China’s Population Crisis Explodes Into Full-Blown Disaster! Just 320 Million People Left?

People really aren't having children anymore. Please have more kids. We're about to lose our jobs. Our kindergarten enrolled just 21 children this year, enough for only one class. I heard about two public primary schools around here. One just has over 30 people, including students and teachers. The other has just over 80 students and teachers combined. They're on the verge of closing. If people stop getting married and having children, teachers will lose their jobs and schools will shut down. Why don't you have children? I feel that life has no meaning. No meaning? Why no meaning? Why don't you want children? I don't think life has any meaning. No meaning? Why do you feel that way? Ever since I left school, I felt that the world is a harsh place. I worked so hard at school, at work, and in life, just to barely get by. It doesn't feel worth it. I don't want to bring a child into this world. Have you thought about having children someday? No, I don't want children. I could have a baby, but I don't think I could raise a child well. It's not just about money. You have to spend time with them and teach them so much about life and being a good person. My mom had such a hard time raising me. I just don't think I could do it well. Why has the birth rate been continuously declining? Don't want children. I could have a baby, but I don't think I could raise a child well. It's not just about money. You have to spend time with them and teach them so much about life and being a good person. My mom had such a hard time raising me. I just don't think I could do it well. Why does the birth rate keep falling? People don't want children. I don't either. Why not? What do you think is behind that? After you have a baby, you still have to work and take care of your family. If you stay home, people say you're doing nothing and living off someone else. If you work, they say you're neglecting your family and your child. It makes you not want to have children. Many young people interviewed pointed to high living costs and housing pressures. They said that even after studying and working hard, they could barely support themselves. They did not want to bring children into the world just to suffer. You were only 30 years old. I just came from Shandong to Beijing. Just like that, my 10 years of running this business are over. As so many people online have said, I have to learn to let go. Everyone understands that in theory, but even after moving most of the things out of both kindergartens, I still can't bring myself to throw away these learning materials. Emotionally, it's just so hard to let go. I spent my best years here. I came to Beijing at age 30 and devoted 10 years, the prime of my life, to building my early childhood education business here. The vlogger in this video ran two kindergartens in Beijing, both closed because they could not enroll enough children. As one of China's most important cities, Beijing might seem less vulnerable to population losses elsewhere. Yet its young adult population has fallen sharply. Over the past 10 years, the number of residents aged 20 to 29 has dropped by more than 2 million. My daughter may not be able to go to school. Everyone knows it's getting harder to run a kindergarten. Fewer people are having children, especially in smaller cities and county-level cities. Some kindergartens are being turned into eldercare facilities. There are more and more older people now. We used to have daycare for children because there were so many kids. Now we have daycare for older adults. The rooms are spacious and bright, with three or four beds in each. Last semester, their class had 32 students. There are twenty-two left this semester. Their class had thirty-two students last semester. This semester, there are only twenty-two left. The elementary school enrolled just thirteen first graders this year. I heard the kindergarten enrolled only two children. People keep wondering whether home prices will rise again or keep falling. Just look at the birth rate each year. Housing demand depends on people. The only kindergarten nearby has closed too. No source of students. The only kindergarten nearby has closed too. There weren't enough children. Young people just aren't having babies anymore. I haven't seen a pregnant woman on the street in ages. This is the obstetrics and gynecology department at our biggest local hospital. There isn't a single pregnant woman here. Oh my goodness, it really feels like young people have stopped having children. There's another floor upstairs, and there's nobody there either. With fewer babies being born, inpatient occupancy in obstetrics and gynecology departments has fallen sharply at many public and private hospitals. Some community hospitals and hospitals outside the top accreditation tier have suspended these services or closed their departments because costs exceeded revenue. For thousands of years, Chinese society has placed great importance on having children. Many people struggle to understand why young adults are now choosing otherwise. The issue is not simply that they don't want children. Current conditions leave them afraid to take that step. Financial pressure remains the biggest obstacle. Ordinary people in mainland China face low wages, long hours, weak enforcement of labor laws, and limited purchasing power. Monthly salaries of two to three thousand yuan are common. Even in major cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, salaries may be just five to six thousand yuan. After rent and food, little is left to save. Taking on a thirty-year mortgage to get married