Senior citizens sway to old-time tunes at a former kindergarten in northern China, as educators turn their sights away from children in the face of a rapidly aging population and a baby bust.
Hundreds of millions of Chinese are set to enter old age in the coming decades while the country’s chronically low birth rate leaves ever fewer people to replace them, official statistics show.
The crisis is already hitting the education sector, with thousands of preschools closing around the country as enrollments dry up.
Photo: AFP
But others are changing with the times — such as a facility in Shanxi province, which has traded chortling children for a more mature cohort.
“[The problem] became particularly evident as the number of children continued to decrease,” said principal Li Xiuling, 56. “After my kindergarten emptied out, I thought about how to make the best use of it,” she added.
Li’s preschool was founded in 2005 and once served as many as 280 children, but closed last year.
Photo: AFP
It reopened in December as Impressions of Youth, a recreational center for people of retirement age and above.
The space in the provincial capital Taiyuan boasts around 100 adult learners of music, dance, modeling and other subjects.
“It’s quite a progressive idea,” Li said. “They come to fulfill some of the dreams they had when they were young.”
Photo: AFP
‘I’M YOUNG AGAIN’
On a rainy morning this month, a modeling instructor led a line of immaculately coiffed older women as they sashayed around the classroom in traditional cheongsam dresses and pink oil-paper parasols.
In another class, students sat in a semicircle beating African drums in time to soaring socialist songs.
He Ying, 63, said joining the center had helped her overcome a post-retirement lack of confidence and meet new friends.
“I used to feel that my cultural life... was very impoverished, that there wasn’t much meaning in going on living,” she said.
“(People here) are not just waiting to grow old.”
Nearly 15,000 kindergartens closed in China last year as enrollments plunged by 5.3 million compared to 2022, according to government data.
In dusty, industrial Shanxi — where the overall population is falling — there were 78,000 more deaths than births last year.
The center bears traces of its past, with bunkbeds and dinky writing desks lining the colorfully decorated walls of former classrooms.
For Yan Xi, who used to teach at the kindergarten but now leads classes for retirees, the shift has taken some getting used to.
“Little kids just believe whatever you say, but the elderly... have their own ways,” she said.
“I have to think harder about how to communicate with them,” Yan said.
Several other facilities across China have found success by pivoting from preschool to senior education, according to local news reports.
Student Sun Linzhi, 56, said they met “a need for universities for the elderly.”
Since joining the center in Taiyuan, “I feel like I’m young again,” she said.
‘SILVER ECONOMY’
China saw a significant rise in the senior population last year, adding nearly 17 million people aged 60 and above, according to official statistics.
That age group already makes up more than 20 percent of the population, a proportion that is expected to rise to nearly a third by 2035, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, a research group.
Beijing plans to introduce a “relatively sound” national elderly care system by next year, but the country lacks nursing homes and faces wide regional disparities in coverage.
Top leaders will likely discuss the future of what they call the “silver economy” at a key economic meeting in the capital next week.
The government estimates that products and services catering to the elderly — from senior-friendly tourism to technology-driven medical care — could be worth 30 trillion yuan (US$4.13 trillion) by 2035.
But it has struggled to revive the plummeting birth rate, a major driver of China’s mismatched demographics.
Li, the principal, said she felt nostalgic for the days when her school teemed with boisterous kids.
“I was very emotionally invested in it,” she said, gesturing towards the disused bunks and desks.
“We kept those as a kind of memento.”
Nov. 11 to Nov. 17 People may call Taipei a “living hell for pedestrians,” but back in the 1960s and 1970s, citizens were even discouraged from crossing major roads on foot. And there weren’t crosswalks or pedestrian signals at busy intersections. A 1978 editorial in the China Times (中國時報) reflected the government’s car-centric attitude: “Pedestrians too often risk their lives to compete with vehicles over road use instead of using an overpass. If they get hit by a car, who can they blame?” Taipei’s car traffic was growing exponentially during the 1960s, and along with it the frequency of accidents. The policy
Hourglass-shaped sex toys casually glide along a conveyor belt through an airy new store in Tokyo, the latest attempt by Japanese manufacturer Tenga to sell adult products without the shame that is often attached. At first glance it’s not even obvious that the sleek, colorful products on display are Japan’s favorite sex toys for men, but the store has drawn a stream of couples and tourists since opening this year. “Its openness surprised me,” said customer Masafumi Kawasaki, 45, “and made me a bit embarrassed that I’d had a ‘naughty’ image” of the company. I might have thought this was some kind
What first caught my eye when I entered the 921 Earthquake Museum was a yellow band running at an angle across the floor toward a pile of exposed soil. This marks the line where, in the early morning hours of Sept. 21, 1999, a massive magnitude 7.3 earthquake raised the earth over two meters along one side of the Chelungpu Fault (車籠埔斷層). The museum’s first gallery, named after this fault, takes visitors on a journey along its length, from the spot right in front of them, where the uplift is visible in the exposed soil, all the way to the farthest
The room glows vibrant pink, the floor flooded with hundreds of tiny pink marbles. As I approach the two chairs and a plush baroque sofa of matching fuchsia, what at first appears to be a scene of domestic bliss reveals itself to be anything but as gnarled metal nails and sharp spikes protrude from the cushions. An eerie cutout of a woman recoils into the armrest. This mixed-media installation captures generations of female anguish in Yun Suknam’s native South Korea, reflecting her observations and lived experience of the subjugated and serviceable housewife. The marbles are the mother’s sweat and tears,