The Island's Last Song: The 0.695 Even the Year of the Dragon Could Not Save

30-second overview: 2024 was the Year of the Dragon, when people in Taiwan should have been rushing to have auspicious babies. Instead, that year saw 715 fewer babies than the previous year¹. For the first time in 48 years, the dragon-year magic failed. The following year, the fertility rate collapsed to 0.695, the lowest among sovereign states². The government spent nearly NT$500 billion over ten years trying to encourage births³, but it kept getting one thing wrong: Taiwanese people are not refusing to have children. More than 70% of married couples have two or more children⁴. What has truly collapsed is marriage. The money has gone to married families, while the gap lies among people who are not married. And looking around the world, from South Korea to Hungary to Singapore, no country has ever bought its fertility rate back⁵. So the question that really needs to be asked has shifted from "How do we get people to have more children?" to "How do we live with dignity on an island destined to become smaller?"

In September 2024, on the first day of school at Sinwei Elementary School in Liugui, Kaohsiung.

Founded in 1921, the school had 104 years of history and was Liugui's only Hakka-language life school⁶. At the flag-raising ceremony that day, the entire school stood on the sports field: five classes, twenty-nine students. Among them, first-grade newcomers: zero⁷. Not a single one. It was the first time since the school's founding.

The following August, Sinwei Elementary was merged into Guangxing Elementary School in Meinong⁸. Acting principal Chen Yi-ting said in the final semester that the school hoped to focus on Hakka特色 teaching, "hoping to attract local students and allow Hakka culture to continue being passed down"⁹. City councilor Lin Fu-pao was more blunt: "One child in one class is not a good thing either" and "schools that should be merged should be merged"¹⁰.

Sinwei Elementary is not an exception. It is a letter: one that Taiwan's rural villages sent forty years ago, and that the cities are only now beginning to receive.

Even the Year of the Dragon No Longer Works

Taiwanese people carry memories of the zodiac. People rush to have children in the Year of the Dragon for good fortune, and avoid the Year of the Tiger, traditionally associated with an inauspicious "solitary phoenix" year. This folk calendar has left nearly fifty years of fingerprints on birth numbers. In the 1976 Year of the Dragon, Taiwan had 425,125 babies, an increase of 55,776 over the previous year¹¹. The 1988 Year of the Dragon brought +28,007, 2000 brought +21,651, and 2012 brought +32,854¹². Four dragon years, four upward jumps, with no exceptions.

Then came 2024.

That year was the Year of the Dragon. In theory, it should have been one of the rare small fertility peaks of recent years. Instead, there were 134,856 births, 715 fewer than the 135,571 births in 2023¹³. For the first time in forty-eight years, the Year of the Dragon did not lift the number. It fell instead. The magic of the zodiac officially failed that year.

If the failed Year of the Dragon was a warning sign, 2025 was an earthquake. In the Year of the Snake, births collapsed to 107,812, another twenty-seven thousand fewer than in the dragon year, a single-year drop of nearly 20%¹⁴. The total fertility rate (TFR) plunged from 0.89 in 2024 to 0.695¹⁵, putting Taiwan below South Korea and making it the place with the lowest fertility rate among sovereign states¹⁶. That same year, deaths reached 200,000. The gap between births and deaths, -92,456, was the largest natural decrease in Taiwan's recorded history¹⁷.

💡 Did you know: This is how to read "0.695." It is called the "period total fertility rate." It means that if a woman were to give birth throughout her life according to the age-specific fertility rates of 2025, she would have 0.695 children. It does not mean that "women today have only 0.7 children on average over their lifetimes." Because people in Taiwan are having children later and later, pushing births that would once have been spread across several years into the future, this "period" indicator is underestimated and compressed. Academia Sinica's Cheng Yen-hsin has calculated that, looking only at period fertility, Taiwan fell below 2 in 1985; but by the real "cohort" measure, women did not have fewer than 2 children over their lifetimes until the generation born in 1965, a gap of fully twenty years¹⁸. So 0.695 is grim, but the way it is grim is more complicated than it looks.