and start a family can create a lifelong financial burden. The pressure of raising children in China runs deeper than many people realize. In one video, a man said workers are paid too little while raising a child costs too much. He called on the government to provide benefits for families having children. Your eyes are aging too fast. Now the biggest problem is children are growing too fast. We might as well start researching how to live forever. The biggest problem is that children take so long to grow up. Cattle and horses can work at two or three years old. You have to raise a child for more than 20 years before they can work. All those years of formula, a home in a good school district, tutoring, wedding expenses, and money for a home. Raising a child feels like feeding a walking money shredder. The parents pay for everything, but society needs those children. A baby's birth creates work for postpartum caregivers, nannies, kindergarten teachers, pediatricians, formula sellers, and early childhood educators. It supports a whole chain of businesses. When children grow up, they become workers, homebuyers, and consumers. Everyone shares the benefits, but the couple raising the child gets the bill. It's like a boss making empty promises. The boss says everyone will benefit when the company grows. Then you work so much overtime, you're losing your hair, while the boss buys a new car and a new house. Society says children are our future. The future belongs to everyone, but the bill belongs to you. That doesn't add up. If having children is an individual responsibility, society should respect individual choices. If it's a shared responsibility, society needs to do its part. In cities, parents face an impossible situation: one income cannot support a family. With two working parents, nobody is available to care for the child or pick them up from school. Kindergarten expects pickup at 4 p.m. sharp, but work ends at 6 p.m. and your boss might still ask you to volunteer for overtime. We can't be in two places at once. China's falling birth rate reflects several pressures building at once. As the economy weakens, competition across industry grows more intense, and young workers face even greater demands on their time. The eight-hour workday is becoming a rule on paper, while ten to twelve-hour days have become routine. Workers must stay available by phone, allowing work to consume their personal lives. Long hours bring little pay. Simply making a living takes all their energy. Families bear almost all of the financial risks of raising children. Housing, education, and healthcare are expensive. Affordable child care is limited, and women also face career setbacks after giving birth. Having a child now means taking on a heavy burden that a family must carry largely alone for decades. As China's birth rate keeps falling, the effects are spreading through maternity care, child care, and education. Hospitals are ending delivery services. Kindergarten enrollment is shrinking. Elementary and secondary school teachers are losing their jobs because there are not enough students. Chinese financial media has seen reported on September 14 that the sharp decline in births is affecting schools and teaching jobs in major cities. When the school year began in September, Zhang Yu, a contract teacher outside the permanent staffing system at an elementary school in Guangzhou's Huangpu District, received notice to return. The school dismissed him before his contract expired, citing declining enrollment. Zhang Yu is not alone. Since July, several contract teachers who said they worked in Guangzhou's Huangpu, Hai Chu, Pan Yu, Huang Yu, and other districts have posted on social media about being dismissed. Kindergarten and elementary schools have been hit the hardest. Reports say that as births decline, new elementary school enrollment across the country has fallen each year since peaking in 2023. Many parts of China have also scaled back teacher recruitment in recent years. Hubei Province, for example, announced 2,740 openings for elementary and secondary school teachers this year. That's down about 52 percent from 5,799 in 2025. Jiangsu Province announced 1,190 openings in 2026, compared with 7,821 openings in 2023. According to China's Ministry of Education, the country had about 232,000 kindergartens in 2025. The ministry's figures describe a 21 percent decline from the 2021 peak of 300,000, with 38,000 fewer kindergartens over four years. The number of full-time kindergarten teachers also fell from 3.2 million in 2022 to 2.6 million in 2025, a loss of 631,000 over three years. China's fertility rate and population have long drawn public attention. Yet many people still dismiss a sharp population decline as a distant or imaginary problem. The figures and trends point to a real decline. According to China's National Bureau of Statistics, the country recorded 7.2 million births and 11.3 million deaths in 2025. Its natural population growth rate was negative 2.4 people per 1,000. The U.S. population stood at 1.4 billion, down 3.39 million from the previous year. Projections from several institutions, including the China Population and Development Research Center and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Institute of Population and Labor Economics, put births in 2026 at roughly 7.2 million to 7.5 million. That would mark another decline from 2025. With population aging accelerating in 2025, some experts project that China's population could fall to about 320 million around the year 2100. According to Newsweek, population researcher Fu Xinyi argues that official figures overstated China's current population by about 130 