Birth rates among Chinese falling everywhere, not just China, Malaysian Chinese official says

This includes ensuring they can afford to send their children for a tertiary education, he said, adding that when Chinese couples calculate the expenses, they tend not to have more children.

“You have to think twice because you have to nurture the younger generation,” Wee said.

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Wee said that while his parents would have had around 10 siblings, members of his generation would only have two or three brothers or sisters on average.

However, he said that the lunar Year of the Dragon tends to see an increase in the birth rate among ethnic Chinese.

While agreeing that the number of ethnic Chinese students in Chinese schools would drop, he said that such schools cannot stop other students of other ethnicities from enrolling.

Around 20 per cent of students in these schools are currently non-Chinese, Wee said.

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Wee was responding to Bayan Baru MP Sim Tze Tzin, who had expressed concern in a Facebook post on February 13 over the declining birth rate among the Chinese community in Malaysia and the effect of this on school enrolment.

Sim said data from 2022 showed that only 40,000 Malaysian-Chinese were born that year.

This article was first published by The Star