的7%上升到2000年的12%。一些城市的未婚比例更大： 20%的40到44岁的曼谷女性未婚； 27%的30到34岁的香港女性单身。韩国的年轻人则抱怨女性“罢婚”。
What is remarkable about the Asian experience is not that women are unmarried in their 30s—that happens in the West, too—but that they have never been married and have rarely cohabited. In Sweden, the proportion of women in their late 30s who are single is higher than in Asia, at 41%. But that is because marriage is disappearing as a norm. Swedish women are still setting up homes and having children, just outside wedlock. Not in Asia. Avoiding both illegitimacy and cohabitation, Asian women appear to be living a more celibate life than their Western sisters (admittedly, they could also be under-reporting rates of cohabitation and pre-marital sex). The conclusion is that East Asia’s growing cohorts of unmarried women reflect less the breakdown of marriage than the fact that they are avoiding it.
亚洲正在经历的事引人注目的不是西方同样存在的女性三十未嫁，而是她们虽然未婚，却很少同居。瑞典30岁后期（35-39岁）的单身女性比例为41%，高于亚洲。但那是因为在那里婚姻作为社会准则正在逐渐消失。瑞典女性仍然组建家庭哺育小孩，不过这是在单身状态下。亚洲不是这样。亚洲女性避免非婚生子和婚前同居，似乎过着比她们的西方姐妹更加独立的单身生活（不可否认的是，她们的同居和婚前性行为的状况也许被低估）。结论就是东亚不断扩大的未婚女性大军与其说反映了婚姻遭到解体，不如说表明了她们在逃避婚姻。
But marriages are breaking down, too. In Hong Kong and Japan, the general divorce rate—the number of divorces per 1,000 people aged 15 or more—was about 2.5 in the mid-2000s, according to Mr Jones’s calculations. In Asia as a whole, the rate is about 2 per 1,000. That compares with 3.7 in America, 3.4 in Britain, 3.1 in France and 2.8 in Germany. Only in one or two Asian countries is divorce as widespread as in the West. The South Korean rate, for example, is 3.5. Because divorce has been common in the West for decades, more couples there have split up. The rise in Asia has been recent: China’s divorce rate took off in the early 2000s. In the 1980s the Asian rate was 1 per 1,000 people; now it is 2. If that rise continues, Asian divorce could one day be as common as in Europe.
但是婚姻还是在解体。根据盖文•琼斯的计算，21世纪头十年中期，香港和日本15岁以上人的总体离婚率是每千人2.5人。整个亚洲是每千人2人。美国是3.7人，英国为3.4人，法国为3.1人，德国为2.8人。只有一两个亚洲国家离婚现象和西方一样普遍。比如韩国的离婚率为每千人3.5人。因为西方离婚成为普遍现象已有几十年了，如今婚姻走向破裂就更加普遍。亚洲离婚率的上升确实是最近才发生的：中国的离婚率从2000年开始飙升。80年代亚洲的离婚率是每千人1人；现在是2人。如果继续增长，亚洲的离婚现象将有一天可能和欧洲一样普遍。
An educated choice 教育熏陶过的选择
The main function of marriage in most traditional societies is to bring up children (romantic love rarely has much to do with it). Not surprisingly, changes in child-bearing have gone along with changes in marriage. The number of children the average East Asian woman can expect to have during her lifetime—the fertility rate—has fallen from 5.3 in the late 1960s to below 1.6 now, an enormous drop. But old-fashioned attitudes persist, and these require couples to start having children soon after marriage. In these circumstances, women choose to reduce child-bearing by delaying it—and that means delaying marriage, too.
