Technology Slice Blog

Marriage Database China - China's increasingly mobile society has seen a significant increase in the number of people taking second spouses, and the illegal practice of bigamy has been made a lot easier by the lack of a nationwide database of marriage records. Some 23 provinces have already set up their own intra-provincial marriage database systems and a system covering the whole country should be ready by the end of 2015, vice-minister of Civil Affairs Dou Yupei told the China Daily . “It will not only provide technical support to improve our marriage management and services, but also will act as a protective screen against illegal acts, such as bigamy and the concealment of marriage,” Mr Dou said. In one of the more spectacular cases, Qiu Xiaohua, the former head of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), was labelled a “vile social and political influence” and expelled from the Communist Party for bigamy in 2007. Meanwhile, the Guizhou Metropolis Daily reported the ca...