The numbers are frightening. But what is even more worth stopping over is the -715 in 2024. It proves one thing: even the lowest-threshold motive of "seeking good fortune by having one more child" no longer moves people in Taiwan. The question is not even whether people can afford a second child. It is that the first child is not arriving. And if the first child is not arriving, one step back, the problem is not in the delivery room at all. It is at the wedding.

Not No Children, but No Marriage

This is the most counterintuitive part of the whole issue, and also the part most often misstated.

Whenever low fertility is mentioned, everyone's mind automatically goes to "young people cannot afford children" and "housing prices are too high, so people are afraid to give birth." It sounds self-evident. But Cheng Yen-hsin of Academia Sinica's Institute of Sociology, who has studied Taiwan's fertility data for decades, concludes: "The key code of low fertility is not not having children; it is more likely: not yet being married."¹⁹

Her evidence is solid. In Taiwan, most couples have children after marriage, and "more than 70% even have two or more children"²⁰. In other words, once Taiwanese people marry, their willingness to have children is not actually that low. What has truly collapsed is the denominator: fewer people are getting married. There were 123,061 marriages in 2024, falling to 104,376 in 2025, a record low²¹. The lifelong unmarried rate among people aged 45 to 49 is already approaching 20%, and projections suggest that by 2050, more than 30% of men and more than one-quarter of women will remain unmarried for life²².

What about "having children without marrying"? In many European countries, non-marital births account for most births. But not in Taiwan. Cheng's figure: "In Taiwan, non-marital births are only 2-4%, and have remained immovable for decades."²³

Put these three figures together, and an entirely different causal map emerges: fertility in Taiwan is almost entirely tied to marriage, with non-marital births accounting for only 2-4%, while the number of people marrying is collapsing. So the fall from the replacement level of 2.1 to below 1.1 was driven almost entirely by the decline in the marriage rate²⁴. Rather than saying fertility has been crushed by "unaffordability," it is more accurate to say it has been drained by "not marrying."

📝 Curator's note: The conventional account gets the causality backward. The mainstream narrative is "economic pressure -> people are afraid to have children -> low fertility," so the policy logic naturally becomes "hand out money to ease the pressure -> everyone will dare to have children." But if the real breaking point is "not marrying," this causal chain is miswired from the first step. Cheng Yen-hsin puts it calmly: if the problem is "cannot afford it," subsidies might be effective; but if most people are unmarried, "economic policy is of no use." Research by the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research points to the same place: housing prices and low wages are not the main causes of non-marriage. What matters more is that "most unmarried people are willing to marry, but after entering the workforce, they have difficulty meeting suitable marriage partners"²⁵. In other words, money cannot solve this problem. The money has been spent at the wrong point in the chain.

And one must beware of an even deeper trap: casting not having children as "young people being selfish." When women for the first time have the capacity to say no to the expectation that they reproduce, labeling that choice selfish is both unfair and aimed at the wrong target. After all, the main cause from beginning to end is not married people having too few children, but people never entering marriage at all. We will return to this later.

Handing Money to the Wrong People

So what has the government done over the past decade?

The answer: it has handed out a lot of money. The low-birth-rate countermeasure plan had a total budget of about NT$485.1 billion from 2007 to 2024²⁶. Spending related to children aged 0 to 6 rose from NT$15 billion in 2016 all the way to NT$140 billion in 2026, surpassing NT$120 billion in a single year²⁷. Childrearing allowances are now NT$5,000 per month for a first child, NT$6,000 for a second, and NT$7,000 for a third or later child, with means testing abolished²⁸. In May 2026, Lai Ching-te further added eighteen measures under a "New Strategy for Taiwan's Population Response," including a monthly NT$5,000 growth allowance from ages 0 to 18 and a uniform central-government childbirth payment of NT$100,000²⁹.

