Breaking Up Is Easy To Do

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Until last year, Chen Hong considered divorce an exotic American concept, as far removed from her life in Shanghai as gastric-bypass surgery or an addiction to reality-TV shows. Then she checked out her husband's cell-phone records. Hundreds of calls had been made to a mysterious number, sometimes just minutes after Chen left for work or took her daughter out to play. Like most Chinese women, Chen had abided by Confucian tradition, which advises that a virtuous wife should serve her husband like God, no matter what. But Confucius lived centuries ago, and Chen, 42, is a telecommunications executive with a good salary. "I want to get divorced," she says. "That's the only way my life will have hope again." (Chen's name has been changed to protect the privacy of her husband.)

It wasn't so long ago that acting on such an impulse in China was rare or even illegal. Ending a marriage in China has long been considered shameful, and for years the ruling communist cadres forbade almost all couples to divorce, viewing it as a symptom of capitalism's fickleness. (The injunction evidently didn't apply to Chairman Mao Zedong, who married three times and had dozens of dalliances.) In 1980 only about 3,000 couples divorced in Shanghai, China's largest city. But as economic reforms have loosened the party's grip on people's lives and ushered in Western attitudes, divorce rates have soared, particularly in urban areas. A study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences last year found that for every two couples who got married in Beijing, another untied the knot. Nationwide, the number of divorces skyrocketed 67% from 2000 to 2005 to approximately 2 million, with at least 120,000 more couples splitting up last year than the year before. "Divorce used to be a bad concept associated with a Western, capitalist society, and we thought that people in a socialist society should lead happier lives," says Xu Anqi, a sociologist at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. "But it turns out that the negative influence of divorce is actually quite small."

Sociologists in the West may debate whether divorce is so harmless, but there's little question that the Chinese no longer feel bound by the death-do-us-part ideal of marriage. Even the government has reconciled itself to the trend, simplifying the process in 2003 from a months-long ordeal to a jaunt to the civil-affairs bureau that can take just 15 minutes. With so many young couples dissolving their unions, a new term has crept into the Chinese lexicon: flash divorces--partnerships that last as long as the average Hollywood romance. "It may be the seven-year itch in the West, but it's the one-year itch in China," says Eva Wong, president of Top Human Technology, which runs relationship workshops in several Chinese cities. "Life in China has changed so fast that if things aren't new or exciting, people just end their marriages instead of working through their problems."