Big Cities Draw Young People In, But Struggle to Keep New Life: Urbanization Is Reshaping Asia’s Family Structures

(Reported by Zhao shuhong in Tokyo)Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Seoul — young people keep pouring in.

These cities offer denser clusters of universities, better hospitals, more corporate headquarters, higher salaries and richer lifestyles. For many young people, moving to a big city means getting closer to better education, broader career prospects and more diverse life choices.

A Cold Look Behind the Data: When Urbanization Meets the ‘Demographic Cliff’

Falling birth numbers and advancing urbanization are happening at the same time across East Asia.

According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics:

• 2016: national births totaled 17.86 million;
• 2024: that figure fell to 9.54 million, with a birth rate of 6.77%;
• 2025: births fell further to 7.92 million, with the birth rate reaching 5.63%.

Meanwhile, the share of China’s population living in urban areas rose from 67.0% in 2024 to 67.9% in 2025, against the tide.

Every percentage-point rise in the urbanization rate means tens of thousands more young people leaving the countryside for high-rises; yet at the same time, the sound of newborns’ cries nationwide is fading by the millions.

The chain reaction from this decline no longer stays confined to dry population tables. Like a cold wind, it has first reached society’s nerve endings — the education sector.

Shifts in enrollment and hiring within education have become the most sensitive window for observing demographic change. Recently, sharp contractions in some regions’ plans to hire primary and secondary school teachers have drawn widespread public attention.

Take provincial-level public recruitment of primary and secondary school teachers as an example:

• Hubei Province: plans to hire 2,740 teachers in 2026, down about 52.8% from 5,799 in 2025 — cut nearly in half.
• Jiangxi Province: its public recruitment plan has plunged from 7,821 in 2023 to just 1,190 in 2026.

[Trend in Jiangxi Province’s Primary and Secondary Teacher Recruitment Numbers]

2023: ████████████████████ 7,821

2026: ███ 1,190 (-84.8%)

For students at teacher-training colleges, the once-secure path of ‘study education, become a teacher, land a public-sector post’ — long seen as an ‘iron rice bowl’ — is becoming deeply uncertain. Some graduates are still stuck waiting to ‘make landfall’ in the civil-service exam queue, while many more have had to turn elsewhere, flowing into private schools, after-school tutoring, or even entirely unfamiliar fields such as insurance, sales and the creative industries.

This forcing mechanism has also fed back into the top-level design of higher education. To cope with the shrinking school-age population, many teacher-training universities have begun a painful restructuring of their programs — cutting enrollment in traditional teaching majors like Chinese, math and foreign languages, while adding ‘new engineering’ majors such as artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, smart manufacturing and new energy materials.

On the surface, this looks like universities rescuing their own employment rates. But at a deeper level, it is the inevitable result of the combined forces of a fading demographic dividend, a reshaped job market, and industrial transformation.

The Physical Squeeze of Space: Big Cities Don’t Lack Young People — They Lack Room to ‘Become Parents’

At a deeper level, one core question confronts everyone: why is it that the more developed a big city becomes, the harder it is for young people to feel secure enough to marry, have children and raise the next generation?

For a long time, the concentration of population in central cities drove the prosperity of industry and public services. But urban life has also completely reshaped the cost structure of the family and the ‘rational calculus’ of childbearing. This physical squeeze on living space, and the anxiety over social class, are magnified without limit in mega-cities:

• Beijing (concentrated resources, a fertility low point): At the end of 2024, Beijing’s resident population reached 21.832 million, with urban residents accounting for as much as 88.2% — far above the national average. Behind such highly concentrated resources lies equally concentrated pressure from employment, mortgages and commuting; that year, its resident birth rate was just 6.09‰.
• Shanghai (an extreme specimen of ‘low fertility’): In 2024, Shanghai’s resident population was 24.8026 million, with only 118,000 births for the whole year — a birth rate as low as 4.75‰ and a natural growth rate of -1.53‰. Even more striking figures come from its registered (hukou) population: the total fertility rate is just 0.72 — far below the 2.1 needed to sustain generational replacement — while the average age at first childbirth has been pushed back to 31.81.

For most urban young people, having children is no longer a natural life stage, but a ‘high-risk investment’ requiring repeated weighing of costs and benefits amid high housing prices, high-intensity work, and personal future plans.

A Shared Chill Across East Asia: The More Concentrated the Resources, the More Concentrated the Pressure

This contradiction is not unique to any single country — it is the ‘big-city trap’ shared across East Asian societies undergoing intense urbanization. Tokyo in Japan and Seoul in South Korea are telling exactly the same story.

City / Region	Total Fertility Rate 2024/2025	Population Distribution Feature
Japan (national)	1.15 (2024) / 1.14 (2025)	Young population keeps concentrating into the greater Tokyo area
Tokyo Metropolis	0.96 (2024/2025)	Japan’s only region with a fertility rate below 1.0
South Korea (national)	0.75 (2024) / 0.80 (2025)	The capital region holds nearly half the national population
Seoul	0.58 (2024)	The lowest fertility rate among the world’s major metropolises

Seoul and Tokyo are by no means cities short on young people. On the contrary, they are the ‘super black holes’ most voraciously absorbing young people within their entire national systems. South Korea’s capital region (Seoul, Incheon, Gyeonggi) is home to nearly half the country’s population, wealth, and top universities.

