MY 70-something grandmother never misses a minute of the TV program lao niang jiu (literally "Old Uncle," meaning mediator), airing daily at 6:30pm.

On this program, parties with disputes, often estranged married couples, voice their grievances to be resolved by lao niang jiu.

I seldom watch these programs. I'm sick of watching people laying bare their private issues on TV and seeking resolution - if they get solved at all. The public outpouring of very private feelings, recriminations, quick tears, contrived hysteria ... fill me with disbelief.

But my grandma, perhaps moved by empathy, thinks differently: "The quarrels in the shows also happened between your grandpa and me. It feels good to see them resolved by lao niang jiu."

Unlike Westerners who often seek divorce when marital problems become too bitter to swallow, the litigation-shy Chinese traditionally bring in a lao niang jiu when a marriage sours but possibly can be salvaged.

In view of the rising divorce rate in China, the role of mediators should be strengthened and expanded, according to Hei Xinwen, a delegate to the National People's Congress.

Hei, a senior executive at a Chongqing computer company, proposed to the congress on Tuesday that divorce procedures be made more difficult by reintroducing now-defunct mediation and making it mandatory.

She referred to the mediations that were common in the 1960s and 1970s when China was a planned economy with the danwei system at its core. Danwei means work unit. Under the danwei system, couples seeking divorce had to obtain permission from their work units, neighborhood committees or village committees.

This often brought blatant intrusion, into people's private affairs. Moreover, divorce at that time carried a stigma: it could damage reputation, ruin chances for advancement and bring unbearable shame to his or her family.

Couples would rather resign themselves to loveless dysfunctional marriages than risk humiliation by going public with their failed relationships. As a result, divorce rates were as low as 2 percent in 1970s, said renowned sociologist Li Yinhe in an interview with Guangzhou Daily published on Wednesday.

Thirty years of rapid social changes have also seen divorce rates increasing tenfold from the 1970s to 20 percent today, said Li.

Last year alone, 1.71 million Chinese couples got divorced, a jump of 10.3 percent over 2008, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs. That doesn't include couples who split after failed mediation.

So alarming is the surging divorce tide that some people, like Hei Xinwen, are campaigning for restoration of the old mediation system. Of the growing army of divorce applicants, young people opting for break-ups on the spur of the moment are swelling its ranks, Hei noted. Interventions by co-workers and neighbors might prompt unhappy couples to think twice before splitting up, Hei told the Chongqing Evening News on Tuesday.

Even if Hei's proposal did see the light of day, its impact would be "very limited," since divorce is now more or less a personal choice, said Xu Anqi, a veteran researcher on family and divorce issues with the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

Xu rejects the stereotypical notion that young couples, especially the post-1980s generation, are the main source of the dramatic rise in divorce. "The common perception of young people as hedonists behaving irresponsibly in marriages is often created by media exaggeration," Xu told Shanghai Daily on Wednesday.

Indeed, divorce rates are on the rise, but that's not a bad thing per se. "Compared to the past, when people avoided divorce like the plague, they can now exercise their free will when it comes to termination of marriages that don't work out," said Xu.

Xu vigorously refutes another widespread misconception - divorce is a "malady" only endemic in prosperous and coastal areas, where people are more exposed to Western ideas of marriage freedom and quick divorce.

In fact, the far-flung Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region has consistently topped the divorce rate table for years. It ranked first in 2008, followed by the three northeastern rust-belt provinces: Jilin, Heilongjiang and Liaoning. Shanghai came in sixth with an annual ratio of 248 divorced couples among 100,000 couples, following southwestern Chongqing Municipality, according to Xu. However, divorce rates in Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces - China's manufacturing powerhouses - are among the lowest in the country.

Xu does not support making divorce proceedings long, drawn out and costly, saying it wouldn't deter people intent on divorce. Despite legal hurdles, the US still has the highest divorce rates in the world. By contrast, Japanese couples need only to fax their signed divorce agreements to civil affairs bureaucrats, but even so divorce rates in Japan are very low.

A more effective way to tackle the rising divorce rate, Xu argued, is to introduce marriage counseling by professional psychologists, who also can mediate. "Right now only a few certificated psychologists are assisting traditional mediators in settling marital disputes," Xu said.

There are already some encouraging signs. Shanghai's Civil Affairs Bureau recently launched a free service - psychological marriage counseling - aimed at reducing ill-conceived divorces. It's a pilot program in Xuhui, Yangpu and Putuo districts.

"We have teamed up with the district's Women's Federation. They field a squad of psychologists for mediation. With their help we were able to save many marriages," Li Haifeng, an official with Xuhui District's Civil Affairs Bureau, said in a telephone interview.

Perhaps focusing entirely on China's divorce problem misses the bigger picture. After all, we are now entering an era characterized not only by high divorce rates, but also by quiet acceptance of "leftover girls" (in their late 20s and 30s) and the once intolerable extramarital affairs.

According to a spot survey by Xu, the sociologist, of 500 divorced local couples, 75.4 percent of the divorces were caused by the gap between women's expectations of their Mr Right and the reality. Shanghai women are notoriously demanding in choosing a mate. They seldom marry below their station and have many other requirements. Breakups would seem inevitable, given unrealistic expectations.

To say the rising divorce rate doesn't augur well for China's future is premature. The bizarre idea of mandated, intrusive interventions is the last measure people would accept.