A recent proposal to lower China's legal marriagable age to 18 has stirred heated discussion.

Huang Xihua, a deputy to the National People's Congress (NPC), said at the NPC's ongoing legislative session that the legal marriageable age should be lowered in order to provide more options for young people.

"Male greatly when marries, female greatly when marries," the legislator cited a well-known Chinese saying.

Cheng Fangzhou, a student from Jinan University who was interviewed by a local news program for her research on the topic, said she found that the present legal marriageable age in China (20 for females, 22 for males) is too high in comparison to that of other countries, after consulting scores of books on marriage laws in foreign countries.

The legal marriageable age is 15 in France, 14 in Russia, 12 in Netherlands and only 9 in Iran. China has the highest legal marriageable age in the world.

Many other university students across the country have sided with Huang and Cheng, conducting their own surveys and researching the possible effects of lowering the legal marriageable age.

Bai Ling, a student at Sichuan International Studies University, said his research indicates that while the limitation has little effect on urban youth at institutions of higher learning, who typically reach the legal marriageable age by the time they graduate, the limit might be too high for rural people who enter the workforce after finishing middle school.

His remark was echoed by Gu Jun, a professor at Shanghai University. Gu said the proposal mainly targets rural residents who begin working at a younger age and is not meant to encourage people to marry at a young age.

Lowering the limit could better meet the needs of migrant workers, who typically marry and conceive children earlier in their lives than college graduates, Gu said.

"Some of the concerns, such as being able to pay housing debts and shoulder the burden of a family at the age of 18, are reasonable," Gu said.

"However, if people do not possess the ability to take on these responsibilities, they can simply choose to marry later," Gu said.

Zhang Jie, a student at Wuhan University, also agreed that lowering the limit does not pose any danger, but could instead protect the interests of many young people around the country.

Qin Jie, a 24-year-old employee at a Beijing law firm, said she believes that people who are old enough to take on the responsibility of supporting a family have the right to decide when they can get married.

"Some people might break the law to change their ages or just live together to bear a child," Qin said. "It will probably create more trouble than just lowering the legal limit."

However, a survey on Weibo.com, a popular Chinese microblogging site, indicated little preference either way. Of the survey's 26,674 respondents, 44.2 percent said they are against the proposal, while a close 42.1 percent said they support it.

A netizen who called himself Niruoanhao strongly opposed the proposal, saying he would feel "ashamed" if younger people marry at only 18 as he is already 28 years old.

In the meantime, demographers widely believe that the lowering of marriageable age would not help address the imbalance of male to female population, a big headache for China with a larger population than any other country in the world.

By 2020, the number of males of marriageable age is estimated to be 30 million more than females China.

Whether to put forward a new law should depend on what rights would be infringed upon and what interests would be safeguarded, said some legislators attending the parliamentary session.

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