Li Xu, a farmer from Ningling County, Henan Province, asked for a divorce at a local court earlier this year. But what he really wanted was to find his wife Zhang Yan, who lives in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province.

Li and Zhang met in 2011 in their mid-20s, while Zhang was living with her one-year-old daughter Xin Xin after a divorce. This was the only time they met before their marriage 20 days later. Zhang left Ningling to work in Hangzhou in 2013, leaving Xin Xin to the care of Li's parents.

According to Li, his wife drifted farther and farther from him after leaving for Hangzhou. Zhang took all her belongings and her daughter back to Hangzhou with her last year.

"I would like to have a baby with her. Then our marriage will last," Li told a local judge in charge of mediating the couple's relations, the last procedure to save a marriage according to law in China.

Zhang came back and refused the court's mediation firmly and said: "I came to end the marriage, and nothing else."

Zhang wore fashionable clothes in sharp contrast to Li. They divorced on March 22.

Wei Feng, president of the Ningling court said: "Such things are common in the villages now. Some young farmers broaden their vision when they work as migrant workers in big cities. They care more about individuality. Some people's marriages are in crisis because of the distance."

The Ningling court set up a domestic relations court in March 2014 to handle cases of divorce, inheritance, family violence, etc. Wang Hongwei, chief judge of the court said the divorce rate among young people born after 1980 increases every year. The county has a population of about 600,000. The number of divorce case the court handled increased from 339 in 2013 to 460 in 2015. Among the divorce cases, about 85 percent are people below 35 years old.

According to the court, more women propose to divorce than men in these cases. In 2015, 281 women initiated divorces, in comparison with 179 men. Apart from economic and personality reasons, living habits, physical appearances and responsibilities for children and the elderly are also becoming decisive causes for divorce. About 15 percent of the divorces occur in marriages of less than three years. Young people are not willing to compromise in marriage. Divorces among the people in their second or third marriage are also not rare.

Gender imbalance is obvious in Ningling, as local traditional culture prefers boys to girls. According to the county government, the male-female ratio in Ningling from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s was an astounding 186:100. Wang Wenli, a civil affairs department official in Ningling government, said this means that about 40 percent of men in Ningling will remain single all their lives if they don't marry a woman from out of the county.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, the number of men was about 34 million more than women on the Chinese mainland by the end of 2014, the gender ratio among the people born in the 1980s being about 136:100.

On one hand, the gender imbalance increases the amount of betrothal money that the male's family is expected to give the female's family to show the importance of the marriage. Many families cannot afford the betrothal money, which can be as high as 100,000 yuan (US$15,000) in some poor countryside regions, where the residents have only recently been lifted out of poverty.

Lin Yijie is another farmer from Ningling who works as a migrant worker. His parents found him a woman to marry. Lin and the woman married this January. But his wife refused any intimate behavior and disappeared two weeks after their marriage. Lin paid 167,000 yuan's betrothal money to the woman's family for the marriage. The court in Ningling found the 24-year-old woman had three marriages before meeting Lin. But according to law, Lin cannot get all of his betrothal money back, even if his divorce application is approved.

Experts have urged the government and social organizations in places like Ningling to provide young migrant workers with tutorship on love affairs and marriage and family issues, so as to prevent soaring divorce rates from evolving into a serious social issue.

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