In Northern Taiwan, Childlessness and Ghost Towns – Liberation

The major port of Keelung has the lowest fertility rate in the country. The shortage of children, combined with the increasing aging of the population, is forcing the authorities to close schools and find marches in the face of an “existential threat”.

Only a memory remains of them in an empty environment: colored shapes run along the walls of the building, sinks and mini-garbage cans one meter off the ground, a wooden rocking horse, two slides and small green desks are neatly arranged in a darkened room. But the classrooms, the corridors, the courtyard remain deserted, without noise. The school has lost its purpose. The children have left the scene. Only the dog Blacky remained, a little lost in front of the steps of the courtyard open to the winds.

In September, the elementary school in the popular Yue Mei District east of Keelung, a major port city northeast of Taipei, was closed. There were only about fifty children left who, every morning, walked up a long steep slope to reach this two-story building built into the mountainside and among the trees. They were exhausted, less and less every year. “They joined a school 1 kilometer away, easier to access, bigger, with more teachers,” welcomes Nick Chon, the vice principal of the community college who has taken up residence on the premises.

inexorable phenomenon

This nice man who is teeming with projects can introduce this school group under the guise of a “greater efficiency”, of one “best student-teacher ratio”, of one “proper use of public facilities”. But it cannot hide a reality that has symbolic force in this Taiwanese suburb.