Seven-year itch cut to three in 40 percent of divorces

Ge Tian, the ex-wife of Liu Xiang, cries as she arrives in Beijing at midnight Thursday, following her divorce from the former star hurdler, June 25, 2015. [Photo/IC]

Another major contributor to the high rate may be that improved legal system makes divorce a lot easier. After its revision in 2003, China's new marriage registration regulation simplified the divorce procedures and reduced its cost, which led to a hike in divorce rate in 2004 with 1.665 million couples choosing to divorce that year.

Additionally, the emergence of fake divorce in recent years in exchange for more benefits such as demolition compensation, more homes or evading the husband-and-wife common debts may also account for the rising divorce rate. Statistics show that 14,574 more couple were divorced in 2010 in the eastern city of Nanjing than the previous year after house purchase restrictions took effect in October of 2010 capping the maximum number of houses a couple can own.

Besides, modern people have high expectations and more emotional demands for marriage, but fail to develop more skills to bridge the long-existing communication gap between women and men as articulated in the book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. Adding that women are becoming more independent financially and the society is also becoming increasingly tolerant of divorcees. More unhappy couples choose to divorce to give themselves a second chance at happiness.

The steadily rising divorce rate is not something unique to China. Data released by Japan's Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare in early 2015 showed that the divorce rate in the country was 1.77, or 1.77 out of 1,000 people, taking the sixth spot and just ahead of Italy, which had 0.91 rate. The other top six countries were Russia, the US, Germany, Britain and France with the divorce rate of 4.5, 3.6, 2.19, 2.05 and 1.97 respectively.

What's more, high divorce rate doesn't necessarily mean modern people lose faith in marriage because though many choose to remarry, governments rarely keep track of the remarriage rate.