大多数传统社会里婚姻的主要功能就是传宗接代（很少和浪漫爱情沾边）。养育后代发生变化和婚姻发生变化相伴相生就不足为奇了。在东亚，女性的一生平均期待育儿数量（即生育率）从60年代的5.3,降到了如今的1.6，跌幅巨大。但是仍然存在的过时观念要求夫妻婚后立即要孩子。在这种情况下，许多女性选择通过延迟生育减轻育儿负担——也意味着延迟了婚姻。
Changing marriage patterns are also the result of improvements in women’s education and income, and the failure of women’s status to keep pace. The salient characteristic of many traditional marriage systems is that women—especially young women—have little independence. In South Asia, brides are taken into the groom’s family almost as soon as they move into puberty. They are tied to their husband’s family. Sometimes women may not inherit property or perform funeral rites (this is especially important in China). In parts of South Asia, wives may not even take their children to hospital without getting their husband’s permission.
婚姻模式的改变也是女性受教育和收入状况得到提高而女性社会地位没有相应跟上步伐的结果。很多婚姻系统的显著特点是女性——特别是年轻女性——几乎没有自主权。南亚的新娘几乎一到青春期就要被带入新郎家里。她们被束缚在丈夫家里。有时妇女可能不能继承财产或者参加葬礼（这在中国尤为重要）。南亚的有些地方，在没有得到丈夫的许可下，妻子甚至不能带孩子去医院。
Two forces are giving women more autonomy: education and jobs. Women’s education in East Asia has improved dramatically over the past 30 years, and has almost erased the literacy gap with men. Girls stay at school for as many years as boys, and illiteracy rates for 15-24-year-olds are the same for the two sexes (this is not true of South Asia). In South Korea now, women earn half of all master’s degrees.
两股力量给予女性以更多的自主权：教育和工作。东亚的女性受教育状况在过去的30年里大幅改善，几乎拉平了和男性的受教育差距。女孩入学年数和男孩相当，15岁到24岁的男女两性文盲率相同（南亚不是如此）。如今韩国所有研究生学位的一半由女性获得。
Education changes women’s expectations. Among Thai women who left school at 18, one-eighth were still single in their 40s; but among university graduates, the share was a fifth. A survey in Beijing in 2003 found that half of women with a monthly income of 5,000-15,000 yuan (roughly $600-1,800, an indicator of university education) were not married. Half said they did not need to be, because they were financially independent. South Koreans call such people “golden misses”. “Why should I have to settle down to a life of preparing tofu soup, like my mother?” asks one.
教育改变了女性对未来的期望。40多岁时依然单身的女性，在18岁就离开学校的泰国女性中比例是八分之一；但在大学毕业生中是五分之一。2003年在北京做的一份调查发现月收入5000-15000元（大概600-1800美元，表明受过大学教育）的女性中有一半未婚。这一半人表示她们没有必要结婚，因为她们在金钱上可以独立。韩国人把这类女性称为“金姐”（golden misses）。“为什么我必须安定下来，过着准备豆腐汤的生活，就像我妈那样？”有人这样问道。
Rates of non-marriage rise at every stage of education. Women with less than secondary education are the most likely to marry, followed by those with secondary education, with university graduates least likely. This pattern is the opposite of the one in America and Europe, where marriage is more common among college graduates than among those with just a secondary education.
单身率随着教育程度逐级攀升。中学以下教育程度的女性最可能结婚，中学教育程度的女性其次，大学教育程度的女性可能性最低。这一模式和欧美截然相反，在欧美较之仅为初中学历的女性，大学学历的女性结婚更普遍。
There are two reasons why education’s spread reduces women’s propensity to marry. First, non-marriage has always been more prevalent among women with more education. Now that there are more women in these higher-education groups, there are fewer marriages. Marriage rates are also lower in cities. Since education is likely to go on improving, and urbanisation to go on rising, more women will join the ranks of graduates or city folk who are least likely to marry.
