Business
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.”
Businessman Brian Kahn has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud in a case that brought down a hedge fund, helped lead to the bankruptcy of a retailer and damaged West Los Angeles investment bank B. Riley Financial.
Kahn, 52, admitted in a Trenton, N.J., federal court Wednesday to hiding trading losses that brought down Prophecy Asset Management in 2020. The Securities and Exchange Commission alleged the losses exceeded $400 million.
An investor lawsuit has accused Kahn of funneling some of the fund’s money to Franchise Group, a Delaware retail holding company assembled by the investor that owned Vitamin Shoppe, Pet Supplies Plus and other chains.
B. Riley provided $600 million through debt it raised to finance a $2.8-billion management buyout led by Kahn in 2023. It also took a 31% stake in the company and lent Kahn’s investment fund $201 million, largely secured with shares of Franchise Group.
Kahn had done deals with B. Riley co-founder Bryant Riley before partnering with the L.A. businessman on Franchise Group.
However, the buyout didn’t work out amid fallout from the hedge fund scandal and slowing sales at the retailers. Franchise Group filed for bankruptcy in November 2024. A slimmed-down version of the company emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
B. Riley has disclosed in regulatory filings that the firm and Riley have received SEC subpoenas regarding its dealings with Kahn, Franchise group and other matters.
Riley, 58, the firm’s chairman and co-chief executive, has denied knowledge of wrongdoing, and an outside law firm reached the same conclusion.
The failed deal led to huge losses at the financial services firm that pummeled B. Riley’s stock, which had approached $90 in 2021. Shares were trading Friday at $3.98.
The company has marked down its Franchise Group investment, and has spent the last year or so paring debt through refinancing, selling off parts of its business and other steps, including closing offices.
The company announced last month it is changing its name to BRC Group Holdings in January. It did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
At Wednesday’s plea hearing, Assistant U.S. Atty. Kelly Lyons said that Kahn conspired to “defraud dozens of investors who had invested approximately $360 million” through “lies, deception, misleading statements and material omissions.”
U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp released Kahn on a $100,000 bond and set an April 2 sentencing date. He faces up to five years in prison. Kahn, his lawyer and Lyons declined to comment after the hearing.
Kahn is the third Prophecy official charged over the hedge fund’s collapse. Two other executives, John Hughes and Jeffrey Spotts, have also been charged.
Hughes pleaded guilty and is cooperating with prosecutors. Spotts pleaded not guilty and faces trial next year. The two men and Kahn also have been sued by the SEC over the Prophecy collapse.
Bloomberg News contributed to this report.
Chatty bots are sharing their hot takes through hundreds of thousands of AI-generated podcasts. And the invasion has just begun.
Though their banter can be a bit banal, the AI podcasters’ confidence and research are now arguably better than most people’s.
“We’ve just begun to cross the threshold of voice AI being pretty much indistinguishable from human,” said Alan Cowen, chief executive of Hume AI, a startup specializing in voice technology. “We’re seeing creators use it in all kinds of ways.”
AI can make podcasts sound better and cost less, industry insiders say, but the growing swarm of new competitors entering an already crowded market is disrupting the industry.
Some podcasters are pushing back, requesting restrictions. Others are already cloning their voices and handing over their podcasts to AI bots.
Popular podcast host Steven Bartlett has used an AI clone to launch a new kind of content aimed at the 13 million followers of his podcast “Diary of a CEO.” On YouTube, his clone narrates “100 CEOs With Steven Bartlett,” which adds AI-generated animation to Bartlett’s cloned voice to tell the life stories of entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson.
Erica Mandy, the Redondo Beach-based host of the daily news podcast called “The Newsworthy,” let an AI voice fill in for her earlier this year after she lost her voice from laryngitis and her backup host bailed out.
She fed her script into a text-to-speech model and selected a female AI voice from ElevenLabs to speak for her.
“I still recorded the show with my very hoarse voice, but then put the AI voice over that, telling the audience from the very beginning, I’m sick,” Mandy said.
Mandy had previously used ElevenLabs for its voice isolation feature, which uses AI to remove ambient noise from interviews.
Her chatbot host elicited mixed responses from listeners. Some asked if she was OK. One fan said she should never do it again. Most weren’t sure what to think.
“A lot of people were like, ‘That was weird,’” Mandy said.
In podcasting, many listeners feel strong bonds to hosts they listen to regularly. The slow encroachment of AI voices for one-off episodes, canned ad reads, sentence replacement in postproduction or translation into multiple languages has sparked anger as well as curiosity from both creators and consumers of the content.
Augmenting or replacing host reads with AI is perceived by many as a breach of trust and as trivializing the human connection listeners have with hosts, said Megan Lazovick, vice president of Edison Research, a podcast research company.
Jason Saldanha of PRX, a podcast network that represents human creators such as Ezra Klein, said the tsunami of AI podcasts won’t attract premium ad rates.
“Adding more podcasts in a tyranny of choice environment is not great,” he said. “I’m not interested in devaluing premium.”
Still, platforms such as YouTube and Spotify have introduced features for creators to clone their voice and translate their content into multiple languages to increase reach and revenue. A new generation of voice cloning companies, many with operations in California, offers better emotion, tone, pacing and overall voice quality.
Hume AI, which is based in New York but has a big research team in California, raised $50 million last year and has tens of thousands of creators using its software to generate audiobooks, podcasts, films, voice-overs for videos and dialogue generation in video games.
“We focus our platform on being able to edit content so that you can take in postproduction an existing podcast and regenerate a sentence in the same voice, with the same prosody or emotional intonation using instant cloning,” said company CEO Cowen.
Some are using the tech to carpet-bomb the market with content.
