It became legal for students to wed 10 years ago but some young couples find it tough to adapt

Fan Jingyu, a junior student at Xi'an International Studies University in Northwest China's Shaanxi province, married her boyfriend in 2013. Just eight years earlier, it would have been impossible for the two undergraduates to wed.

Until 2005, Chinese undergraduates were not allowed by law to marry while studying at university. Ministry of Education regulations at the time stipulated that if they decided to marry, they had to quit college.

Hubei University sophomore Song Zhenhua's husband carries her out of a dormitory to their wedding in 2012. Chen Yong / For China Daily

 

But this began to change in 2005, when the ministry scrapped the rule, saying that undergraduates' freedom to wed would no longer be restricted under China's Marriage Law and Marriage Registration Regulations.

The new rule, which took effect from September that year, meant that undergraduates - men aged 22 and above, and women aged 20 and above - could get married as they wished, like other Chinese citizens.

Fan, 24, says she was lucky to have been studying at a time when the ban was lifted. "Otherwise, I would have had to make a choice between marriage and study."

She met her future husband when she went to study at the University of Sao Paulo, in Brazil, as a one-year exchange student in 2012. He was a student at that university and is three years older than her.

"We soon fell in love and went to register for marriage in San Paulo a year later, before I returned to China," says Fan, who graduated from the Xi'an university last year and now lives and works in the Brazilian city.

She says that when she married she did not have to comply with any procedures from her university.

"I was not asked to hand in any applications I just told my teachers and classmates I was getting married and all of them wished me a happy marriage."

Lao Kaisheng, director-general of the National Research Society of Education Policies and Laws, welcomes the abolition of the restriction.