教育的普及减少了女性结婚意愿有两个原因。第一，单身在较高教育程度的女性中总是更为流行。既然高等教育程度的女性增多，婚姻自然也减少。城市的结婚率也更低。随着教育可能得到持续改善，城市化继续推进，更多的女性将加入到结婚意愿最低的高学历者或市民的行列。
Marrying up高攀上嫁
Second, more education leaves the best-educated women with fewer potential partners. In most Asian countries, women have always been permitted—even encouraged—to “marry up”, ie, marry a man of higher income or education. Marrying up was necessary in the past when women could not get an education and female literacy was low. But now that many women are doing as well or better than men at school, those at the top—like the “golden misses”—find the marriage market unwelcoming. Either there are fewer men of higher education for them to marry, or lower-income men feel intimidated by their earning power (as well as their brain power). As Singapore’s Mr Lee once said: “The Asian man…preferred to have a wife with less education than himself.” In Singapore, non-marriage rates among female university graduates are stratospheric: a third of 30-34-year-old university graduates are single.
第二，女性受教育程度越高，其潜在择偶对象就越少。在大多数亚洲国家，女性一直被允许甚至被鼓励攀高枝，即嫁给收入、教育水平更高的男性。攀高枝在过去女性不能接受教育、女性识字率低的时候是有必要的。但是如今很多女性在学校表现和男性一样好甚至更好，那些顶端的女性——像“金姐”——发现婚姻市场不再那么受欢迎了。不是可供交往的教育程度更高的男性减少了，就是收入更低的男性对她们的赚钱能力（以及高智商）感到不安。就像新加坡的李光耀说的那样：“亚洲男人……传统上更愿意拥有一位教育程度比自己低的妻子。”大学以上教育程度的新加坡女性未婚率高得离谱： 30岁到34岁的大学程度的女性中三分之一是单身。
Better education also makes possible the other main trend changing marriage: female employment. Asia’s economic miracle has caused—and been caused by—a surge of women into the formal workforce. In East Asia two-thirds of women have jobs, an unusually high rate. In South-East Asia the figure is 59%. In South Korea the employment rate of women in their 20s (59.2%) recently overtook that of twenty-something men (58.5%). This surge has been accompanied by the collapse of the lifetime-employment systems in Japanese and South Korean firms, which used to ensure that a single (male) worker’s income could support a middle-class family. Now the wife’s earnings are needed, too.
更好的教育也使改变婚姻的另一重要趋势——女性就业——成为可能。亚洲的经济奇迹和一大批女性成为正式劳动力息息相关，互为因果。在东亚，三分之二的女性拥有工作，这一比例非同小可。在东南亚这一比例为59%。韩国的20多岁女性的就业率（59.2%）最近超过了同龄男性（58.5%）。女性就业的热潮伴随着日韩企业终生雇佣制的逐步解体，曾经这种终生雇佣制确保了单个男性劳动力的收入就可以支撑起整个中产家庭。如今还需要加上妻子的收入。
All things being equal, having a job increases a woman’s autonomy. She has more options, and these options include not having a husband. But it is clear from Western societies that women will not necessarily choose a job over marriage. Rather, they will struggle to balance the conflicting demands of work and family.
正常情况下，拥有工作增加了女性的自主权。女性有了更多的选择，包括不嫁人。然而从西方社会就可明确看出，西方女性不一定要为工作而牺牲婚姻，而宁愿努力平衡工作要求和家庭需要之间的矛盾，而宁愿努力平衡工作要求和家庭需要之间的矛盾。
What is unusual about Asia is that women seem to bear an unusually large share of the burden of marriage, reducing the attractiveness of family life compared with work. Certainly, this is what Asian women themselves think. Surveys about attitudes to marriage are patchy and subject to a lot of reservations. But for what it is worth, in a survey from 2011 of Japan’s three largest cities, only two-thirds of wives said they felt positive about their marriage, much less than their husbands; in America, both husbands and wives usually report higher and similar levels of satisfaction. In a survey from 2000, satisfaction levels in Japan were only half those in America. This may be because the readier availability of divorce in America has left fewer people trapped in loveless marriages. Or there may be something in the Japanese caricature of the salaryman husband working long hours and socialising all night and at weekends, while his neglected, fretful wife struggles to bring up the children at home.
