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.”
Business
Meta discontinues Instagram feature on new AI image generation tool after Hollywood backlash
A new tool that let people take publicly posted Instagram photos and use AI to generate new images from them drew such a big backlash in Hollywood that Meta has discontinued one of the features.
Instagram’s parent company, Meta, on Tuesday rolled out the new AI tool, called Muse Image, which makes it easy to “turn your ideas into high-quality visuals you can download and share anywhere.”
In a promotional video, Meta showed examples like adding a friend into a band photo.
But the tool came under fire from talent agencies, managers and union officials. They noted that many Instagram accounts were opted in by default, allowing users to manipulate the image and likeness of celebrities without their consent.
“I just think it’s wrong again to expect people to opt themselves out of something that literally has been proven to be able to create harm,” said Kyle Hjelmeseth, chief executive of Los Angeles-based influencer talent management firm G&B.
By Friday, Meta said a feature on Muse Image that helps pull photos from public Instagram accounts was no longer available.
“Earlier this week, we announced that one way for people to generate images in Meta AI is by @-mentioning public Instagram accounts that they want to reference,” Meta said in a blog post. “Our intent was to provide a useful creative tool and to give people control over whether their public content could be referenced in this way. We’ve heard the feedback that this feature missed the mark, so it’s no longer available.”
Creative Artists Agency, which raised concerns to Meta on behalf of its clients, commended the tech company for its swift decision.
“Putting individual rights and consent at the forefront is essential to building responsible technology,” the Century City-based talent agency said in a statement. “We look forward to ongoing conversations to ensure creators stay protected as technology evolves.”
Hollywood has long been wary of AI, after a string of deepfakes — videos or images depicting celebrities doing or saying things they never authorized. Jamie Lee Curtis and others have appeared in ads for products they never endorsed. Last year, OpenAI’s Sora 2 video tool drew outrage in Hollywood after users conjured up dead celebrities without their estates’ consent. OpenAI later said it would give rights holders more granular controls.
After Meta rolled out its new tool, there was immediate backlash from Hollywood.
“Anything other than a clear and conspicuous OPT-IN for these types of uses of Instagram users’ images is unacceptable, and an utter miscalculation of public sentiment regarding the obvious dangers and harms inherent in such use,” performers union SAG-AFTRA said in a statement.
United Talent Agency was also critical of Meta, saying it demands opt-in for the use of likeness, image and intellectual property of its clients on any platform.
“The use of such property without OPT-IN consent, credit and compensation is exploitation, not innovation,” the Beverly Hills-based talent agency said.
Meta’s initial response on Wednesday was that users can choose to opt out of having their photos used by Muse Image by changing their settings.
“We built Muse Image with strong controls and safety guardrails from day one,” Meta said in a statement. “Private accounts and those belonging to users under 18 are automatically excluded and adult users with public accounts can opt out with just a couple clicks. We will take action against any content that violates our Community Standards.”
Two days later, Meta removed a key feature from Muse Image, saying it received feedback that it “missed the mark.”
The launch fits a familiar Silicon Valley pattern — ship products first, ask for forgiveness later.
“They leverage their scale to make it easy to use the tools as well as to scale out the content that is available,” said Mickey Maher, chief business officer at Vermillio, which tracks people’s digital likenesses and intellectual property. “It’s not unique to this Meta product.”
Others said opt-out should be the default.
“This dark pattern of AI overreach, where essentially it’s a free-for-all when it comes to your content, information, is something that nobody actually wants,” said Lori Fena, former chair and executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founder of New York-based Personal Digital Spaces. “What we need in this new AI ecosystem is the ability to create trust and to have some sort of understanding and authenticity, and this does exactly the opposite.”
Television City, one of the most famous studios in the entertainment industry where generations of TV shows have been created, is expected to hit the market again as its owner grapples with debt.
It’s the latest sign of distress in Hollywood as the film and TV industry struggles from a sharp falloff in production activity across Southern California.
Television City’s owner, Hackman Capital Partners, is already in the process of selling the historic Radford Studio Center, which gave L.A.’s Studio City neighborhood its name. Hackman defaulted on a $1.1-billion mortgage in January and investment bank Goldman Sachs took over the property, which is now escrow for a sale to Netflix.
The sprawling Television City property is one of the most desirable locations in Los Angeles, sharing fences with the Original Farmers Market and the luxury Grove outdoor shopping center, each of which attracts millions of visitors every year.
If the studio at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue where “American Idol,” “All in the Family” and scores of other shows were filmed becomes available as expected, the owners of the Grove and the Farmers Market would be among the likely contenders for the property for potential expansion of their businesses, said sources familiar with the matter who were not authorized to comment.
Grove owner Rick Caruso was among the bidders for Television City, formerly known as CBS Television City, last time it was on the market and could emerge as a possible bidder.
The highest bid when broadcaster CBS sold the studio in 2019 came from Hackman Capital Partners, an international movie studio operator and commercial property landlord that paid $750 million for the 25-acre site that is near Hollywood, Beverly Hills and and the Sunset Strip.
Hackman Capital’s plan to recoup its investment included continuing to operate Television City as a studio for rent while adding new revenue-generating features.
