These are the loveliest weeks of the year in Beijing, warm and sunny during the day and cool in the evening, the leaves starting to turn as the songbirds perch in the branches on their way from Siberia to winter in southeast Asia.
At the Olympic Forest Park on Sunday afternoon, families, couples and groups of friends were stretched out on the grass, paddling on the lake in duck-shaped boats, and sitting under trees singing and playing guitar.
Lei, a tall, skinny software engineer with a kind heart and an awkward manner, was leading me through the trees in the south of the park, identifying each one as we passed. Here he would show me a small maple leaf turning red, there a ginkgo with its smelly, pinkish fruit and peeping out of a pond a few surviving lotus flowers.
He told me he comes here at least once a month, partly because it is wilder and more natural than Beijing’s formal, ornamental parks, although it is less than 20 years old. Most of the rest of the time when he’s not working, he is at home alone playing video games late into the night.
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For a while he used to come to the park with a young woman he met after his and her parents set them up on a date. Lei is in his mid-thirties and his parents were getting worried that, left to his own devices, he would never meet anyone.
As a third generation Beijinger of above average height, an only child with a good university degree, a well-paid job and parents and grandparents who own a number of homes in the city, Lei is as eligible as it gets in the Chinese marriage market. He liked the woman he was dating and he could see that she liked him, putting him at ease in a way that he had never felt in such situations before.
“She was patient with me,” he said.
They met every weekend, visiting the Lama Temple, the Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven and all of Beijing’s major parks. Relieved and delighted, Lei’s parents allowed their enthusiasm to get the better of them.
“Every time I’d see her, they’d ask me questions afterwards and they kept asking me how it was going. We had a big argument and I stopped going on the dates,” he said.
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Lei’s parents are far from alone in worrying about their offsprings’ reluctance to settle down as China’s marriage rate has dropped sharply over the past decade.
Some 13.47 million couples got married in 2013 but by 2023 the number had fallen to 7.68 million, the lowest annual figure since 1985 when comparable records began.
Those who are getting wed are doing so later than before, with the average age for first marriages now over 30 in the biggest cities. I asked a woman, who has been on Beijing’s dating scene for longer than she wishes, why men like Lei were so resistant to pressure from their parents to marry.
“Because they know that as soon as they get married, the pressure will be on to have a child,” she said.
The fall in China’s birth rate has been even more dramatic than the decline of marriage, with just 9.02 million babies born in 2023 compared with 17.86 million in 2016.
This month parents of children under three years old received their first payment under a scheme worth Rmb3,600 a year for each child.
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The government says this will cover about 14 per cent of the average cost of taking care of a child but parents are sceptical. And few believe the subsidy will be enough to persuade more people to get married and have children.
Women in China are putting off marriage and childbirth because they cherish their freedom and more of them are rising higher and faster in their careers than in their mothers’ generation. For both men and women, the cost and pressure of educating children in China’s highly competitive system is another disincentive.
As the light began to fade and the air cooled, Lei and I sat by the lake watching the paddle boats make their last few laps. I asked him if he could imagine being married now or being happy with someone.
“I could have imagined it with her,” he said.
I was about to ask him why he didn’t just get in touch with her and see her again without saying anything to his parents. But as I started to open my mouth he gave me a steady look and I decided, unlike his parents, to leave him alone and mind my own business.
