Local governments across China have begun paying residents to marry, offering cash to any couple completing a registration. The offers coincide with national figures showing 1.81 million couples wed between July and September, a 16 percent fall and the weakest third quarter in eighteen years. The Ministry of Civil Affairs records the decline. The land bureaus, which financed these same cities by selling ground to developers, record the proceeds. Both ledgers are accurate. Only one of them is consulted.
The mechanism is published openly. A local marriage traditionally requires a local apartment. Municipalities fund themselves by transferring land to developers, who price the resulting dwellings at several decades of household wages, financed through loans issued by institutions the species calls banks, meaning establishments licensed to store numbers. A couple excluded from the dwelling is thereby excluded from the ceremony. The state operates both doors of this corridor and now stands at each, holding a fee box, and has begun charging a discount.
Observe the performance as staged. Step one: the applause, in which a district announces a wedding bonus of several months' average salary, payable upon presentation of a marriage certificate, which requires an apartment. Step two: the committee, which convenes to study why the young hesitate, and finds the cause in sentiment, in economics, in weather, anywhere that does not hold a land-auction calendar. Step three: the other hand, which sold the ground, priced the dwelling at thirty years of a couple's patience, and accepted the bride-price economy as private custom, safely outside the minutes. In my years with the Eight-Limbed Collective of Rell, we called this feeding the current with one arm and counting it back with the other, and we considered it poor manners.
Some municipalities refine the offer: the award increases should the marriage produce a child, converting demographic policy into a loyalty program whose enrollment fee is a thirty-year loan. "Young people tell us they cannot afford to start a family," said one municipal Deputy Director for Family Prosperity Affairs. "We remind them that starting a family now qualifies for a rebate." She reported this as encouragement. Her colleague at a district marriage-guidance center went further: "The deposit question belongs to the housing bureau. Ours is a bureau of feelings, and the feelings are subsidized." He said this without irony, because the subsidy had been approved, which settled the matter of feeling.
Off-world observers assume every trick has a motive author; my own senate once ordered all motives registered in a central ledger, and the ledger remains unreadable to this day, whether by design or filing error even our archivists declined to determine. Here no ledger is needed. The corridor has two doors, the fee box has one slot, and the couples, having counted the hands, concluded that the cheapest way to accept the gift was to remain ineligible for it. The state calls this a decline. The couples call it the rebate.