Last year the city approved Hackman Capital’s $1-billion plan to add 980,000 square feet of offices, sound stages, production facilities and retail space.
The original studio designed by famed Los Angeles architect William Pereira erected in 1952 has city landmark protections, but newer structures on the property do not and there are acres of surface parking that could be converted to other uses.
Both Caruso and Farmers Market owners A.F. Gilmore have sued to limit the planned expansion of the studio, calling it a “massively scaled” development that “would overwhelm, disrupt, and forever transform the community.”
The debate over the development has played out amid a serious downturn in the region’s entertainment industry, with studios shifting film and television production to Georgia, New Mexico and other out-of-state locations.
L.A.’s entertainment industry also suffered a series of blows including the COVID-19 shutdown, strikes by writers and directors in 2023 and cutbacks at studios that reduced demand for sound stages.
A group of Hackman Capital’s lenders led by Deutsche Bank filed a notice of default last month, saying they’re owed more than $357 million. Hackman Capital is still trying to renegotiate its debt.
“The studio market is evolving, and the financing environment for studio assets remains complex,” Chief Executive Michael Hackman said in a statement. “We are engaged in active discussions with our lending partners and are carefully evaluating all of the alternatives.”
A person familiar with the process but not authorized to speak about it publicly said Hackman Capital will be hard-pressed to pay its debt in light of challenges facing the industry. The notice of default is “the baby step to put Television City in play” for new buyers, the source said, “and it is in play.”
Already in play is Manhattan Beach Studios, another Hackman Capital property encumbered by a $240-million loan from Deutsche Bank that the lender is in the process of selling. A buyer could foreclose on the property and potentially change its use to advanced manufacturing such as aerospace or defense, which is in high demand in Southern California.
Brokerage Cushman & Wakefield, which is managing the sale, emphasized in marketing materials that the 22-acre site has “significant available power capacity” and “offers flexible uses” on “some of the most irreplaceable underlying land in the South Bay.”
After showing worryingly weak early interest, World Cup fans showed up at the last minute to boost Los Angeles hotel occupancy and room rates.
Ahead of the last tournament game in Los Angeles is on Friday, hotels popular with soccer fans said they were full and charging higher rates.
In early May, the American Hotel and Lodging Assn. reported a lack of hotel bookings just a month shy of the games.
About 80% of respondents said hotel bookings were below initial expectations, and more than 65% of L.A. respondents said bookings were lower than a typical summer. In the report, half of the L.A. hotel respondents said they assumed that visa barriers and distance from venues were contributing to the low early bookings.
The turnout that many were concerned had also been hurt by high ticket prices ended up being better than those first projections.
The Pierside in Santa Monica has been exceptionally busy during the World Cup, with many tourists opting to stay near the beach despite the longer trek to SoFi Stadium where the games are held. The Pierside has no rooms for this weekend.
“We’ll have a day or two gap, but other than that we’ve been full,” said a Pierside manager. “I think beach-side hotels have been busier, because tourists are more interested in going to the beach while here.”
In the so-called Stadium District, the Anthem Hotel saw even greater numbers of tourists than they had initially expected for the tournament, including both domestic and international guests.
Its few remaining rooms were going for more than $500 per night late in the week.
“Many guests are planning longer stays, using match days as the centerpiece of a broader Los Angeles itinerary,” said Ruben Flores, general manager at the hotel. “Being in the heart of the Stadium District puts us in a unique position to welcome fans who want the energy of the tournament to extend beyond the stadium.”
Downtown L.A.‘s Hotel Indigo got a surge in bookings the days leading up to the July 2 knockout game between Spain and Austria. Previously, FIFA had reserved thousands of rooms downtown for staff, media, and other stakeholders, but later canceled the reservation.
The American Hotel and Lodging Assn. attributed the delayed booking boom to young international travelers waiting until right before the game to book hotels in search of last-minute deals.
“Demand has picked up, consistent with a recent trend toward shorter booking windows for events of this caliber,” Rosanna Maietta, the association’s chief executive, said in a statement. “Unlike typical leisure travel, many travelers finalized plans and secured tickets closer to the start of the games.”
Not all hotels have seen the last-minute boom in bookings. Hotel June next to Los Angeles International Airport said its bookings were lower than expected.
“We were expecting more reservations, but I think it’s because the rates have gone up,” said Kira Moreno from Hotel June. “We have still been steady but not been too full or too busy, pretty similar to any other day.”
Airbnb proved to be a popular alternative to traditional hotels, with offers like the World Cup bundle, which included free World Cup tickets with select Airbnb stays at an average price of $365 per night.
In recent years, L.A. has struggled to bring tourists into the city. Last year, the number of international tourists went down by 5.5% from the year before, marking the first time tourism had fallen since the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
Immigration raids and wildfires dissuaded tourists from visiting, and even Canadian tourists who typically make up the largest number of foreign visitors to California dropped 21%.
Increased flight costs also discouraged many tourists. With the U.S.-Iran conflict continuing and the Strait of Hormuz closed, jet fuel prices skyrocketed, making international travel unrealistic for many tourists. International air travel to L.A. County had already fallen 30% from August to November 2025.
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