US Edition The Chinese government is to relax its traditional hold over the private lives of its subjects by allowing them to marry without the permission of their bosses.
In an outburst of apparent liberalism that may yet prove double-edged, the government has published three lengthy documents dealing with marriage laws and population control.
From Oct 1, applications for marriage will no longer have to be approved by the bride and groom's work units, while the health examinations currently forced on both will also cease to be compulsory.
Aids sufferers and others with infectious diseases will no longer be banned from marrying. State media said the measures were aimed at bringing the law up to date with modern China and a growing acceptance that people were entitled to a private life.
At the same time, the government published an agenda for dealing with broader population issues which hinted at reforms to the one-child policy. But there is no suggestion it might be scrapped, or what solutions might be found to a series of growing problems linked to it, other than a huge surveillance programme for much of the population.
By the start of China's reform era, work units and residents' party committees were all powerful and usually puritan arbiters of social as well as political life.
In some places they still have the power, rarely exercised, to fine unmarried couples found sharing a room.
According to Xinhua, the state news agency, the new rules are an acknowledgement that times have moved on. Over the past decades, China's marriage system has gone through a series of changes which have so far ignored the individual's marriage rights and privacy, it said. Under the new rules, people wanting to wed will only have to provide their identity cards and residence permits, and promise that they are not already married.
It will remain illegal for the mentally ill to marry, but a judgment on the candidates in this regard will apparently be left to officials on the spot.
Divorce has also been liberalised, with permission from work units again no longer being required. There is, however, no change in the law banning homosexual marriage.
The law may be linked in at least one aspect to the lengthy agenda Xinhua also outlines for the new State Family Planning and Population Commission. To prevent bigamy, the marriage law announces the launch of what will be a vast database making it possible to check the entire population's marital status on the internet.
Meanwhile, the commission intends to create a similar nationwide data bank on women of childbearing age.
The two, combined with proposals to replace the current identity card with a computer chip smart card covering both personal details and social benefits, will provide the government with a vast technical apparatus to monitor, reward and punish its subjects' social choices.
The report on the commission's work hints that current moves towards providing carrots as well as sticks, such as giving financial rewards to couples who have only one child even where they are entitled to two, may be extended.
Xinhua also admits some of the problems attributed by foreign agencies, though not itself, to the one-child policy.
The male-female birth ratio is now 117:100 owing to the preference of parents for boys and consequent prenatal gender selection, abandonment and non-registration of girls.
The proportion of the population aged over 65 is likely to reach a fifth by the middle of the century, the report adds, while the huge migrant population is exerting its own pressures. Policy changes are set to reach beyond current birth control measures to tackle a much wider range of population-related problems, Xinhua comments.
The new commission replaces the old Family Planning Commission, which implemented the one-child policy with sometimes savage rigour, enforcing abortions, fining miscreants and demolishing the houses of repeat offenders.
The new commission, Xinhua adds, will have even more power in the administration.