亚洲不一样的地方似乎在于女性要承担的婚姻负担比例过于沉重，相对于工作来说降低了家庭生活的吸引力。当然这只是亚洲女性自己这样认为。对婚姻态度的调查中意见分散并多有保留。但不管是真是假，一份2011年关于日本三个最大城市的调查显示，只有三分之二的妻子表示对婚姻感到满意，比例远低于她们的丈夫；美国夫妻的婚姻满意度在调查中往往要更高，夫妻双方意见也更为一致。这也许是因为美国离婚更加容易，陷入无爱婚姻的人更少。或者与日本人刻画的所谓“工资男”丈夫形象有关，日本丈夫白天长时间工作，夜晚和周末都忙于社交，而备受冷落、满腹怨气的妻子不得不在家带孩子。
Whatever the problem, it is not confined to Japan. Illyqueen, a popular Taiwanese blogger, recently ranted about “Mama’s boys” in their 30s who have had “no hardships, no housework, [and who] …have lost the ability to keep promises (like marriage).” If some Asian women do indeed have an unusually negative view of marriage, it might make them more likely to choose a job over a husband, or to put off marriage while they pursue a career.
不管是何原因，这个问题不局限于日本。台湾一位有名博主Illyqueen最近在博客中咆哮：“年过30的‘妈妈的男孩’没有困难，没有家务活……失去了兑现承诺的能力（如婚姻承诺）。”如果亚洲女性确实对婚姻的态度负面悲观，那么她们更愿意选择工作而非丈夫，或者为追求事业而推迟婚姻。
Moreover, public attitudes and expectations are lagging far behind changes in women’s lives in Asia, making it even harder to strike a balance between life and work. Despite higher incomes and education, “women have lower socioeconomic status than men,” argues Heeran Chun, a South Korean sociologist. “Their lives are markedly restricted by the cultural values associated with Confucianism.” They are expected to give up work—sometimes on marriage, often after childbirth—and many do not return to the job market until their children are grown. This forces upon women an unwelcome choice between career and family. It may also help to explain the unusually low marriage rates among the best-educated and best-paid women, for whom the opportunity cost of giving up a career to have children is greatest.
更糟糕的是，公众态度和公众期望严重滞后于亚洲女性的人生变化，要平衡生活和工作就变得更加困难。尽管她们收入增加、教育改善，但“女性的社会经济地位低于男性，” 韩国的社会学家Heeran Chun这样认为。“她们的生活明显地被儒家文化价值观所限制。”社会对她们的期待是放弃工作，有时一结婚就放弃工作，更经常的是生孩子以后，很多女性就直到孩子长大才返回职场。这就给女性施加了一个关于职业和家庭不受欢迎的选择。也有助于解释高学历高收入的亚洲女性结婚率异常之低，对于她们来说放弃职业选择生孩子的机会成本是最大的。
As in most traditional societies, women in Asia have long been the sole caregivers for children, elderly parents or parents-in-law. People generally assume they will continue to be so, even though many women have paid jobs outside the home. The result is that expectations placed on wives have become unusually onerous. Surveys in Japan have suggested that women who work full-time then go home and spend another 30 hours a week doing the housework. Their husbands contribute an unprincely three hours of effort. In America and Europe the disparity is less extreme, and has narrowed considerably since the 1960s.
就像大多传统社会，亚洲女性长期以来就是唯一给孩子、年老的父母和公婆以关怀照顾的人。即使很多女性在家庭之外拥有一份挣钱的工作，人们一般还会希望她们继续如此。结果就是妻子背负的期望变得异常艰巨。在日本的调查表明，全职工作的太太回到家里每周还要花30个小时做家务。而丈夫每周只贡献可怜的三个小时。在美国和欧洲这种差别不那么极端，从60年代以来还缩小了不少。
On top of this, many Asian couples face enormous pressure to ensure their children succeed in schools with cut-throat competition for places—pressure that falls mostly on the mother. Private child care is exorbitantly expensive. There are few state-subsidised crèches (324,000 children are on waiting lists in Seoul alone). And setting up a home is expensive because of high house prices. All this means it is harder to strike a satisfying balance between job and family in Asia than in the West.
