36,000 Preschools Shut Down in China in Sign of Total Doom | The American Spectator

Data released by China’s Ministry of Education last month revealed an astonishing reality: In the past two years alone, 36,000 preschools across China have shuttered their doors.

This is not due to a decline in the popularity of preschool or consolidation on the part of the Chinese government. Rather, these preschools have closed simply because not enough children to attend them were born.

Since 2016, when births in China peaked, the country has been gripped by a dramatic decline in births. Whereas 17.86 million children were born in China in 2016, only 9.54 million Chinese children were born in 2024, according to the Chinese government (which could very well be manipulating the numbers). This dramatic decline eclipses the birth collapse that the country experienced during Mao’s Great Chinese famine.

The Chinese government claims that the number of children enrolled in preschool peaked in 2020 at 48 million. Today, the number of children attending preschool has already declined to just under 36 million.

“The difficulty in kindergarten enrollment seems to have appeared suddenly, like a cliff,” said a Chinese woman, Tang Tang, who recently left a position teaching preschool education to teach at the university level.

The Chinese government has been forced to somewhat admit the folly of its population control measures, which used forced abortions, kidnappings, and coercive fines to enforce a one-child policy. The government abandoned its one child-policy in 2016 to switch to a two-child policy before changing to a three-child policy and then abandoning that in favor of encouraging child-bearing.

But with this massively depleted new generation of young people, the Chinese Communist Party’s idiocy will be put on full display. The start will be this mass shuttering of preschools, which will only accelerate with each passing year. Then, elementary schools will soon find there are half as many students to teach as in recent years. Tens of thousands of high schools will then close their doors. Then Chinese universities will find that prospective students simply do not exist. The country’s economy will then face the pain of half as many young workers.

Other signs of the birth collapse today include the idling of factories that produce baby formula, the closing of obstetrics units in hospitals across the country, and hundreds of thousands of preschool teachers recently losing their jobs. One man who formerly operated preschools described last year how he had switched into the elderly care industry and planned to use empty classrooms as places for the elderly to go during the day for services.

In China, children ages 3 to 6 attend preschool, meaning that preschool enrollment will continue to decline over the next few years as smaller birth cohorts age into the system. And, if, as is expected, births continue their downward trend in China, preschools — which are divided roughly equally between private and public — will need to shutter even faster than they already are. It is expected that births in China will fall this year in correspondence with the declining marriage rate, with one estimate projecting 7.3 to 7.8 million births in 2025. This means that China could have roughly 40 percent as many births this year as at its 2016 peak.

In 2021, China had 295,000 preschools. These kindergarten programs offer full-day instruction. Given current trends, easily 100,000 of those schools could shutter within just the next few years. Those preschool closures will be an ever-present sign of civilizational doom and the brokenness of Chinese culture, which has been brought to the point where people see no hope for the future. Many young Chinese speak of themselves as being the “last generation.” Generations of authoritarian control have created a society that doesn’t wish to continue on.

In 2025, the United Nations projected that China would lose more than half of its population by 2100, falling to 633 million. But others predict more dramatic decline. For example, Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison projects that China’s population will fall to 330 million by 2100. This is below the UN’s low estimate for China’s population at 2100 of 403.8 million people. Fuxian’s estimate assumes that China will be able to stabilize its birth rate at 0.8 children per woman. In recent years, China’s birth rate has been falling dramatically. Whereas it was 1.81 in 2017, it reached 1.0 in 2023 — which is less than half the replacement rate.

The declining birth rates follow an extreme dropoffs in marriages. In 2013, when Xi Jinping became president of China, there were 23.9 million first-time marriages — China’s peak. That has fallen by an astounding rate to reach 5.97 million first-time marriages in 2023. In other words, there were a quarter as many marriages 10 years after Xi ascended to power as when he came into office.

Demographic destruction is really only just behind the corner for China, meaning the Chinese government could act out militarily before the doom becomes too apparent to the world.