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.”

President-elect Donald J. Trump is considering an executive order to allow TikTok to continue operating despite a pending legal ban until new owners are found, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

The possible executive order, reported earlier by The Washington Post, is under discussion as TikTok faces a deadline on Sunday to be banned in the United States unless it finds a new owner. The popular video-sharing app is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. Republicans have said for years that they see the app, which has been downloaded to millions of smartphones, as a national security risk. It has become a rare issue that has united both parties in Congress.

If the Supreme Court upholds the law, which will ban the app unless ByteDance sells it to a non-Chinese company, special treatment from Mr. Trump might be the only way for TikTok to continue operating in the United States in the near term. The law requires app store operators like Apple and Google and cloud computing providers to stop distributing TikTok in the United States.

An executive order could try to direct the government not to enforce the law or to delay enforcement to complete a deal, a move that past presidents have used to challenge laws. It is unclear if an executive order would survive legal challenges or persuade the app stores and cloud computing companies to take steps that could expose them to huge penalties.

Alan Z. Rozenshtein, a former national security adviser to the Justice Department and a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, said an executive order should be “taken with a medium-sized boulder of salt.” Such an order is not a law, he said, and legally would not change the legislation passed by Congress and signed by President Biden.

While there is some speculation that the app will still work if it has already been downloaded, the law also affects internet hosting companies like Oracle and other cloud computing providers, and it is unclear how video load times and the functionality of the app may respond.

One person close to Mr. Trump’s team said some of his allies had loose discussions about buying TikTok but provided no details. Mr. Biden, whose term ends on Monday, a day after the ban is set to go into effect, is also under pressure to find a way to save the app.

The New York Times reported late Wednesday that TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Chew, is expected to attend Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Monday and was offered a seat on the dais. TikTok declined to comment.

Mr. Chew is expected to be joined by other tech executives on the dais: Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Meta; Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder; Elon Musk, Mr. Trump’s megadonor; and Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, who personally donated $1 million to the inaugural committee.

Mr. Trump had previously backed a TikTok ban but publicly changed his stance last year, soon after meeting with Jeff Yass, a Republican megadonor who owns a large share of ByteDance.

Mr. Trump has said they did not discuss the company. But Mr. Yass helped found the trading firm Susquehanna International Group and is one of the biggest supporters of the conservative lobbying group Club for Growth. The group has hired people with ties to Mr. Trump, such as Kellyanne Conway, his former top adviser, and the Republican adviser David Urban, to lobby for TikTok in Washington.

TikTok has also worked to make inroads with the Trump team through Tony Sayegh, who was a Treasury official during Mr. Trump’s first administration and now leads public affairs for Susquehanna.

Mr. Sayegh has relationships with the Trump family and was a core part of the campaign’s decision to join TikTok this summer. Several members of the family, including Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Kai Trump, the president-elect’s granddaughter, have also joined the app.

Mr. Trump’s interest in TikTok is not entirely because of his advisers. He came to see how well videos about him performed on the platform, and his advisers credited it with helping him to expand his reach to a new type of voter during the campaign.

Any actions Mr. Trump might be able to take on TikTok are complicated. The law gives the president the ability to extend the deadline for a sale only if there is “significant progress” toward a deal that would put the company in the hands of a non-Chinese owner.

It also requires that the deal be possible to complete within 90 days of an extension. It is unclear exactly how an extension will work if Mr. Trump tries to deploy it after the ban takes effect.

TikTok has maintained throughout its court challenge to the law that such a sale is unworkable in part because of the prescribed time frame. A group led by the billionaire Frank McCourt has mounted a bid to buy the app — though without its mighty algorithm — in recent months.

Mr. Trump could also try to work around the law by instructing the government not to enforce it.

But app store operators and cloud computing providers could require more than a soft assurance from Mr. Trump that he will not punish them if they fail to execute the ban, said Ryan Calo, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law. The potential legal liability for companies that violate the law is significant: Penalties are as high as $5,000 per person who is able to use TikTok once the ban is in effect.

“You could have a policy not to enforce this ban,” said Mr. Calo, who was part of a group of professors who urged the Supreme Court to overturn the TikTok law. “But I think that maybe conservative companies would just be like: ‘OK, you’re not going to enforce it. But it is on the books, and you could enforce at any time.’”

Mr. Trump’s pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi, has declined to say whether she would enforce the law.

“I can’t discuss pending litigation,” she said at her Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday. “But I will talk to all the career prosecutors who are handling the case.”

Mr. Trump has a third option: appealing to Congress to reverse a policy it overwhelmingly approved with broad bipartisan support last year.

“Congress can undo this anytime,” Mr. Calo said.

On Thursday, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said on the Senate floor that he was worried about the possibility of a ban on TikTok.

“It’s clear that more time is needed to find an American buyer and not disrupt the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans, of so many influencers who have built up a good network of followers,” he said. He added that he had also made those views clear to the Biden administration and accused Republicans of blocking a bill that would have extended the deadline for a ban by 270 days.

A White House official said on Thursday that the administration’s clear view was that TikTok should operate with an American owner. Because of the timing of the potential ban — taking place over a holiday weekend before the inauguration — it would fall to the next administration to carry out the law, the official said.

Catie Edmondson contributed reporting.