Marriage Law of the Peoples Republic of China (1950)

The Marriage Law of the People's Republic of China, effective May 1, 1950, was the new communist government's first major piece of social legislation, replacing the arranged and often forced marriages of imperial and Republican-era China with a civil marriage system based on free choice and mutual consent. It set the minimum marriage age at 20 for men and 18 for women, banned marriage by proxy and concubinage, and for the first time gave women the right to divorce. Enforcing it took years of government education campaigns, and by the mid-1950s most Chinese marriages were being formally registered under it; it was superseded by a revised marriage law in 1980 and formally repealed when China's Civil Code took effect in 2021.