Chen Wei, a deputy to China’s rubber-stamp National People’s Congress, on Wednesday suggested teaching mandatory sex ed classes to kindergarten children in a desperate effort to shore up China’s collapsing birthrates.
Chen, who is also an assistant at Zhejiang Chinese Medical University, told the state-run Global Times that “sex education in China still has a long way to go compared to international norms.”
“Last year I proposed that we are lacking locally developed sex education textbooks in China. As you can see, new textbooks have now been introduced, but we still have a shortage of professional teachers,” she said.
Chen’s new proposal is for a “dedicated program to train sex education teachers” at every level of education, instead of relying on teachers from other disciplines like biology to handle sex ed on the side. She also wants sex ed classes with centrally planned curricula to become much more thorough and begin at considerably earlier ages, all the way down to the kindergarten level.
“The curriculum should cover comprehensive topics including relationships, gender and rights,” she said.
The Global Times noted that China’s ruling State Council wrote a blueprint for sex ed in 2021 that called for its complete integration into the basic educational system, and also presented guidelines for parents to follow when discussing sex with their children.
Reliable data on whether early sex ed could increase birthrates or not is hard to come by and, of course, much would depend on exactly what Chen’s legion of certified sex educators tell those kindergarten and grade-school kids about the birds and the bees.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) published a survey in 2022 that found sex education significantly reduced birthrates by cutting down on unplanned pregnancies. China’s curriculum would clearly be geared toward encouraging young people to marry and have children, but industrialized nations with secular governments have struggled to convince young people not to put off marriage and family until their education and careers are secure.
China’s latest Five-Year Plan included ambitious goals for “modernizing” the population by doubling its rather low per capita gross domestic product (GDP) by 2035.
According to the state-run Xinhua news service, the plan acknowledged that “the demographic challenges of declining birth rates and rapid population aging are placing additional strain on the country’s modernization push.”
The new Five-Year Plan ostensibly “proposes a series of measures to fully tap this demographic advantage, particularly against the backdrop of an aging and declining population,” including “fertility support and incentives, better aligning education resources with demographic shifts, and bolstering the elderly care sector.”
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) noted last week that China’s “birth crash” arrived sooner than expected, and the problem is much more severe than the Five-Year Plan admitted, as 2025’s demographic data suggested that “China was almost 60 percent below the childbearing level needed for long-term population stability as of 2025.”
“If China were to maintain that 2025 birth pattern, there would be only 43 future daughters — and 18 future grand-daughters — for every 100 Chinese women of childbearing age today,” AEI observed.
This means China’s working-age population could decline by 25 percent or more by 2050 and its contingent of military-age males could be only half as large. Meanwhile, the longer lifespans envisioned by the Five-Year Plan will give China a ratio of elderly retirees to young workers that has never been seen before. The rapid decay of extended families will also make it harder for the aging population to get by, as tomorrow’s Chinese retirees will lack the squadrons of children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews enjoyed by their predecessors.
The South China Morning Post (SCMP) on Friday cited analysts who hoped the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) might cushion the demographic crises faced by China, South Korea, and Japan by dramatically increasing productivity, making it possible for a shrinking worker base to support an aging population.
South Korea already has the world’s highest proportion of robots to human workers, with about 1,012 industrial robots to every 10,000 humans with manufacturing jobs — a rate about double that of Japan or China, which in turn have far higher roboticization levels than the global average.
SCMP’s analysts predicted the Asian industrial powers would slowly turn from last-ditch efforts to boost stubborn birthrates and embrace AI as the best way to prop up their gross domestic products. The Bank of Korea, for example, feared that demographic decline could cut GDP by 16.5 percent by 2050 — but aggressive use of AI could reduce that decline to 5.9 percent.
AI cannot help much with declining household consumption as the population collapses and it might bring wages down. The SCMP predicted the Asian powers would be quick to adopt automation and roll out massive robot programs, so the rest of the world could soon get a sneak peek at how much AI can do to balance the scales between crashing birth rates and aging populations.
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