Educational Management Resilience under Low Fertility: Theoretical Construction and Adaptive Mechanisms of County-Level Education Systems in Demographic Decline

Persistent low fertility is shifting education governance from the management of expansion toward the management of contraction under uncertainty. This article develops Educational Management Resilience (EMR) as a theory of how territorial education systems preserve essential public functions while progressively reconfiguring institutions under sustained demographic decline. EMR is conceptualized through absorption, adaptation, and transformation, but the framework departs from generic organizational resilience by making the territorial service portfolio---rather than organizational survival---the object of resilience. It therefore evaluates continuity in access, quality, equity, efficiency, and legitimacy while recognizing that resilient transformation may involve deliberate organizational discontinuity. The article specifies decision boundaries among the three capabilities, theorizes an absorption trap produced by institutional inertia and concentrated political costs, develops a cost-adjusted conceptual measurement model, and consolidates the causal argument into six propositions. Chinese county governance is treated as a theoretically consequential meso-level because school layout, teacher allocation, fiscal responsibility, accessibility, and family choice intersect there. Illustrative county policy episodes demonstrate operationalization without being presented as causal validation. A comparative longitudinal research strategy is then proposed to test the framework under heterogeneous patterns of demographic and spatial decline.