The money was really spent. The problem is that almost all of it went to families that were already married and already had children. It does not connect at all to the part that is collapsing: people who are not married. That is what "handing money to the wrong people" means. The problem was never that the money was too little. The target was wrong from the start.

Even more awkwardly, even when money is given to families that are "married but hesitating over whether to have one more child," the effect is tiny. Yang Tzu-ting of Academia Sinica's Institute of Economics conducted a clever study using lottery winnings in Taiwan as a "natural experiment": families that suddenly won prizes of more than NT$1 million were effectively receiving a "fertility subsidy" from the sky. Would they have more children?

Yes. But only 0.07 more children.

Converted into plain terms, among every hundred families that won large prizes, the windfall led to only about seven additional children within six years³⁰. Yang's inference is direct: unless a subsidy comes close to the full cost of raising a child, it cannot move fertility decisions³¹. Why is money so ineffective? Because he found that what truly deters people is often time, not money: "Raising children does not merely increase expenses; more importantly, it affects how people arrange their personal time."³² Raising a child to age 18 in Taiwan costs about NT$10 million, but what deters people even more than the NT$10 million is the life parents must hand over during those eighteen years.

Wen Tsai-hung of National Taiwan University's Population and Gender Studies Center puts it more sharply. Having studied population issues for years, he delivers this verdict on the logic of "paying people to have children":

"The logic of giving you money and telling you to have children does not work. Pursuing a more equal and kinder living environment is the fundamental solution."³³

He adds another sentence explaining why this issue is so hard to take seriously: "Population problems are always like boiling a frog in warm water; you never feel that they are very serious."³⁴ When an earthquake comes, you react within seconds. But a population crisis, even with one or two decades of warning, keeps being pushed to tomorrow because it moves slowly. What Wen truly cares about is the underlying setup of Taiwanese society. He says, "If we continue constantly emphasizing individual competition, this situation of unequal and extremely concentrated resource distribution cannot change."³⁵ In a society that throws all pressure onto individuals to bear alone, having children becomes a high-risk personal gamble. No amount of money changes the structure of that wager.

⚠️ Contested view: Shih Hsin University's Chiang Min-chin cuts in from another angle. He says Taiwan "privatizes childrearing risk while publicizing the demographic dividend": children grow up to pay taxes, serve in the military, and sustain the whole society, so the benefits belong to everyone; but the risks, costs, and sacrifices of bearing and raising them must be swallowed by parents alone. He therefore argues: "Low fertility is not a moral defect, but a price signal."³⁶ Young people not having children does not mean something is wrong with them. More likely, they have done the math. In this frame, subsidies are "like painkillers, not surgery"[^37]: they can suppress the pain for a while, but they cannot cure the lesion.

No Country Has Bought It Back

At this point, a natural question arises: what about other countries? Surely someone has succeeded? Should Taiwan not copy their homework?

This is the sentence from this article that most needs to be remembered: so far, no developed country has used policy to buy its fertility rate back to the replacement level of 2.1. Not one.

That sentence sounds pessimistic, but it is the conclusion repeatedly confirmed by international organizations. Research from IZA World of Labor says pro-natalist policies can indeed raise fertility rates slightly, but are "unlikely to bring fertility back to replacement level"³⁷. Economist Stuart Gietel-Basten adds an even plainer note on low fertility in Asia: "Throwing money at the problem is not going to solve it."³⁸ When the evidence is laid out:

• Hungary has been treated as the model student of conservative pro-natalism. Viktor Orban's government has long spent around 5% of GDP on family policy, among the higher levels in Europe, but the fertility rate in 2024 was still only 1.39. AEI even estimates that if the world wanted to raise fertility by 0.2 through policy, it would require roughly US$250 billion in additional spending each year³⁹.
• South Korea spent more than US$270 billion and still remains among the countries with the lowest fertility rates in the world⁴⁰.
• Even France and the Nordic countries, benchmarks for "family-friendly" policy, cannot hold the line: France's 2025 fertility rate was 1.56, its lowest since World War I; Finland's 1.25 was a record low⁴¹. All the model countries are falling.

