The deepening economic challenges China’s state capitalist rulers face today are being exacerbated by a sharp fall in the country’s birth rate, which is becoming one of the most rapid in the world. This has led to a massive contraction in the country’s preschool system, a foretaste of a bigger crisis looming.
The number of children in Chinese kindergartens fell by 25% between 2020 and 2024. That’s a drop of 12 million. This has forced the closure of tens of thousands of preschools across the country. In years to come the plunge will be reflected in all aspects of China’s educational system.
China’s population has declined for the last three years. Following a record drop in 2023, an uptick in births the following year to 9.3 million was still outpaced by the number of deaths in the country. Yearly births have nearly halved since the peak of 17.9 million in 2017.
The economic crisis and tumbling births reinforce each other. As times get harder, more Chinese youth are deciding not to have children.
“With the birth rate dropping, enrollments had declined,” Zhuang Yan-fang, an educator and owner of three preschools in Jinhua, a city in China’s prosperous coastal Zhejiang province, told the Financial Times. She estimated that “90% of private kindergartens have closed.”
In 2023, she decided to turn one of her facilities, which used to take in 270 children, into a 42-bed nursing home. This captures the reality — a falling need for preschool accompanied by a growing need for facilities to care for the elderly. Her two remaining kindergartens together now serve only about 150 children, down from more than 1,000 a few years ago.
As lower numbers of children make their way up the school and university system, it poses another challenge of what to do with the vast infrastructure of China’s education system. This will effect millions of teachers and other school staff. It will also leave growing numbers of buildings empty.
This reflects a wider problem. Beijing’s yearslong real estate bust has left behind as many as 90 million empty housing units at the same time as China’s population is shrinking. It is expected to fall by over 200 million people in the next 30 years.