Business

China’s Population Declines for 3rd Straight Year

Published

1 year ago

January 17, 2025

China’s Population Declines for 3rd Straight Year

To get its citizens to have more children and stop its population from shrinking, China has tried it all, even declaring having babies an act of patriotism. And yet, for the third year in a row, its population got smaller.

Not even a surprise uptick in the number of babies born, a first in seven years, could reverse the course of an aging and declining population.

China is staring down a longer term baby bust that is rippling through the economy. Hospitals are shutting their obstetrics units, and companies that sold baby formula are idling factories. Thousands of kindergartens have closed and more than 170,000 preschool teachers lost their jobs in 2023.

The country’s birthrate, as one former kindergarten in the southern city of Chongqing put it, “is falling off a cliff.” Enrollments in China’s kindergartens plummeted by more than five million in 2023, according to the most recently available data.

On Friday, the National Bureau of Statistics reported that 9.54 million babies were born last year, up slightly from 9.02 million in 2023. Taken together with the number of people who died over 2024 — 10.93 million — China’s population shrank for a third straight year.

The small bump in newborns, in part because it was the auspicious Year of the Dragon in the Chinese zodiac, didn’t change the broader trajectory, experts said. China’s childbearing population is declining and young people are reluctant to have children.

“In the medium and long term, the annual number of births in my country will continue to decline,” said Ren Yuan, a professor at Fudan University’s Institute of Population Studies.

The lack of babies is adding to China’s economic challenges. A shrinking working-age population is straining an underfunded pension system, and an aging society is leaning on a creaking health care system. China also reported on Friday that the economy grew by 5 percent in 2024, a number that was in line with expectations but that many experts said did not fully reflect a crisis of confidence among households reeling from a multiyear property crisis.

To encourage people to have more babies, the authorities are offering tax benefits, cheaper housing and cash. Cities are promising to cover the cost of in vitro fertilization. In some parts of the country, they are even promising to get rid of restrictions that penalize single mothers.

The government has called on local officials to put in place early-warning systems to monitor big changes in population at the village and town levels around the country. Some officials are even knocking on doors and calling women to inquire about their menstrual cycles.

Companies are also getting involved. In 2023, the travel site Trip.com started paying employees nearly $1,400 a year for each newborn until the age of 5. Last week, the founder of electric vehicle maker XPeng said he would give employees nearly $4,100 if they had a third child.

“We want our employees to have more kids,” said He Xiaopeng, the founder, in a video posted on social media. “I think the company should take care of the money, so employees can have children.”

The problem is not unique to China, which in 2023 was passed by India as the world’s most populous nation. Falling birthrates are often a measure of a country’s move up the economic ladder because fertility rates tend to fall as incomes and education levels go up. But China’s sudden decline in population arrived much sooner than the government had expected. Many families are earning more money than they were a decade ago, but have lost income because of the housing crisis.

Officials have long feared the day when there will not be enough workers to support retirees. Now the government has less time to prepare. More than 400 million people will be 60 or older in the next decade.

China is facing two challenges on this front. Its public pension system is severely underfunded and many young people are reluctant — or are unable — to contribute. A low retirement age has made things worse. After years of deliberation, the government decided on a 15-year plan to gradually increase the official age to 63 for men, 58 for women in office jobs and 55 for women who work in factories. The changes took effect this month.

The party only loosened birth restrictions in 2015 to allow families to have two children, an easing that created a sudden boom. Hospitals had to add beds in the corridors because there weren’t enough.

But the moment was short-lived. By 2017, births started declining every year until last year.

In 2021, panicked officials loosened China’s birth policy again, allowing couples to have three children. It was too late. The next year, so few babies were born that the population began to shrink for the first time since the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s failed experiment that resulted in widespread famine and death in the 1960s.

China has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, far below what demographers refer to as the replacement rate required for a population to grow. This threshold requires every couple, on average, to have two children.

Experts said the number of births would likely continue to fluctuate.

“For a country of 1.4 billion a half million more births is not much of a rebound at all,” Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. “This is in comparison to the lowest year, in 2023 when the pandemic certainly put a pause on childbearing.”

Many young Chinese people are quick to rattle off reasons not to have children: the rising cost of education, growing burdens of taking care of their aging parents and a desire to live a lifestyle known as “Double Income, No Kids.”

For women, the sentiment is especially strong. Daughters who were the only children in their families received education and employment opportunities their parents often did not. They have grown up to become empowered women who see Mr. Xi’s appeals to them to do their patriotic duty and bear children as one step too far. Many of these women have said that deep-seated inequality and insufficient legal protections have made them reluctant to get married.