South Korea's story especially deserves unpacking, because it is the easiest to misread as a case of "policy working." South Korea's fertility rate has indeed risen for two consecutive years: 0.72 in 2023, 0.75 in 2024, and back to 0.80 in 2025⁴². That sounds like hope. But Statistics Korea itself says this rebound was "likely driven by an increase in marriages since August 2022"[^44]: a post-pandemic wave of delayed marriages being made up, combined with a demographic dividend from more women in their early thirties reaching marriage age. It was not the achievement of any pro-natalist policy.

(Note: Taiwan's figure here is the period total fertility rate. Taiwan is around 1.1 under World Bank/UN model-based measures, which use a different system. The two should not be mixed⁴³.)

And hidden here is an even harsher fact. South Korea's fertility rate has risen for two years, yet the population is still shrinking⁴⁴. Why? Because of "population momentum." A society's population structure is like a giant ship. Even if the fertility rate miraculously returned to 2.1 overnight, the number of women of childbearing age has already shrunk substantially, so the total population would continue falling for decades⁴⁵. Taiwan's total population peaked at 23,603,121 at the end of 2019⁴⁶, and has declined ever since. No policy can make this downward slope turn back.

📝 Curator's note: This is why the question "Can pro-natalist policy reverse low fertility?" is itself framed wrongly. Reversal implies pulling the total population back up, while population momentum shows this is already physically impossible. At most, policy can "slow the pace of decline"; it cannot "turn downward into upward." South Korea is living proof of this sentence: fertility rising and population continuing to fall can happen at the same time, with no contradiction at all. Setting the goal as "saving the population" guarantees a losing battle. Reframing the goal as "fall less hard and live better while becoming smaller" is the option still in hand.

It is also worth clarifying an older version of the story that is often cited: many reports say South Korea created a dedicated "Ministry of Population Strategy and Planning," and that the policy then worked. In fact, Yoon Suk Yeol did announce in May 2024 that he would create such a ministry and declared a national population emergency. But the relevant bill remained stuck in the National Assembly and ultimately died with Yoon's impeachment. The ministry was never actually created⁴⁷. Treating a nonexistent ministry as a success story is a mistake.

The Countryside Has Already Lived Through It

Return to Sinwei Elementary School at the beginning, the one with no first-grade newcomers on the sports field.

When urban residents hear "low fertility," it often feels abstract. The MRT is still crowded. Kindergartens still have waiting lists. But Taiwan's rural villages began receiving this letter forty years ago. Only now are cities opening it. Zoom out to all of Taiwan: there are 512 elementary schools with fewer than 50 students, and 1,025 with fewer than 100, accounting for 38.4% of all elementary schools nationwide⁴⁸. Total elementary enrollment is projected to fall from 1.2 million in school year 113 to just 689,000 in school year 129, evaporating by more than half in fifteen years⁴⁹.

In 2026, Kaohsiung's Xingtian, Xiaolin in Jiasian, and Jianshan in Taoyuan each had only one first-grade newcomer⁵⁰; across Kaohsiung, 79 schools could open only one first-grade class. In Tainan, Toushe in Danei and Liuxi in Hedong, both branch campuses, also each had one first-grader⁵¹. Nationwide, 110 schools already have so few new students that they can open only one class.

This time machine will not stop at elementary schools. Low fertility is a wave that climbs upward by age: first emptying maternity wards, then elementary schools, then universities, barracks, workplaces, long-term care, and pensions, arriving station by station on schedule.

Universities are first in line. The number of first-year college students fell below 200,000 in school year 114 and is projected to reach only 146,000 by school year 129⁵². The private school union estimates that when only fifty or sixty thousand new students remain, there will be enough to sustain only about 50 private universities, meaning around 40 schools will face closure⁵³. (An honest caveat is needed: university vacancies in 2025 actually hit a five-year low, with only 1,220 unfilled places across 18 schools⁵⁴. The long-term "student-source cliff" is real, but short-term numbers fluctuate because of closures and enrollment reductions; they are not so linear.)

