In Jiangxi province, in southeastern China, authorities said the number of new jobs for preschool, primary and secondary school teachers will fall by 54.7 percent this year to 4,968, less than a third of the number of vacancies two years ago.
In neighboring Hubei province, teacher recruitment fell by a fifth over the same period.
The drop is due to a sharp decline in the number of school-age children, as China is experiencing a period of “ultra-low” fertility, with fewer than 1.4 births per woman. The China Population and Development Research Center estimates that the total fertility rate will fall to 1.09 in 2022.
Compared to 2016, when the country ended its “one-child” policy, the number of births fell to 9.02 million last year from 17.86 million — a drop of more than 50 percent. In global estimates released in July, the UN predicts that China’s population will fall from its current 1.4 billion to 639 million by the end of this century, a sharper drop than the 766.7 million predicted just two years ago.
The UN predicts that by 2050, 31% of Chinese people will be aged 65 or over. By 2100, that figure will be 46%, approaching half the population.
Quoted by the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post, Jiangxi’s Education Department acknowledged the challenge in an official response to suggestions about reforming the education system in late June.
“The low fertility rate will become one of the main risks to the country’s demographic development,” it said.
According to Jiangxi authorities, the proportion of children aged 0 to 15 in the province’s population has declined over the past four years, with a drop of 480,900 last year – the largest since 2020.
Educational resources must be restructured in response to the falling fertility rate, the government body said, citing the closure of a fifth of schools in rural areas in the province with fewer than 100 students.
A similar situation in central China’s Hunan province in 2023 prompted education authorities to announce that no new kindergartens would be built in rural areas.
The number of children in Hunan kindergartens is expected to fall by 14.79% to 319,400 in 2023, compared with the previous year.
Around 15,000 kindergartens were closed nationwide in 2023, as enrolment fell by 5.3 million compared to 2022, according to government data.
Resorting to immigration to combat population ageing seems to be out of the question: China defines itself as a "non-immigration" country. Beijing does not recognise dual nationality. Citizenship is granted based on the principle of "jus sanguinis" (right of blood), and can only be granted to those of Chinese descent.
Profound changes in Chinese society rule out a recovery in the number of births.
"Women are more aware," Zhao Hua, a 28-year-old Chinese woman from Beijing, explained to the Lusa news agency. "Gender inequality continues to be profound in China: men want a traditional family, in which the woman takes care of the children and household chores," she added.
Several young Chinese women interviewed by Lusa highlighted this discrepancy in expectations, in a society that has modernized at a pace unparalleled in modern history. According to the World Bank, in 1980, only 19.4% of the Chinese population lived in urban areas. In 2023, the rate rose to around 66%.
"Women now have their own careers and incomes and do not want to play that role," explained Yang Qian, a Chinese woman from Hebei province, adjacent to Beijing.
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