In 2025, China recorded 7.92 million births. The year before: more. The year before that: more. For the fourth consecutive year, China's population fell — by 3.39 million people. The birth rate has hit a record low. And 15 government departments have sat down together to write an answer.

The document, released last week by a coalition including the Communist Youth League, the National Development and Reform Commission, and the Ministry of Education, is China's most comprehensive attempt to redesign its cities for young people and children. It outlines 18 measures. It sets a target: by 2030, the concept of "youth-development-oriented cities" will be widely established across China. By 2035, a complete system will be in place.

The measures are specific: expand childcare subsidies. Add mother-and-baby rooms to public spaces. Strengthen after-school and holiday childcare services. Make school access more equal for the children of migrant workers. Support young entrepreneurs. Create jobs suited to youth innovation.

Behind each measure is the same question: what would a Chinese city look like if it were designed with children — and the decision to have them — at the center?

The answer matters enormously. China's demographic decline is not a projection. It is a present reality. The cities that have been built at extraordinary speed over the past four decades were built for production, for migration, for economic growth. They were built for adults moving from rural areas to urban factories and offices. The kindergartens, the parks, the pediatric clinics, the safe streets, the school-adjacent housing — these came second, if they came at all.

The children who were not born in 2025 are not a statistic. They are 7.92 million specific absences. Each of them represents a decision made by a specific family in a specific city, often with a specific calculation: Can we afford childcare? Is the school near enough? Is the apartment large enough? Is the air clean enough? Is the city built for a child, or is a child expected to adapt to a city built for everything else?

China's government is now officially asking that question. The answer will be built, district by district, in cities where the children aren't yet coming.

(Sources: NBC News / China Daily / The Standard Hong Kong — April 2026)

Seoul 🇰🇷 — South Korea's birth rate is the lowest of any country in the world. In 2023, it fell to 0.72 — less than one child per woman, an unprecedented figure in recorded demographic history. The Korean government has spent an estimated $200 billion over two decades trying to raise it. Nothing has worked. Seoul knows what Beijing is discovering: the measures being proposed — childcare subsidies, mother-and-baby rooms, school access reform — are necessary but not sufficient. The deeper problem is that the city itself was not designed with the possibility of childhood in mind. The commute. The apartment size. The work hours. The examination pressure. Seoul has thrown money at the birth rate and found that money, without urban redesign, changes very little.

Singapore 🇸🇬 — Singapore has been trying to raise its birth rate for forty years. The government has offered baby bonuses, extended parental leave, housing priority for families with children, co-located childcare in HDB housing estates. The total fertility rate remains below 1.1. Singapore's experience is the most instructive for China's 15 ministries: comprehensive, well-funded, intelligently designed policy can slow the decline and make having children somewhat more affordable. It cannot reverse the underlying social transformation that makes young adults in modern, expensive, high-pressure cities choose not to have children. The city redesign that Beijing is proposing is important. But Singapore has already built many of the things Beijing is now planning. Its birth rate is still falling.

Tokyo 🇯🇵 — Tokyo's birth rate is the lowest of any of Japan's 47 prefectures — a remarkable distinction in a country already running one of the world's most significant aging and population decline experiments. Young people move to Tokyo for economic opportunity and then find it structurally incompatible with family formation. The apartments are small. The commutes are long. The work culture is all-consuming. The childcare waitlists are years long in some wards. Tokyo has been aware of this for decades. Its policy responses have been incremental — childcare expansion, parental leave reform, work-hour restrictions. What China's 15-ministry approach represents is the kind of coordinated, citywide redesign that Tokyo has never managed to attempt at scale. Whether scale is enough is a different question.