The barracks have received the letter too. The number of draft-age men fell below 100,000 for the first time in 2023, to 97,828, and is projected to fall to 74,000 by 2031⁵⁵. The bankruptcy year for Labor Insurance has been pushed back from the originally estimated 2028 to 2031, but only through an unprecedented NT$387 billion injection⁵⁶. The workplace talent gap, the National Development Council estimates, will widen from 400,000 to 480,000 by 2030⁵⁷. And in 2025, Taiwan officially entered a "super-aged society," with people aged 65 and older surpassing 20.06% of the population, or 4.67 million people⁵⁸.

💡 Did you know: One crossover point quietly happened in 2020: that year, the number of dogs and cats in Taiwan exceeded the number of children aged 0 to 14 for the first time. In recent years, there have been about 2.79 million dogs and cats, still more than the population of children aged 0 to 14, about 2.68 million⁵⁹. "More pets than children" sounds like a lament, but it is actually a concrete measure of a society gradually shifting the objects of affection, companionship, and care away from the next generation.

Where will the missing people come from? Some have already quietly filled the gap. In April 2025, the number of migrant workers in Taiwan reached 830,000, a record high, including 215,000 foreign caregivers caring for Taiwan's elderly⁶⁰. There are also about 600,000 new immigrants, who are about to become Taiwan's fifth-largest demographic group⁶¹. In other words, as Taiwan has fewer children of its own, workers from other countries are quietly sustaining the island's factories and long-term care bedsides. This is an invisible release valve, and also an ethical question we have not properly faced: we depend on their young and working-age labor, yet rarely seriously discuss their circumstances and future.

Whose Crisis?

At this point, it is time to ask a sharper question: whose crisis is low fertility, exactly?

For the past decade-plus, low fertility has almost always been placed inside a "national security crisis" frame: insufficient soldiers, labor shortages, economic decline, pension black holes. It sounds urgent. But more and more people have begun to ask whether this frame once again turns women's bodies into tools of the state.

Lee Meng-ying of the Garden of Hope Foundation says it directly: in the national-security narrative around encouraging births, "women will be regarded by the state as resources/tools for population reproduction"⁶². Lin Lu-hung of the Taiwan Women's Link points to a truth often overlooked: "Taiwanese women are not unwilling to have children; they do not wish to be bound by marriage culture and by mother-in-law/daughter-in-law and affinal kinship relations"⁶³. Many women want children, but do not want the entire marital-family structure attached behind the child, a structure they cannot accept.

This connects directly back to the earlier thread of "non-marriage." BBC Chinese interviewed several Taiwanese people who chose not to follow the traditional path. Kuo Pei-yu, a 35-year-old editor at an independent publishing house, said without polishing it: "Marriage has no benefit at all for women. My mother followed the script society gave her, got married, and had children, and she lived very painfully inside that framework."⁶⁴ A 33-year-old Mr. Chen, who works in a local public-sector office, said, "Living alone is perfectly fine too."⁶⁵ In 2023, the unmarried share among Taiwanese aged 35 to 39 had already reached 47.6%⁶⁶, nearly half. When "not marrying and not having children" moves from a marginal choice to nearly half the population's normal condition, continuing to define it as "a crisis," "selfish," or "out of touch" is itself worth questioning.

⚠️ Contested view: Cheng Yen-hsin's proposed solution points its arrow at society's entire assumption about "who should be responsible for raising children": "Childrearing needs to become the responsibility of an entire village, society, and country, not women's natural duty."⁶⁷ That sentence flips the entire subtext of pro-natalist policy. As long as raising children is still presumed to be women's natural duty, subsidies, allowances, and slogans are merely adding money on top of an unfair division of labor, without touching the division itself.