另外，不少亚洲的夫妻面临着保证孩子在竞争激烈的学校获得成功的压力，这种压力大多压在了母亲身上；请人照顾孩子费用奇高；几乎没有国家补贴的日托项目（单单首尔就有324,000个孩子在排队等待日托服务）；高房价使组建家庭变得昂贵：这些事实意味着要在工作和家庭之间取得令人满意的平衡，在亚洲要比在西方更艰难。
The lost brides流失的新娘
Not every Asian country is affected by these trends equally. South Korea, for example, has lower rates of non-marriage, and a lower age of marriage, than its neighbours. But the big exceptions are Asia’s giants. At the moment, marriage is still the norm in China and arranged marriage the norm in India. As long as that continues to be true, a majority of Asians will live in traditional families. But how long will it continue? Signs of change are everywhere.
亚洲各国受此趋势影响的程度并非一致。比如韩国的单身比例和结婚年龄都比邻国低。但例外却是亚洲两大巨人：目前结婚仍然是中国的社会准则，包办婚姻仍是印度的社会准则。 如果这种状况持续下去，那么大多亚洲人将生活在传统家庭里。但是它将持续多久？改变的迹象到处都是。
The mean age of marriage is rising in both countries. Divorce is increasing, especially among younger people. In India, traditional arranged marriages are being challenged by online dating (shaadi.com claims to be the world’s largest matrimonial service) and by “self-arranged marriages”, hybrids in which the couple meet, fall in love and agree to marry—but then let the two families fix everything up, as in traditional arranged marriages.
在中国和印度平均结婚年龄都在上升。离婚也在增加，特别是在年轻人中间。印度的传统的包办婚姻受到了网上约会（shaadi.com自称世界最大婚介所）和“自办婚姻”的挑战，这种“自办婚姻”是一种半自主婚姻，双方见面到相爱、同意结婚，但接着让双方家庭来摆平一切，就像传统的包办婚姻那样。
In China, the migration of millions of young men and women from the countryside to cities is changing family life profoundly. It has pushed up the divorce rate because migrant workers return home to find that they and their partners have grown apart. When the husband and wife go to the city together, either they choose not to bring their children with them (since both work full time) or they may not do so, since the hukou household-registration system prevents dependants from joining them. According to a survey in 2008 by the All-China Women’s Federation, 58m children of migrant workers were being brought up hundreds of miles away, in their parents’ village, usually by grandparents. The immediate family is no longer the universal setting for child-rearing in China.
在中国，上千万年轻男女从农村流向城市深刻地改变了家庭生活。离婚率被抬高，因为农民工回到家发现自己和配偶的差别越来越大。如果夫妻双双进城，他们或者选择不把孩子带在身边（因为两人都得全职工作），或者不能带孩子在城市生活，因为户口制度使孩子不能留在自己身边。2008年全国妇联的一份调查显示，5800万农民工子女在距离父母上千公里的农村成长，通常是由祖父母带着。父母直接养育子女不再是中国抚养孩子的普遍模式了。
More important, the marriage systems of both giants risk being torn apart in future by their practice of sex-selective abortion. Tens of millions of female fetuses have been aborted over the past generation, as parents use pre-natal screening to identify the sex of the fetus and then rid themselves of daughters. In China in 2010 more than 118 boys were born for every 100 girls. In India the ratio was 109 to 100. By 2030, according to Avraham Ebenstein of Harvard University and Ethan Sharygin of the University of Pennsylvania, about 8% of Chinese men aged 25 and older will be unable to marry because of the country’s distorted sex ratio. By 2050 the unmarried share will be 10-15%. In 2030, in the two giants, there will be 660m men between the ages of 20 and 50, but only 597m women. Over 60m men therefore face the prospect of not finding a bride. That is almost as many men of 20-50 as will be living in America in that year. This alone will wreck Asia’s tradition of universal marriage.
