China’s National Bureau of Statistics records a 3.78-year rise in the average (both-sexes) age at first marriage between 2010 and 2020 (24.89 to 28.67 years), making delayed marriage the modal experience in urban China rather than a deviant choice. A 2021 Sixth Tone report on a Communist Youth League survey of 2,905 unmarried urbanites aged 18-26 found that about 44% of women said they do not plan to marry (versus nearly 25% of men), and 30.5% of respondents said they “do not believe in marriage.” The most-cited reasons were practical rather than aspirational: 60.8% said it was difficult to find the right person, 56.2% cited the cost of having children, and 46% cited the financial cost of marriage. This 44% figure measures marriage-aversion intent, not regret about having delayed — the survey carries no distress or regret rate, so the action-side number reflects how common the delay/skip path now is, not how many who took it regret it.
On the inaction side, South China Morning Post reporting on a CCTV survey found that almost one in five married women in China (~20%) said they regret getting married in 2020, up from 12% in 2017 and 9% in 2012. The survey found dissatisfaction highest among wives currently aged 36-45 — a breakdown by current age, which the researcher attributes to being at the most tiring stage of life, not by age at marriage. A Frontiers in Public Health study documents the lengthening of marital duration and the structural delay of marriage in China from 1982 to 2015, but does not measure satisfaction or regret by age at marriage.
Because the two sides measure different things — intent not to marry versus self-reported marriage regret — the apparent action_dominates gap (44% vs. 20%) should be read with caution: it indicates that not-planning-to-marry is more prevalent than regretting marriage, not that delaying causes more regret than marrying. This entry is flagged proxy_only for that reason. China’s fertility rate, which fell to roughly 1.0 in 2023 — among the lowest ever recorded nationally — is widely attributed to educated urban women’s response to the documented career and personal costs of early marriage and motherhood. Neither figure comes from a direct bilateral “do you regret your marriage timing?” survey.