The collapse of fertility rates in China could lead to millions of teachers losing their jobs in the next decade, the South China Morning Post reported on Tuesday, as classroom sizes shrink and some neighborhoods find no use for smaller elementary schools at all.
China has documented a dramatic decline in its birth rate under dictator Xi Jinping, who took power in 2013, despite Xi’s decision to end the decades-long “One Child Policy” in 2015. The policy made it illegal for a woman to have a second pregnancy, resulting in millions of government-mandated forced abortions and infanticides. In 2013, the Communist Party estimated that the policy killed 400 million people.
China’s laws currently allow married couples of the Han ethnicity to have up to three children, but few families are using the expanded legal ability to build a family. In January, the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics published data showing that China’s fertility rates hit a record low in 2023 – birth rates fell by 5.7 percent between 2022 and 2023 – and the national population fell by 2,08 million that year. Official statistics show that China’s birth rate stood at 6.39 per 1,000 people in 2023.
Chinese officials have considered a wide variety of proposals – from expanding government support for in vitro fertilization (IVF) programs to implementing more detailed sexual education curricula in schools to encourage childbirth – but none have yet yielded any significant changes in the number of babies born.
As a result, fewer children will be entering the Chinese school system, potentially putting teachers at risk of higher competition for their jobs.
“With fewer students, there will inevitably be redundancies at schools within a certain period or a certain region,” Chu Zhaohui, a senior researcher at the China National Academy of Educational Sciences, told the South China Morning Post. “According to my field research, because of their financial burdens, local governments will absolutely recruit fewer teachers this year.”
The Post described teaching as traditionally considered a reliable and commendable profession in China but, with the prospect of “millions expected to lose their jobs in the next 10 years,” that perception is changing.
“[I]f classes remain at the same levels, there will be a surplus of 1.5 million primary school teachers and 370,000 middle school teachers by 2035, according to research by a team led by Qiao Jinzhong, an education professor at Beijing Normal University,” the newspaper reported.
The Morning Post noted that China has long struggled with class sizes, “with as many as 50 students in one class in some urban areas and around 30 in most rural areas.” The potential lack of demand for teachers has made its way into the pages of state propaganda outlets, but spun as a positive – a chance for the Communist Party to reduce class sizes and refocus on quality of education.
“Decline provides [an] opportunity to reduce class size, pursue better development China’s low birth rate in recent years caused the number of kindergarten and primary school students in the country to drop last year,” the state-run China Daily claimed in April. The newspaper quoted the nation’s Premier Li Qiang encouraging parents to embrace the fact that fewer students could result in more opportunities in higher education for the smaller generations.
“When assessing the demographic dividend, we shall not just look at the sheer size of the population but also look at the scale of the high-caliber workforce,” he was quoted as saying.
China Daily admitted, however, that the closures of schools – and laying off of teachers – was inevitable, and the South China Morning Post reported that multiple Chinese provinces have issued “directives” to end certain degree programs, limit educational opportunities, and restructure faculty corps.
China has struggled with the quality of its education for years, but concerns about Chinese children receiving adequate teaching escalated significantly during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, in which the Communist Party shut down schools for extended periods. The school closures continued even after the regime officially ended “zero-Covid,” its lockdown and quarantine camp policy and disruptions in the form of “health checks” and mass hospitalizations occurred throughout December as China struggled with mass infections of other respiratory diseases. Chinese health experts blamed an “immunity gap” from lack of exposure to pathogens during years of lockdowns for the rapid spread of illness among children.
Chinese schools have also failed to prioritize basic reading, writing, and arithmetic classes, choosing instead to focus on communist indoctrination, pledges to atheism, and attempts to “salvage masculinity in schools.”
China is not alone in facing significant societal restructuring in the face of a declining population of children. In Japan, which has one of the world’s smallest birth rates, the shortage of students has led in the long term to a shortage in teachers, as students choose not to join the profession given its reputation as an increasingly less vibrant field. Many of the few remaining teachers are also women who occasionally require maternity leave, resulting in classrooms being left without their teachers.
“The declining birth rate and increase in the number of people taking maternity leave seem to contradict each other. But the proportion of women employed in education is 59.9 per cent in elementary schools, 43.4 per cent in middle schools and 35.4 per cent in senior high schools,” the East Asia Forum explained in July. “This makes the shortage of teachers due to maternity leave particularly serious in elementary schools. The duration of maternity leave is also increasing because of the lack of licenced nurseries.”
In South Korea, which boasts the world’s lowest birth rate, medical students are eschewing pediatrics as the field is no longer reliably profitable, potentially leading to pediatric shortages. Parents reported long wait times to book appointments with pediatricians in 2023 due to fewer pediatricians being available, and some couples have cited the pediatric shortage as a concern discouraging them from having children, exacerbating the birth rate crisis.
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