Yet when young people from across Japan and Korea travel hundreds of kilometers into the big cities, they find themselves caught in a paradox: there are more job opportunities, but competition is more suffocating; salaries are higher, but sky-high housing prices and education costs instantly swallow the premium. Their 24 hours are filled with long commutes, endless overtime, and fragmented personal lives. Big cities attract job-seekers and workers, but leave no room whatsoever for ‘family builders’ and ‘parents.’

A Historic Shift: The Economic Role of Children, From ‘Producer’ to ‘Object of Nurture’

Stretching the timeline out, the reason we have fallen into a collective low-fertility trap is, at its core, that human society has undergone an extremely profound shift in family economic structure.

In traditional agrarian society, a child was not just a new family member but also an important future laborer. Children could help with farming, herding, and household care, and bore the function of continuing the family line and ‘raising children to provide for old age.’ For many families, raising children required investment, but as children grew older they gradually repaid the family — in the long run, the return on ‘production’ was positive.

However, once societies entered industrialization and urbanization, this supply-demand relationship fundamentally reversed:

Today, in big cities, children no longer directly participate in household production, but instead require an ever-longer period of education and upbringing. From childcare, kindergarten, primary and secondary school, to university and various forms of extracurricular learning, a child typically requires more than twenty years of continuous net investment.

American economist Gary Becker famously proposed the ‘Quantity–Quality Trade-off’ theory of children. He argued that once family income rises and education becomes widespread, families tend to have fewer children while increasing their ‘refined investment’ in each child’s education, health, and development.

In other words, what modern families pursue is no longer ‘having more’ but ‘raising better.’ This shift has occurred in nearly every country that has completed industrialization and deep urbanization. Regardless of cultural background, once a society steps into modern economic logic, the quality of investment demanded for each child rises without limit — and the quantity falls sharply as a result.

A Distorted Ordering of Life Priorities: Bigger Than Cost Is ‘Opportunity Cost’

Once we understand this shift in the economic role of children, we can see that low fertility is by no means simply a matter of young people ‘not wanting to have children’ — rather, big cities multiply the opportunity cost of an individual’s entire life.

A paper published in Beijing Social Sciences, ‘The Impact of Metropolitanization on Low Fertility: Evidence from 60 Years of Data Across 149 Countries,’ pinpoints this exactly: by offering high employment opportunities, wage levels, and personal choice, metropolitanization sharply raises the opportunity cost of childbearing.

In big cities, the coordinate axes of life become more diverse. For many young people, the years before thirty are the golden period for building a career and climbing the social ladder. Graduate school, studying abroad, changing jobs, starting a business, earning professional qualifications, traveling, making money, personal growth — each of these can become a direction where time invested yields immediate returns. Marriage and childbearing have been demoted from the ‘one and only default required course of life’ to just one of many ‘high-risk electives.’

This opportunity-cost trade-off is even crueler for women in particular. Urbanization has given them more equal access to education and career platforms, but the harsh evaluation mechanisms of the modern workplace (long hours, intense competition) are inherently at odds with the long stretch of time childcare requires. Faced with a heavy ‘motherhood penalty’ — career interruption, skill atrophy, or marginalization in promotion caused by childbearing — whether or not to have a child is no longer just a question of whether the family income can afford formula milk; it also concerns whether a woman is willing to bear the enormous cost of pausing her development, or even being pushed out of the market, during the golden years of her career.

Therefore, the low fertility rate of big cities is, more precisely, this: modern urban life has raised the threshold for having children far too high. It demands that an individual possess an extremely high net economic worth, an abundance of time, and a nearly perfect socialized system of childcare support. When these conditions cannot be met, choosing not to have children is, in fact, the most responsible ‘rational calculation’ young people can make for themselves and the next generation.

Future Urban Competition: From ‘Fighting Over Labor’ to ‘Keeping New Life’

In the past, whether a city was judged successful or vibrant was measured by GDP — by how many major corporate headquarters it could attract, and how much young outside labor it could absorb. But in an era squeezed by both low fertility and an aging population, a new standard of evaluation is quietly emerging.

Young people being willing to come is only the first step. The harsher test is: once they arrive, can they truly settle down here? Can they feel secure enough to return to a family role? Can they raise the next generation in this forest of concrete, free of worry?

Many demographic studies point out that only when a society and its cities are willing to provide comprehensive childcare support, flexible working arrangements, affordable housing, and a fairer division of family caregiving labor can this overwhelming opportunity cost be partly reduced — and only then might the willingness to have children gradually improve.

For many Asian countries undergoing structural transformation, mega-cities remain the engines of economic growth. But as young people in these cities are forced, again and again, to push back their most important life decision — reproduction — to ‘some other time’ or even ‘never again,’ urban planners and policymakers must return to answer the most fundamental question of all:

Is this city, in the end, only fit to work in — or is it also fit to live in?