China's 2005 divorce rate was 2.76 per 1,000 people. But for 2006 the figure is likely to be 1.3 per 1,000. A rekindling of the initial love felt between two people possibly? 

For years the official divorce rate released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) was calculated based on the number of divorcees.

To the discomfiture of many in China, the rate was uncomfortably close to the 3.7 per 1,000 in the United States and higher than the figure of 2 per 1,000 for Japan and South Korea.

Now, to the relief of many, the true picture will emerge by basing the figures on the number of divorced couples instead of divorcees. This is an internationally-followed practice.

According to official figures, there were 1.61 million divorced couples last year and using the new method of calculation this puts the divorce rate at 1.3 per 1,000. If the calculations were extrapolated to 2005, the figure would have been 1.38 rather than  2.76.

The statistical correction came about thanks to the tireless efforts of senior researcher Xu Anqi at the Marriage and Family Institute of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. For years she's waged a lone battle to get the "mistake" corrected.

She started to correspond with various organizations such as the NBS, the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the Supreme People's Court from the 1990s, but many officials felt the miscalculation wouldn't cause any problems, she said.

"I strongly disagreed with them," she said. "Based on the wrong statistics, many sensational research reports came out. For example, some even suggested that the divorce rate in China had surpassed that in the United States."

She said that many UN and internationally-renowned research institutes used the official statistics. This caused a lot of international misunderstanding about marriage in China.

But her determined efforts have been rewarded and the 2006 Yearbook of Population Studies, to be released soon, will use the correct method of calculation.

He Feng, a gender studies researcher at Fudan University said, "Xu's effort is crucial to sociological studies. We always do a lot of horizontal comparisons of statistics between China and other countries. We should live up to global standards."

(China Daily January 26, 2007)