“I don’t want to be able to have children anymore, sooner or later Korea will be extinct!”
The warning of former president Yong Ziyu is still in the ears, and the latest data for 2025 gives the South Korean government a dull reminder: the growth of newborns appears to warm up for 13 consecutive months, but the overall fertility rate is only 0.75, not even a zero of the population stability line 2.1 is enough.
The street car is pushed by pets, mother and baby shops are still rare than luxury shops, once a bustling primary school with only a few dozen students, and the Korean fertile winter, more than imagined.
Baby car-dressed dogs, school turned old-age home: South Korea's fertility cold to ice
Let's not say the data is too hard, first look at a few real-life things.In a Korean review, the host went to the primary school recording program, asking the whole school how many students there are, the children scattered and answered "23".
When I asked a little boy how many people there were in his class, the even more outrageous answer came: "There are only four in the whole grade".
The host shuddered for half a day and said: “Now half of the school’s people are here,” but the program team said the school is still “in good condition.”
This scene put us here simply dare not think, even in the town primary school, one grade is not as many people, right?
Even more magical is the street sight.In Seoul, you will find a lot of baby cars pushed, but when you look around, the inside is not lying with a doll that does not urinate, but a pet dog in small clothes.
Some netizens joked: "Korean pet shops are three times more than mother and baby shops, to buy a bottle of milk you have to search through three streets, but to buy dog containers downstairs."
This is not an exaggeration, with data showing that South Korea's number of mother and baby goods stores decreased by 47% over the decade, while pet cafes add more than 200 each year.
The fate of the school is more telling.
In 2021, South Korea will only shut down more than 20 schools, and by 2025, it will soar to 49. These vacant teaching buildings are not idle, and they have been painted and converted into nursing homes.
On the one hand, there are fewer and fewer children who are infertile, and on the other hand, the proportion of older people over the age of 65 has broken by 20%, formally entering the "hyper-aging society".
Some netizens took a comparison picture: the sign of "XX Primary School" hangs at the old school gate, but the new sign says "XX Nursing Home". The slide at the door is still there, but the players have become old people in wheelchairs, which makes people sigh to look at it.
The marital status of young people is even more worrying.
On the streets of Seoul, randomly interviewed young people aged 20 to 40, six adults are unmarried, and the unmarried rate in the 30-year-old population is more than 50%.
Furthermore, a 2025 survey by the South Korean Bureau of Statistics showed that 42.7% of unmarried people aged 20 to 39 felt that “marriage is not a must-have option”, up 19 percentage points faster than a decade ago.
Among the married, there were 24.6% of volunteers, who completely disbanded marriage and childbirth.
1.8 million marriage fee + 64-hour class: the truth that young people dare not give birth
Some say that South Korean young people are selfish and love freedom, but truly understand the inner situation and know that they are really "unable to produce, dare not to live."
First of all, the economic burden of dying people was crushed, and a survey by the South Korean Institute of Health and Social Research showed that young people bought marriage houses for at least 1.3 million yuan and got married for 1.8 million.
But in 2025, the average monthly salary of young people in South Korea is about RMB 2,60,000 (USD 4,830,000), and even if they don't eat or drink, they will have to save enough money to get married for six or seven years, which does not count the cost of raising children.
More contradictory is the fact that young Koreans do not earn much, but are kidnapped by the “face culture” and spend money.
According to the U.S. Investment Report of 2022, South Korea spends $325 per capita on luxury goods, leading the world.
It is not that they are rich, but in the Korean job search market, wearing a badge became a "click brick", if you go to an interview in ordinary clothes, not even the next round of opportunity.
This trend directly leads to the average debt of young Koreans of 520,000 RMB, which is higher than the mortgage loans of many young people in our country.
It was not easy to get out of the head into the large factory, and fell into the cave of fire inside the workplace.
More than 30% of people in the workplace in South Korea work more than 50 hours a week, and a semiconductor department of Samsung has been specially approved to work 64 hours a week. If this were placed here, it would have been on the hot search.
More frightening is that South Koreans work 2,000 hours a year on average, and the world’s top, “You don’t do what people do” is not a joke in South Korean enterprises, it’s a real reality.