The steep drop in babies is having a drastic effect on health care, education and even the consumer market. Companies that once minted money selling baby formula to feed a baby boom are now making shakes with calcium and selenium for older adults with brittle bones.

Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, is shutting a factory for the China market that employs more than 500 people halfway across the world in Europe. The company will focus on selling premium baby products and expanding its offering in adult nutrition in China, a spokesman said.

The pressure on China’s health care system is even more pronounced. Dozens of hospitals and maternal health clinic chains have reported closing over the past two years.

On social media forums, nurses specializing in obstetrics have talked about low pay and lost jobs. One doctor told state media that being in obstetrics, once considered an “iron rice bowl” position with guaranteed job security, had become a “rusty iron rice bowl.”

And some smaller hospitals have stopped paying their staff, Han Zhonghou, a former official at a hospital in northern China, told a Chinese magazine.

“Life for maternal and child hospitals,” Mr. Han said, “is getting harder and harder by the year.”

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Business

San Diego County agency selling water to keep its high rates in check

Published

10 hours ago

March 22, 2026

Press Room

San Diego County agency selling water to keep its high rates in check

San Diego County’s water agency is selling some of its water to another Southern California agency to help limit increasingly high water costs for 3.3 million people.

The water is going to Western Municipal Water District, which serves a growing area of nearly 1 million people in Riverside County, including Corona, Riverside and Temecula.

The San Diego County Water Authority will transfer at least 10,000 acre-feet of water per year over the next 21 years, enough for about 30,000 typical households.

The agencies said the deal will be worth about $100 million over the first five years.

The San Diego County agency has invested heavily to get more water in recent decades. In 2003, it struck an agriculture-to-urban transfer deal and it also buys water from the Carlsbad desalination plant under a 30-year agreement. These actions have brought San Diego County plentiful water — also some of the most expensive in the state. At the same time, conservation efforts in San Diego County have reduced water needs.

The San Diego County Water Authority delivers water to 22 cities and other agencies. Last year its board approved raising wholesale water rates 8.3%, which drew criticism from residents who said they were already struggling to afford their water bills.

Board Chair Nick Serrano said the deal “allows us to maximize the value of the investments San Diego County residents made over decades, strengthen water reliability, and do so in a way that is mindful of affordability.”

The two agencies said in a joint statement on Thursday that for Western Municipal, the additional water will help during drought and ensure reliable water without the cost and time involved in developing new water infrastructure projects.

The water will move from one area to the other through the pipelines of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the regional wholesaler that imports water from the Colorado River and Northern California. Both San Diego County and Western Municipal are members of the MWD.

An agreement between the MWD and the San Diego County Water Authority last year ended a 15-year legal battle over water costs and cleared the way for San Diego County to start selling some of its excess water to areas that need it.

Business

Gasoline price gouging in California draws a warning

Published

22 hours ago

March 21, 2026

Press Room

Gasoline price gouging in California draws a warning

California’s petroleum market watchdog is warning about price gouging at some gas stations charging over $7 or even $8 a gallon as the Iran war sends oil prices soaring.

The average price of gas in California is currently $5.66, but as of Friday, a Chevron station in Essex is charging $9.69, another in Los Angeles’ Chinatown is charging $8.71, and one in Vidal Junction is charging $7.79, according to GasBuddy, which tracks prices across the country.

“Our team is vigilantly monitoring the retail, wholesale, and spot markets,” said Tai Milder, director of the California Energy Commission Division of Petroleum Market Oversight, in a statement. “Any reports of unfair practices or market manipulation will be taken seriously, and we will not hesitate to refer any illegal conduct for further investigation and prosecution.”

Gas prices have jumped some 30% nationally since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran three weeks ago and Iran blocked 20% of the global oil supply. Californians, who already faced prices over $1 per gallon higher than the national average, are especially feeling the squeeze.

The extremely high prices at some gas stations in California “are not supported by current crude oil prices or gasoline futures,” the division said.

California’s oil and gas watchdog division was created in 2023 to provide greater insight into the state’s petroleum market after summer gas price spikes exceeded $6 per gallon two years in a row.

The state consistently sees the highest fuel prices in the country due to state taxes and fees, environmental programs, a cleaner fuel blend requirement and an isolated petroleum market, where 80% of gasoline comes from in-state refineries.

