THE freedom to get married is one of the basic rights that citizens are endowed with. However, the former complicated marriage registration process in China sometimes used to make this freedom less than easy to achieve.

Intending couples not only had to get signatures from their employers by presenting their marriage applications but also had to go to appointed medical health care centres to have compulsory pre-marital check-ups as required by the marriage registration offices.

The new Regulations on the Management of Marriage Registration issued on August 18, surprisingly, stipulated that the two former mandatory procedures would now be optional. The Shanghai Star devoted a large space to give full play to the disputes that led to the new regulations.

The reforms were acclaimed as an important step in the nation's development, since the changes meant less interference with individual freedom and a return of people's rights to the people themselves. However, the reforms also raised some new worries.

In China, many people are not in the habit of taking regular physical check-ups. Due to a widespread lack of medical knowledge, many don't even know which diseases would have a negative effect on an intention to get married, especially those relevant to child bearing.

In order to avoid having unhealthy babies, which can be one of the reasons leading to unhappy marriages, pre-marital check-ups should be treated in a more reasonable way. As one expert pointed out, what the new regulations abolished was not the pre-marital check-up itself, but the element of compulsion.

As for the cancellation of the company certificates approving marriages, people held different views.

Under the market economy, people are regarded as part of the wider society, instead of just components of as a work unit, as emphasized under the former planned economy. This change, therefore, became a challenge to the old practices where marital affairs and the education of workers' children could be interfered with by workplaces because people were attached to one work unit for their whole working life.

The new regulations, indeed, promoted the freedom of individuals and protected their privacy but some experts believed that the time was still not ripe to repeal the old regulations. Some were also worried that the new system allowed more chances for bigamy. After all, ID cards and hukou books were not sufficient to prove one's marital status and most people didn't have the social awareness to get the information on these two documents updated voluntarily.

These worries were verified soon by the rapidly increased number of marriages after the new regulations were put into practice in October. In Guangzhou, for example, more than 3,000 couples registered to be married during the one-week national holidays when the new regulation was implemented. However, only one couple in 40 had a pre-marital physical check-up although many hospitals had planned various services for the convenience of intending couples.

In addition, the nation's online marital status information had not been connected which made it difficult for marriage registration offices to detect married people who still had "single" in their hukou or ID cards and who might attempt a second marriage before ending their first.