Everyday tired to go home and want to lie down, who has the energy to talk about loving to have children?
Not to mention the “hell model” that began at school.
Korean children start from elementary school, sleep only 4 hours a day, and pay at least RMB 60,000 a year for a good university.
Our domestic parents are tired of tutoring homework, which is really dwarfed compared with South Korea.
These young people have survived ten years and finally got rid of the rehearsal class, thinking of having children to let TA go back and forth his old way, decided to choose "to count."
Some young people in the interview said very truthfully: "I myself as a cow horse, I don't want to give birth to small slaves for money valleys, continue to work for them."
Korean women’s high school enrollment rate was 76.3 percent, 10 percentage points higher than men’s, but employment rate was only 56.7 percent.
When recruiting, companies will also stamp women "not to have children in a few years", even if they have children, the male maternity leave use rate is only 14.3%, and the burden of carrying the baby is basically all pressured on the mother.
In this case, women are naturally more cautious about childbirth, after all, nobody wants to both work and be a "all-powerful mother".
Spend 2 trillion yuan to ask for children but give them for nothing? This is the dream that should wake up most
The South Korean government has been rushing like a ants on a hot pot, and since 2006 there have been more than $200 billion spent on maternity subsidies, the equivalent of GDP spent annually in our middle-sized city.
The local government is even more crazy, Seoul gives the first child a cash bonus of 11,000, second child 16,000, and children before the age of 8 can still receive a monthly allowance of 1600 yuan.
Incheon is even more ruthless, directly shouting "a prize of 500,000 RMB", giving a total of 100 million won from birth to 18 years old.
In addition to spending money, all kinds of wonderful policies also lay down.
Gwangju piloted "parents of primary school students go to work at 10 o'clock". If the response is good, it will be implemented nationwide in 2026.
Compulsory enterprises to disclose child support data and include it in the evaluation system.
Kindergartens engage in night care, and communities offer free childcare, just for the convenience of parents who work overtime.
Even college students did not let go, the government engaged in documentaries, campus lectures, advertising the "non-economic value of marriage", and the young people did not buy accounts at all, and someone directly in the lecture said: "Let's first solve the problem of house prices and overtime."
But the money is spent, and the effect is unbearable.
From 2006 to 2025, South Korea's monthly childcare subsidy increased from 100,000 won to 500,000 won, but the fertility rate dropped from 1.12 to 0.79.
Experts have thoroughly analyzed that the growth of newborns in 2025 is "compensatory fertility", but it is the release of demand delayed during the epidemic, coupled with the increase in the base of marriageable women around the age of 30. It is not the policy that has played a role at all.
As some netizens say, “Give you 500,000 to make you overwork every day and spend 3 million to raise a puppet, would you?”
The root of the problem is actually obvious. The Korean government dares to throw money, but it does not dare to touch the real hard bones.
The workplace culture of the financial monopoly has not changed, the 64-hour work system still exists, where do young people have time to take care of the family?
Gender equality has not been implemented, and the utilization rate of male parental leave is pitifully low. How dare women give birth?
Housing prices and education costs are not high, and 28.3% of young people have no housing solved, and having children is more promising.
In Sweden, parents share 480 days of maternity leave, and fathers have exclusive leave, with a fertility rate of 1.7 days.
France relies on public guardianship and a flexible working system and is much stronger than South Korea.
Zhao Ingtai, a professor at the University of Seoul, said: “The real demographic revolution is not in the maternity house, but in the heart of every young person.”
South Korea's trouble has actually given us a wake-up, in 2024, China's birth population is 9.54 million, the natural growth rate of the population is 0.99‰, although it has not yet reached South Korea, but housing, education, and job pressure are also concerns of many young people.
After all, childbirth can never be prompted by subsidies.
When young people feel that there is a future, do not need to spend money for the house, do not sacrifice their lives for overtime, do not worry about childcare to insomnia, they will naturally be willing to have children.
If you only want to throw money but don't solve the fundamental problem, even if you raise the subsidy to 1 million, it will only be "drawing water with a sieve".
Today in South Korea may be the tomorrow that many countries need to be alert to. After all, only by keeping confidence can we keep future children.