Drawing on data from 2016 China Family Panel Studies, this paper uses survival analysis to examine premarital cohabitation and its impacts on marriage and childbearing behaviors. The results indicate: (1) Despite a quick transition into marital union, premarital cohabitation has a postponement effect on first marriage, which influences males to a larger extent. After controlling for selectivity by propensity score matching, premarital cohabitation no longer delays women‘’s marriage but still affects that of men. Over cohorts, the impacts of premarital cohabitation on marriage change in magnitude and direction, reflecting its heterogeneity. (2) Although marriage and childbearing are still closely related, women who have cohabited premaritally tend to prolong their transition into motherhood. Despite a squeezing effect of marriage delay on fertility timing, premarital cohabitators are not affected. These findings not only suggest that Chinas family systems are characterized by a combination of modernity and traditionality, but also have implications for public policies in the realm of marriage and childbearing during the Second Demographic Transition.

This study explores how to use the online public opinion big data to infer the transition of fertility intention propensity of Chinese web-users. By comparing the results from the simple sentiment analysis, the LDA un-supervised classification, and the fasttext supervised classification, it is found that the supervised classification based on the theory of planned behavior yields more accurate and meaningful results. A change from the positive to negative dominant mood of fertility intention has occurred since 2012, during which there is a shift of topics. The comments regarding perceived controls have replaced those related to behavioral beliefs as the most popular ones for fertility. Housing price, children's education, and work are the most mentioned key words in the category of perceived controls. The strong correlation between fertility intention propensity and fertility level among Chinese provinces validates our fertility intention analyses. We also discuss the prospect of applying public opinion big data in demographic research.