The wedding business has always been a stable, fairly huge one in the city of Shenyang, Liaoning province, which has about 1,000 companies in it, but with that many companies competing, they have to keep searching for new ways to survive, especially since hotels keep raising their wedding rates.

Wedding companies have to give the hotel a large site fee, with the top hotels now asking anywhere from about 5,000 yuan ($772) to as much as 20,000 yuan, leaving the wedding companies with a mere 3,000 yuan in some cases. Some industry people are estimating that at least 300 of them will close down.

So, some are enlarging and fine-tuning their business to include such treats as doing opening ceremony or annual ceremony for some companies. Others are establishing wedding "clubs" that provide both the site and a range of services, or, as Tian Feng, chairman of the Shenyang ceremony business association explains, "We provide one-stop wedding services for customers by bringing the entire ceremony to our club."

And, Shenyang now has more than 10 these "clubs", with investment of millions of yuan for each.