更重要的是，这两个大国的婚姻系统在未来都有可能面临着被择性堕胎撕裂的危险。父母使用产前扫描技术辨别胎儿性别、打掉女胎，结果上一代人中有几千万女胎被打掉。2010年中国男女出生比是118比100。印度的男女出生比是109比100。2030年，根据哈佛大学的Avraham Ebenstein和宾夕法尼亚大学的Ethan Sharygin所称，由于扭曲的性别比，近8%的25岁以上的中国男性将不能结婚。到2050年不能结婚的男性比例将达到10%-15%。2030年这两个大国将有6.6亿20岁到50岁的男性，但只有5.97亿的同龄女性。超过6000万男人将由此面临找不到新娘的局面。6000万几乎是那时居住在美国20岁到50岁的男性总和。仅仅这一点就将打破亚洲传统的普遍婚姻模式。
Parasites and bare branches寄生虫和光棍
The big question remains: how much is this a problem? And if it is, why? Arguably, the most important thing is that women who do not want to marry are no longer being forced to. And that must be a benefit: to them, to men spared an unhappy marriage; perhaps to society as a whole.
问题仍然在于：这种趋势多大程度上成为一个问题呢？如果它是，那为什么呢？可以论证，最重要的是不愿结婚的女性不再被强迫结婚了。这必须是件无论对她们自己还是对于得不到一个幸福婚姻的男性、或许还对于整个社会都有利的事情。
Against that, there are several reasons for worry, some of them extremely disturbing. Social attitudes in Asia change slowly, and many people think it wrong to remain unmarried. “Parasite singles” is the unflattering term in Japan. The reluctance to marry seems to have unleashed spiteful hostility, an attitude that makes the decision not to wed a tough one.
有诸多对女性单身对自身、男性及社会三者兼顾抱有疑虑的理由，有些还令人非常不安。亚洲的社会观念改变缓慢，不少人仍认为单身可耻。“单身寄生虫”是日本人对单身者直白的称法。不愿结婚似乎引发了社会的抵触情绪，决定不结婚也需三思而后行。
Contraception is a particular problem. Several Asian countries restrict state-provided family planning to married couples. A few even demand to see the wedding certificate before dispensing condoms (that has happened in Europe, too). This is not a sensible policy when so many men and women will remain unmarried throughout their 20s and 30s.
避孕措施是一个特别的问题。一些亚洲国家的政府提供的家庭生育计划（发放安全套）仅限于婚后夫妻。少数国家甚至要求发放安全套前检查结婚证（这也已经发生在欧洲）。在大批男女在二三十岁都保持单身的情况下，这一政策显然不明智。
Then there are the educational and social aspects of changing marriage patterns. Because women tend to marry up—that is, marry men in an income or educational group above them—any problems of non-marriage are not dispersed throughout society but concentrated in two groups with dim wedding prospects: men with no education and women with a lot.
婚姻模式的变化还表现在教育和社会层面。由于女性倾向于攀高枝——即嫁给收入和教育水平都高于自己的男性——不结婚带来的任何问题都不会在整个社会平铺开来，而是集中在结婚可能性较低的两个人群中：文化低的男性和文化高的女性。
Almost every East Asian country is worried about the decline of marriage among its best-educated daughters. In Singapore the government even set up an online-dating service, lovebyte.org.sg, to boost marriage rates among graduates. The problem is no less acute among poor or ill-educated men. South Korean women seem to be no longer interested in marrying peasant farmers, for instance.
