Chow Wai-chun, president of the Early Childhood Educators Association, said there was little chance of the birth rate improving until the Covid-19 pandemic ended.

She said the current situation was worse than in 2003, when the Sars epidemic hit the city. There were 47,687 babies that year, only slightly lower than 48,119 in 2002.

Compounding the situation was the ongoing wave of emigration sparked by Beijing’s imposition of the national security law on Hong Kong in 2020 and its tightening grip on the city’s political affairs.

Chow said: “We used to handle withdrawal applications when the second term ended, but now we’re receiving applications every month, something not seen in the past.”

Hong Kong’s birth rate on track to hit 24-year low, with schools to bear brunt

With fewer babies born, kindergartens paying high rents for their campuses faced a greater risk of closing down, she noted.

The birth rate might turn around if the government increased the tax allowances for newborn babies and children, Chow argued. It might also help if the current half-day subsidy to cover kindergarten fees was changed to a whole-day subsidy, to ease the burden on working parents.

Population expert Paul Yip Siu-fai has sounded the alarm over the birth numbers for years now, and especially since 2020, when Hong Kong began recording more deaths than births. Official figures showed about 8,700 more deaths than births in 2020, widening by almost 50 per cent to 12,900 more deaths last year.

“The lowest number of births last year only deepened the situation the year before but going below 40,000 is really low,” said Yip, chair professor in social work and social administration at the University of Hong Kong and a former adviser to the government on population issues.

He did not expect the city’s birth numbers to be promising in the next three years and said the prolonged pandemic also discouraged couples from having babies.

Agreeing that the wave of emigration had worsened the baby situation, he said: “The people who moved out from Hong Kong last year were mainly young couples and professionals and therefore the downward trend is going to continue.”

Yip said the pandemic had also resulted in a drop in the number of Hongkongers marrying mainland Chinese, and mainlanders preferred having a baby soon after marriage.

The number of all marriages in Hong Kong fell from about 44,000 in 2019 to almost 28,000 in 2020, before slipping further to a record low of 27,000 last year. Cross-border marriages, with either partner from the mainland, plummeted from 13,262 in 2019 to 3,266 in 2020.

Yip warned that the declining number of births would have a domino effect – first affecting kindergartens, then primary and secondary schools and universities, before ultimately hitting the labour force.

For several years early this century, Hong Kong’s baby numbers received a big boost from mainland Chinese women who chose to give birth in the city as their children could then enjoy the benefits of being residents.

Thanks largely to them, births in Hong Kong shot up between 2005 to 2012, peaking at about 95,000 babies in 2011.

Hong Kong school closures ‘inevitable’ as enrolment falls, families leave city

But there were growing complaints that Hong Kong women were finding it hard to book hospital beds to give birth, and concerns that the mainlanders’ children would put pressure on the city’s health care, education and welfare services.

Former chief executive Leung Chun-ying put a stop to mainland women giving birth in Hong Kong from 2013, unless they were married to residents. The move was reflected in the baby data right away, with the number of births plunging from 91,343 in 2012 to 57,623 in 2013.

Four years later, the pro-Beijing think tank Hong Kong Vision Project, led by former Legislative Council president Jasper Tsang Yok-sing, called for the ban to be scrapped, estimating that the city would benefit by having 25,000 more babies a year. The government rejected the suggestion.

Population expert Yip said reversing the ban now was unlikely to work as Hong Kong was no longer as attractive to mainlanders as in the past.

He said young couples in Hong Kong were put off from starting families because of the education system, tiny living spaces and recent developments in the city.

“We should not bury our heads in the sand,” he said. “People have legitimate reasons for preferring not to have babies and the government should allay the concerns raised by those leaving the city.”

While it would be right to raise allowances to ease the financial burden on parents, he added, couples would not have babies because of an allowance.

Communications manager Matt Leung*, 40, who got married in 2019 when Hong Kong was hit by months of social unrest, said he and his wife decided against starting a family after considering the city’s political and social situation.

“My wife and I all along disliked the education system, and we became more determined not to have a baby after the national security law was implemented,” he said.

The couple have since made plans to emigrate, and now are planning to have a baby next year, after they settle down in Canada.

*Name changed at interviewee’s request