This isolation makes California gas prices more sensitive to refinery outages and market manipulation. In 2024 the division reported that, after accounting for environmental rules and taxes, Californians still pay an extra 41 cents more per gallon and the largest share of that goes to industry profit. They also found that the price spikes of the previous two years were caused by refineries going offline without backup supply and “potentially manipulative trading” in those under-supply conditions.

Lawmakers and regulators have been more quiet about price gouging of late and the energy commission put a decision to impose a profit cap on refiners on hold after a series of refinery closures raised concerns about future fuel supply shortages.

Jamie Court, the president of the nonprofit ratepayer advocacy group Consumer Watchdog, said the fact that the gap between national and California prices has widened since the start of the war is evidence of price gouging.

“We know they made 49 cents per gallon in January,” said Court, of the refineries. “We know now that their margins are closer to $1.25 per gallon,” he said, citing the group’s analysis of state and Oil Price Information Service data.

Chevron said in a statement that most of its gas stations are owned and operated by independent business people who are “free to set the retail price of fuel and other products.”

“Those costs are generally determined by fundamental economic forces like demand, supply and competition,” said spokesperson Ross Allen, who added that crude oil prices, which make up the bulk of gas prices, have gone up but California’s taxes and environmental fees can also add over $1.20 a gallon.

Valero, Marathon Petroleum, and Shell did not respond immediately to requests for comment.

The petroleum oversight agency said it reached out to stations where pricing appears “excessive and disproportionate to increases in those sellers’ costs” including “multiple stations in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, in addition to multiple stations in Northern California” since the war began.

It also encouraged Californians “to shop around and compare prices between name-brand and unbranded (or generic) gasoline.”

“While retailers typically charge more for branded gasoline, all gasoline sold in California must meet the state’s high standards for emissions control and engine performance,” read the statement.

Business

California attorney general asks judge to block Nexstar-Tegna merger

Published

1 day ago

March 21, 2026

Press Room

California attorney general asks judge to block Nexstar-Tegna merger

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta is asking a judge to unravel Nexstar Media Group’s $6.2-billion acquisition of rival TV station owner Tegna — the latest in a flurry of merger twists.

Nexstar announced late Thursday that it had consummated the Tegna takeover — despite a lawsuit that Bonta and seven other Democratic state attorneys general had filed in federal court the previous day.

The state officials sued to block the union of the station groups, alleging the new colossus would violate antitrust rules and a federal law limiting broadcast station ownership.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Sacramento.

Hours after that filing, the Federal Communications Commission’s Media Bureau in Washington approved Nexstar’s deal — clearing the way for the nation’s largest TV station group owner to swallow the third-largest station group.

The purchase gives Nexstar, which owns KTLA-TV Channel 5 in Los Angeles, 265 television stations.

On Friday, Bonta and the other attorneys general asked a judge for a temporary restraining order to freeze the takeover until a hearing on the matter.

“Nexstar/Tegna is not a done deal,” Bonta said Friday in a statement. “I will not let these corporate behemoths merge without a fight.”

It was not immediately clear when a judge might rule on the request for a restraining order.

Bonta appeared at a lawmakers’ hearing in Burbank on Friday to explore the impacts of another huge merger: Paramount Skydance’s proposed $111-billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. Bonta’s office has opened an investigation into the Paramount-Warner merger, but Bonta said Friday that no decision has been made on whether he or other attorneys general will seek to block it.

For now, he is focused on derailing the Nexstar-Tegna deal.

“We filed a suit before that deal closed,” Bonta told The Times. “We think our case is extremely strong. There is no way this should be approved.”

At issue is whether the FCC had the power to grant a waiver that would allow Nexstar to control TV stations that reach nearly 80% of U.S. households. In 2003, Congress set the station ownership cap at 39% of the country.

The Department of Justice also gave its blessing to close the deal.

The three FCC commissioners did not vote on the matter — despite pleas from the lone Democrat on the panel who advocated for an open process.

Approval of the merger was rapid after President Trump endorsed the consolidation on Feb. 7.

“We need more competition against THE ENEMY, the Fake News National TV Networks,” Trump wrote in his social media post.

“Letting Good Deals get done like Nexstar – Tegna will help knock out the Fake News because there will be more competition, and at a higher and more sophisticated level,” Trump wrote. “GET THAT DEAL DONE!”

In a statement Thursday, Nexstar founder and chief executive Perry Sook thanked Trump and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, saying Nexstar was “grateful” they recognized the “dynamic forces shaping the media landscape” and allowed the transaction to move forward.