Los Angeles podcasting studio Inception Point AI has produced its 200,000 podcast episodes, accounting for 1% of all podcasts published on the internet, according to CEO Jeanine Wright.
The podcasts are so cheap to make that they can focus on tiny topics, like local weather, small sports teams, gardening and other niche subjects.
Instead of a studio searching for a specific “hit” podcast idea, it takes just $1 to produce an episode so that they can be profitable with just 25 people listening.
“That means most of the stuff that we make, we have really an unlimited amount of experimentation and creative freedom for what we want to do,” Wright said.
One of its popular synthetic hosts is Vivian Steele, an AI celebrity gossip columnist with a sassy voice and a sharp tongue. “I am indeed AI-powered — which means I’ve got receipts older than your grandmother’s jewelry box, and a memory sharper than a stiletto heel on marble. No forgetting, no forgiving, and definitely no filter,” the AI discloses itself at the start of the podcast.
“We’ve kind of molded her more towards what the audience wants,” said Katie Brown, chief content officer at Inception Point, who helps design the personalities of the AI podcasters.
Inception Point has built a roster of more than 100 AI personalities whose characteristics, voices and likenesses are crafted for podcast audiences. Its AI hosts include Clare Delish, a cooking guidance expert, and garden enthusiast Nigel Thistledown.
The technology also makes it easy to get podcasts up quickly. Inception has found some success with flash biographies posted promptly in connection to people in the news. It uses AI software to spot a trending personality and create two episodes, complete with promo art and a trailer.
When Charlie Kirk was shot, its AI immediately created two shows called “Charlie Kirk Death” and “Charlie Kirk Manhunt” as a part of the biography series.
“We were able to create all of that content, each with different angles, pulling from different news sources, and we were able to get that content up within an hour,” Wright said.
Speed is key when it comes to breaking news, so its AI podcasts reached the top of some charts.
“Our content was coming up, really dominating the list of what people were searching for,” she said.
Across Apple and Spotify, Inception Point podcasts have now garnered 400,000 subscribers.
Los Angeles County is suing four oil and gas companies for allegedly failing to plug idle oil wells in the large Inglewood Oil Field near Baldwin Hills.
The lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court charges Sentinel Peak Resources California, Freeport-McMoran Oil & Gas, Plains Resources and Chevron U.S.A. with failing to properly clean up at least 227 idle and exhausted wells in the oil field. The wells “continue to leak toxic pollutants into the air, land, and water and present unacceptable dangers to human health, safety, and the environment,” the complaint says.
The lawsuit aims to force the operators to address dangers posed by the unplugged wells. More than a million people live within five miles of the Inglewood oil field.
“We are making it clear to these oil companies that Los Angeles County is done waiting and that we remain unwavering in our commitment to protect residents from the harmful impacts of oil drilling,” said Supervisor Holly Mitchell, whose district includes the oil field, in a statement. “Plugging idle oil and gas wells — so they no longer emit toxins into communities that have been on the front lines of environmental injustice for generations — is not only the right thing to do, it’s the law.”
Sentinel is the oil field’s current operator, while Freeport-McMoran Oil & Gas, Plains Resources and Chevron U.S.A. were past operators. Energy companies often temporarily stop pumping from a well and leave it idle waiting for market conditions to improve.
In a statement, a representative for Sentinel Peak said the company is aware of the lawsuit and that the “claims are entirely without merit.”
“This suit appears to be an attempt to generate sensationalized publicity rather than adjudicate a legitimate legal matter,” general counsel Erin Gleaton said in an email. “We have full confidence in our position, supported by the facts and our record of regulatory compliance.”
Chevron said it does not comment on pending legal matters. The others did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
State regulations define “idle wells” as wells that have not produced oil or natural gas for 24 consecutive months, and “exhausted wells” as those that yield an average daily production of two barrels of oil or less. California is home to thousands of such wells, according to the California Department of Conservation.
Idle and exhausted wells can continue to emit hazardous air pollutants such as benzene, as well as a methane, a planet-warming greenhouse gas. Unplugged wells can also leak oil, benzene, chloride, heavy metals and arsenic into groundwater.
Plugging idle and exhausted wells includes removing surface valves and piping, pumping large amounts of cement down the hole and reclaiming the surrounding ground. The process can be expensive, averaging an estimated $923,200 per well in Los Angeles County, according to the California Geologic Energy Management Division, which notes that the costs could fall to taxpayers if the defendants do not take action. This 2023 estimate from CalGEM is about three times higher than other parts of the state due to the complexity of sealing wells and remediating the surface in densely populated urban areas.
The suit seeks a court order requiring the wells to be properly plugged, as well as abatement for the harms caused by their pollution. It seeks civil penalties of up to $2,500 per day for each well that is in violation of the law.
Residents living near oil fields have long reported adverse health impacts such as respiratory, reproductive and cardiovascular issues. In Los Angeles, many of these risks disproportionately affect low-income communities and communities of color.
“The goal of this lawsuit is to force these oil companies to clean up their mess and stop business practices that disproportionately impact people of color living near these oil wells,” County Counsel Dawyn Harrison said in a statement. “My office is determined to achieve environmental justice for communities impacted by these oil wells and to prevent taxpayers from being stuck with a huge cleanup bill.”
The lawsuit is part of L.A. County’s larger effort to phase out oil drilling, including a high-profile ordinance that sought to ban new oil wells and even require existing ones to stop production within 20 years. Oil companies successfully challenged it and it was blocked in 2024.
Rita Kampalath, the county’s chief sustainability officer, said the county remains “dedicated to moving toward a fossil fuel-free L.A. County.”
“This lawsuit demonstrates the County’s commitment to realizing our sustainability goals by addressing the impacts of the fossil fuel industry on front line communities and the environment,” Kampalath said.
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