It’s not a great mystery why China recently revised its marriage and divorce laws to make the former easier and significantly disincentivize women from pursuing the latter:
The number of Chinese kindergartens has fallen by a quarter in four years, prompting the closure of tens of thousands of schools in the country as a precipitous drop in births hits the education system.
Enrolments in China’s kindergartens have declined by 12mn children between 2020 and 2024, from a peak of 48mn, according to data from the country’s ministry of education. The number of kindergartens, serving Chinese children aged 3-5, has also fallen by 41,500 from a high of nearly 295,000 in 2021.
Falling enrolments are now “baked into the system and that’s not going to change”, said Stuart Gietel-Basten, director of the Center for Aging Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He added that compared with five or 10 years ago, the decline in births was “huge”.
The contraction of China’s pre-school system is a foretaste of the challenges to come for business and policymakers from China’s demographic decline, which is expected to be one of the most rapid in the world. China has recorded three consecutive years of population decline to 2024 following the decades-long policy, ended in 2016, that limited many couples to one child. While the number of births rose by about 520,000 last year to 9.3mn, following a record low in 2023, they were still outpaced by deaths and have declined by nearly half since the peak of 17.9mn in 2017.
It’s fascinating to observe that the importation of Western feminism has proven to be even worse for Chinese fertility than the notorious one-child policy that was in place from 1978 to 2015. Which suggests that if the birth rates don’t turn around quickly, China is going to start cracking down hard on permitting young women to pursue higher education, given that education has proven to be the most efficient way to render women barren.
It’s far too soon to tell, but I suspect that it is the Enlightenment and its false values that the historians of the future will eventually hold responsible for the decline and fall of the West.