million. Using his revised population estimate and current fertility trends, he projects a decline to roughly 320 million by the year 2100. He says fertility has not recovered, even though the Chinese Communist Party ended the one-child policy about 10 years ago. Low fertility and population aging will continue to deepen the decline. Ye, who works at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the United States, published China's population data manipulation in the independent Chinese language journal Contemporary China Review. He cross-checked official population figures against school enrollment and graduation statistics, vaccination records, household registrations, and birth and death records. He also compared provincial and national data and examined census records in detail. He used the findings to argue that the official population is overstated. Many people attribute China's population decline to young adults avoiding marriage and having fewer children. But those choices reflect a deeper problem: treating people as numbers that the government orders can control while overlooking their right to make personal decisions can have lasting consequences. The CCP's one-child policy lasted for decades, with the government using sweeping administrative powers to restrict births. But as time officials recognize the population decline, changing policy can no longer restore young people's desire to have children. Today, the government wants more births, but young adults are making their own choices. Remaining unmarried, having no children, and marrying later are becoming increasingly common. Fujian Yi has long questioned the CCP's population statistics and published the book Big Country with an Empty Nest. He believes the lasting effects of the one-child policy, combined with persistently low fertility, will accelerate population decline. Although mainland China ended the policy about ten years ago, fertility has not recovered and population aging has become another major challenge. The report explains how such a deep decline could happen within seventy-four years, a period approaching average human lifespan. As people age and die, the population contracts rapidly if births remain too low to replace them. Yet Yi's projection of three hundred and twenty million depends on a specific starting population and fertility trends. It is not a certain outcome. The report says missile expert Song Jin used engineering control system models to analyze population growth. In nineteen eighty, he projected that China's population would exceed four point two billion by the year twenty eighty. That forecast heightened the CCP leadership's concerns about food supplies and political stability, helping drive the adoption of the one-child policy. The article in Contemporary China Review describes the policy as an example of applying engineering logic to a complex social system. It says the policy prevented hundreds of millions of potential births, forced abortions and sterilizations during enforcement, caused profound suffering and worsened long-term low fertility and population aging. The United Nations also projects a sharp decline in China's population by the end of the century. Three editions of its World Population Prospects show how its estimate for the year twenty one hundred has changed. The twenty nineteen edition projected China's population at about one point zero six billion in twenty one hundred. The twenty twenty two edition lowered the projection to about seven hundred and sixty seven million. The twenty twenty four edition lowered again to six hundred and thirty three million. Yi considers that estimate too optimistic. His own projection of three hundred and twenty million comes from his research, and whether it will happen remains uncertain. Yi warns that inflated population figures could affect far more than population policy. The consequences could extend to the economy, society, defense, diplomacy, international investment, and other countries' policies toward China. He argues that inflated figures fuel expectations that China's economy will far surpass the United States. They also reinforce Beijing's strategic view that the East is rising as the West declines, while increasing international anxiety about U.S.-China competition. Population size alone does not determine national strength, but an unbalanced age structure will test China's future development. China is now growing old before becoming wealthy. When most Western countries began aging, they had already modernized their industries, achieved higher incomes, and built relatively strong social welfare systems. China faces tougher conditions. Its population is aging faster than those of developed countries. Per capita income remains far below levels in developed European countries and the United States. Local government finances face mounting pressure, and pension shortfalls are becoming more serious. China has not completed a smooth transition to developed country status as the benefits of its large workforce fade. It's becoming an aging society before its economic transformation is complete. That means China will face more old people, fewer young people, and increasingly strained government finances at the same time. Political orders cannot reverse its age structure. Surveillance cannot resolve the economic and social crises caused by population decline. Some experts warn of a deeper risk for China. Its population crisis is unfolding under an increasingly centralized political system focused on controlling the public. Beijing's own policy choices could turn an already difficult to reverse population decline into a governing crisis lasting decades.