Even the most basic assumption, "total population decline = economic decline," is challenged by some. Commentators have argued that it is necessary to distinguish between "aggregate GDP" and "GDP per capita": if there are fewer people, but each person creates more value, per capita income may rise instead. Some projections suggest lower fertility could even raise per capita income by about 10% before 2055⁶⁸. From another angle, the structures truly bearing the crisis may be the tax base, the military, the pension system, and domestic-demand industries that require large numbers of people, rather than every concrete Taiwanese individual. For individuals, fewer people is not necessarily the end of the world.

So if encouraging births is doomed to be ineffective, and labor shortages are real, does Taiwan have another path? Business Today offers an answer that is blunt enough to sting: "Immigration is the only path to solving the population crisis."⁶⁹ Yet Taiwan has barely moved down this path. Only about 40,000 foreigners have permanent residency, less than 0.2% of the total population. By contrast, Canada brings in about 500,000 immigrants in a single year, and Japan's Specified Skilled Worker visa has admitted 300,000 people in six years⁷⁰. Taiwan cries out that it lacks people while keeping the door tightly shut. Between encouraging births and accepting immigrants, Taiwan has not really begun to answer the question.

📝 Curator's note: One option that has gone unspoken has always stood beside "encouraging births": adaptation. The National Development Council itself has in fact loosened its language, saying AI and automation "are expected to become solutions"⁷¹. This is already the language of "reorganizing production within a smaller population," no longer the language of "reversing population decline." The subtext of the whole issue is quietly shifting tracks: from "find ways to make Taiwanese people have more children" to "accept that Taiwan will become smaller, and then find ways to live well." The former is a battle that cannot be won. The latter is only just beginning.

Living Well on an Island Destined to Shrink

The cruelest and most honest thing about demography is that it has almost no miracles.

After ten years of encouraging births and nearly NT$500 billion spent, even the Year of the Dragon could not be bought back. The degree to which fertility has been crushed by unaffordability is far smaller than the degree to which it has been drained by non-marriage. For ten years, the government has kept handing money to people it imagined were "afraid to have children," giving it to those already married while failing to connect with the part that has truly collapsed. Even if money were placed precisely into the hands of every hesitant family, Yang Tzu-ting's lottery experiment says that is worth only 0.07 children. Around the world, in Hungary, South Korea, France, and the Nordic countries, no country has bought its fertility rate back to replacement level. After Taiwan's total population peaked in 2019, no policy can make this downward slope turn around.

So what this article wants to leave you with is less another empty line about "Taiwan needing a better society" than an adjustment of perspective: perhaps we have been asking the wrong question all along. The question "How do we make Taiwanese people have more children?" has had ten years of answers: 0.695, and the empty sports field at Sinwei Elementary. The questions that truly need to be asked are two others: how can people who in fact want to marry and have children avoid being bound by an entire structure they cannot accept? And how, on an island that is destined to become smaller and older, can people live with dignity, warmth, and someone there to catch one another?

On that day in the 2024 Year of the Dragon, on the sports field at Sinwei Elementary School, there was not a single first-grade newcomer wearing a new uniform and carrying an oversized schoolbag.

It was a very quiet image. So quiet that you cannot help wondering: how much longer will this island take before it stops shouting toward the delivery room, turns around, and properly looks at the people already here on the field?

The singing will grow quieter. But as long as someone is still singing, it is not yet the final song.

Further Reading:

• Rural Education in Taiwan — When rural villages entered low fertility forty years earlier than cities, small rural schools were where this letter first arrived.
• Education System and Exam Culture — University closures and the student-source cliff are inseparable from how the whole society understands "school advancement."
• Development of Taiwan's Long-Term Care System — When people over 65 exceed 20% and foreign caregivers sustain 215,000 bedsides, long-term care is the other end of low fertility.
• Taiwan's Robotics Industry — If fewer people is already settled, automation will be one of the key answers for "reorganizing production within a smaller population."

References