Today, Fangbei community in Hebei province's Shijiazhuang City has a couple, Zhang Jiuyu and Guo Changlan, whose marriage of 80 years and 14 days have broken the world's record on longest marriage.

This noon, 96 year old couple Zhang Jiuyu and Guo Changlan, accompanied by their family, happily took part in the celebration. Zhang Jiuyu, the old man spotting a crop of white hair, still has penetrating eyes and high spirits. He only suffered mild hearing loss. When reporters communicated with him in writing, the old man answered in a loud voice. His thought process was alert and he remembered many past events that he was happy to recount. His wife Guo Changlan suffered a cerebral thrombosis last April and had difficulty in moving about and sat nearby quietly.

According to the family of the old couple, they were married on October 8, 1925 when they were both 16. Now they have been married for more than 80 years. When asked how they managed to live so long and keep up their marriage, Zhang Jiuyu said the most critical factor was keeping a happy frame of mind. When he was young, he liked sports activity such as soccer. When he became older, he switched to walking. Today he still insists on daily practicing a set of calisthenics he created. Guo Changlan never held an outside job in her life. She dedicated herself to household work, helping raise her children and helping her husband, without complaints and never losing her temper. Zhang Jiuyu said, "We never got angry with each other even once in our entire life."

When asked about their regular daily diet, Zhang Jiuyu seemed quite proud when he said "the meals I consumed are quite different from others. For breakfast I eat two eggs, half a pound of milk, one piece of yam and a piece of carrot."

A new family planning reward policy is to be introduced in 23 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions across the country this year.

According to the new policy, rural couples with only one child or two daughters will be eligible for a cash reward of no less than 600 yuan (72 dollars) each year when they are 60 years old. The reward will last for the rest of their lives.

In east China's Anhui Province, which began practicing the new policy recently, approximately 50,000 rural seniors are eligible for the cash reward this year, according to the Anhui Provincial Committee for Family Planning.

The province also stipulates that those who have only one daughter or whose only child died can get 240 yuan (29 US dollars) more.

The strategy of promoting care for girls and rewarding farmers for following the national family planning policy aims to guide farmers to maintain the low birth rate while addressing the high sexual imbalance.

China's family planning policy, launched in the late 1970s to check China's rapid population growth, has reduced the country's population by an estimated 300 million. But the policy has also negatively impacted some rural families lack of male laborers.

Last year, more than 310,000 farmers in 10 cities of the five provinces where the pilot project was launched received around 200 million yuan (24 million dollars) in cash rewards for having only one child or two daughters.

At present, China's central budget covers some 80 percent of the reward allowances paid in China's less developed western regions, while in the better-developed eastern coastal regions allthe reward money is paid from the local budgets.

Concerned localities have adopted measures to guarantee the strict implementation of the new policy.

Anhui Province stipulates that people who are found to misappropriate reward allowances, cover up problems, practice fraud and provide false evidence will be harshly punished or even face lawsuits.