Five charts about the fortunes of the Chinese family 中国家庭财富的5张图表
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As China's most powerful decision-makers meet to set the course of the nation for the next five years and a new generation of leaders emerges, we look at data from Chinese authorities and major surveys, to get some clues about how China's family life and society is changing.
In 2015, the government threw out its notorious one child policy which had been intended to keep population figures low but had led to a crippling gender imbalance.
So while now the door is open for more kids and bigger families, a look at marriage and divorce rates increasingly shows the same trend as the rest of the developed world: Marriage rates are falling while more and more people end up divorced.
Yet this first impression might be misleading.
"China has always had and is still having a much lower divorce rate than US and western European countries," Xuan Li, assistant professor of psychology at New York University Shanghai, explains.
"A much higher percentage of mainland Chinese people marry eventually, in comparison to those in neighbouring areas and countries. So the idea that the Chinese families (and ergo, the society and nation) are falling apart is statistically ungrounded."
China might have overturned its one-child policy in 2015 yet its legacy will continue to be a problem for years to come. There is even a term for unmarried men over 30: Shengnan, meaning "leftover men".
In 2015, a Chinese businessman in his 40s reportedly sued a Shanghai-based introductions agency for failing to find him a wife, having paid the company 7m yuan to conduct an extensive search.
"China's one-child policy advanced and amplified a demographic transition," explains Louis Kuijs of Oxford Economics. "Falling birth rates and an aging population have been exerting downward pressure on the labour force and thus on economic growth."
"Although the one-child policy was changed in January 2016 into a two-child policy, higher birth rates now will only show up in the labour force in around two decades," he estimates.
But higher standards of living are slowly affecting traditional gender perceptions and that in turn will have a positive effect on the gender imbalance.
"The gender imbalance is already changing," said Mu Zheng of the Centre for Family and Population Research at National University of Singapore.
"That's because of the relaxed fertility policy, changing attitudes, women's advanced profiles in both education and work, and with a more established social security system,"
But for now, the current gender imbalance does make it hard for men to find wives.
Amid the constant talk about China's housing bubble about to burst, here's a detail that stands out: Among millennials, China has a towering percentage of homeowners, a different league it seems from European countries or the US.
While the above data largely covers urban China, it still illustrates a crucial point: parents are trying whatever they can to equip their sons with some added extras to woo women into wedlock.
"It is the custom that husbands will provide a home," said Dr Jieyu Liu, deputy director of the SOAS China Institute.
"Many love stories fail to turn to marriage if the men fail to provide a marital house."
So once charm, luck or a property have helped China's singles get hitched - what is life like for families?
China's average income has seen a steady rise, both in rural and in urban areas. While the relative expenses on food have dropped significantly over the past decade, the money spent on things like health, clothes or transport has gone up. The same goes for communications. The surge in mobile phones illustrates that point.
Smartphones are not just another communications expense - the WeChat app for instance is so woven into everyday routines that life without a phone is virtually unthinkable.
"WeChat is designed as an app that is like a toolkit for life, sort of a digital Swiss Army knife," Beijing-based tech analyst Duncan Clark of ABI Research explains.
He says consumers have been embracing the convenience of it covering everything from paying utility bills, cashless payments in shops, taxis and bike rentals, money transfers and of course - communication.
Higher incomes translate into more money spent on children's education and recent years have shown a steady rise in parents sending their children overseas to study. What's more, they are coming back.
"A large proportion of these students are returning to China, with 433,000 having returned in 2016," explains Rajiv Biswas, APAC chief economist at analytics firm IHS Markit.
This rapidly growing pool of Chinese graduates with international degrees and experience of living abroad will make the next generation of Chinese business and government leaders "very international in their thinking and understanding of other cultures, which will be increasingly important as China assumes the mantle of the world's largest economy in about a decade".
And while a degree from a European or US university is likely to boost your chances on the job market - it might also drive up your chances of bagging the right partner.
中国家庭财富的5张图表
5年来，中国变得更加富有、更加强大。但这对普通中国家庭的命运和财富意味着什么呢？我们观察了中国政府的数据以及主要的调查结果，希望能够了解中国家庭生活和社会变化的迹象。
2015年，中国放弃了旨在限制人口数量的计划生育政策。现在，生育更多孩子、建立更加庞大的家庭的大门已经敞开。对于结婚率和离婚率的观察愈发显现出与其他发达国家相同的趋势：结婚率不断下降，越来越多的人离婚。然而，第一印象有可能会误导。上海纽约大学的助理教授崔丽弦(音)说：“中国的离婚率在过去和现在都比美国和其他西欧国家低。与邻国相比，中国人结婚率更高。因此，有关中国家庭正在解体的说法在统计学上是站不住脚的。”
尽管当前的性别失衡使得男性很难找到妻子，但更高的生活标准也正在缓慢地影响传统的性别观念，这转而也对性别平衡带来了积极影响。新加坡国立大学家庭与人口研究中心的郑穆(音)说：“性别不平衡已经发生改变。女性在教育和工作中的地位得到提升，社会保险体系更加完备。”
房子是中国百姓非常在意的一个话题，在谈到中国的房价泡沫即将破灭时，一个细节凸显了出来：在中国的千禧一代中，拥有住房的人的比例很高(70%)，远高于美国(35%)、英国(31%)等西方国家。
那么，在中国，结婚后的家庭生活是什么样子呢？中国的平均收入正在稳步上升，无论是农村地区还是城市地区。过去10年间，食物支出比例相对而言大幅度下降，不过，通信领域的支出正在上升，手机数量的大幅度增长便是证明。在中国手机早已不再是单一的通信工具，它覆盖了生活的方方面面。
此外，更高的收入使得家庭对于子女教育的投资增加。近年来，越来越多的父母把孩子送到海外学习。此外，留学生们也开始回流。环球视点市场咨询公司亚太区首席经济学家拉吉夫•比斯瓦斯(音)说：“这些学生中有很大一部分选择回国，2016年，有43.3万人回国。”他说，拥有国际学位和海外生活经历的中国毕业生的人数迅速增长，这使得中国下一代企业和政府领导人的思维更加国际化，并能够理解他国文化。在中国未来十年即将成为全球最大经济体之际，这正在变得愈发重要。