几乎每个东亚国家都对高学历女性不断下降的结婚率忧心忡忡。新加坡政府甚至建立了一个婚恋网站（lovebyte.org.sg）来提高高学历人士的结婚率。贫穷或者文化水平低的男性难找对象的苦恼和高学历女性的问题不相上下。比如韩国女性似乎不再愿意和农民结婚。
China has coined new terms to describe the two groups: sheng-nu (left-over women) and guang gun (bare branches, or men who will not add to the family tree). “Bare branches” is most commonly used in China to refer to men who will be unable to marry because of sex-selective abortion. And that encapsulates the biggest worry about Asia’s flight from marriage. If (when?) it spreads to China and India, it will combine with the surplus of bachelors to cause unheard-of strains. Prostitution could rise; brides could be traded like commodities, or women forced to “marry” several men; wives could be kept in purdah by jealous, fearful husbands.
中国人生造了两个描述这两类人群的词：“剩女”和“光棍”。“光棍”是指代由于择性堕胎而难找对象的中国男性使用最为普遍的词。这一状况集中体现了对于亚洲人逃避婚姻的担忧。如果（何时？）逃避婚姻的情况扩散至中国和印度，它和严重过剩的单身汉一起将导致前所未有的紧张局面：卖淫增加；新娘像商品一样可以买卖，或者女人被迫“嫁给”几个男人；妻子被吃醋、揪心的丈夫深藏家中。
This may sound alarmist. But the reluctance of women to marry, together with men’s continuing desire for a wife, is already producing a surge of cross-border brides. According to “Asian Cross Border Marriage Migration”, a book edited by Melody Lu and Wen-Shan Yang (Amsterdam University Press), 27% of Taiwanese marriages in 2002 involved foreign women; one in eight births that year was to a “mixed” family. Many girls are illiterate teenagers sold (in practice) by their families to older, richer foreigners. Back in their home villages, therefore, young men’s marriage chances are lower. Arranged marriages with foreigners fell in Taiwan after the government cracked down on them, but they continue to rise elsewhere. In South Korea, one-seventh of marriages in 2005 were to “Kosians” (Korean-Asians). In rural areas, the share is higher: 44% of farmers in South Jeolla province who married in 2009 took a foreign bride. If China or India were ever to import brides on this scale, it would spread sexual catastrophe throughout Asia. As it is, that catastrophe may be hard to avoid.
这听起来显得过分担心，大惊小怪。但是女性不愿结婚和男性对妻子持续的渴望已经产生了一大批跨境新娘。一本由Melody Lu和杨文山（Wen-Shan Yang）编辑、阿姆斯特丹大学出版社出版的书《亚洲跨境婚姻》指出，2002年27%的台湾婚姻都涉及外国新娘；当年八分之一的新生儿来自“混合”家庭。很多女孩都是没有受过教育的青少年，被家人“卖给”了年龄更大、更加富裕的外国人。结果她们家乡年轻男性的结婚机会减少。有组织的涉外婚姻在台湾当局的打击之下呈下降趋势，但在其他地方继续上升。2005年韩国七分之一的婚姻属于“韩亚联姻”。在农村地区涉外婚姻比例更高：庆尚南道2009结婚的农民中有44%都拥有一位外国新娘。假如中国和印度也以这个规模进口新娘，那将导致整个亚洲的性别灾难。这种灾难或将难以避免。
There is an historical precedent for falling and low marriage rates. It happened in Ireland in the late 19th century and in America and much of Europe in the 1930s. American and European marriage rates bounced back between 1945 and 1970. But Europe and America were different: marriage rates fell during an economic crisis and recovered as the economy did. The Asian peculiarity is that marriage rates have been eroding during a long boom. And as Asia gets richer, traditional marriage patterns are only likely to unravel further.
结婚率下降和低结婚率有其历史先例：19世纪末的爱尔兰和20世纪30年代的美国及欧洲部分国家。美国和欧洲的结婚率在1945年到1970年间反弹。但是欧美与亚洲不同：欧美的结婚率在经济萧条时期下降，经济复苏后反弹。亚洲的独特性在于结婚率在长期的经济繁荣期一直在下降。当亚洲变得更加富裕，传统的婚姻模式只可能继续解体。
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