Not long ago, Japan stood where China does today: top threat to America’s title as the world’s preeminent economic power. In the 1980s and 90s, Japan even appeared likely to succeed, with books such as Japan as Number One: Lessons for America becoming best sellers.
Then, in a blink, Japan’s economy collapsed with the bursting of a massive asset bubble from which it never truly recovered. Overnight, the Empire of the Rising Sun became a setting one.
Analysts have recently taken to highlighting stark similarities between Japan before its fall and China now. Begging the question of whether Japan’s fate foreshadows China’s own.
If demographics are destiny, then China has much to fear in this regard. Demographic reversal was after all at the heart of Japan’s fall. And like Japan then, China has a rapidly aging population. If anything, China’s demographics are even more severe.
China’s population is already declining and poised to continue to do so. Indeed, China is facing what has been described as a demographic time bomb. By 2035, China is projected to have more than 400 million people aged 60 and older (for perspective, the entire current U.S. population totals only 335 million.) China is also staring at population loss on a historic scale, with some studies showing China’s population nearly halving over the next 45 years. Based on China’s current population of just above 1.4 billion, that would equate, in less than half a century, to the loss of a staggering 700 million people.
This demographic catastrophe in the making was largely caused by China’s one-child policy, implemented in 1979 and not abandoned until 2016. This terribly ill-conceived and cruel policy suppressed China’s population growth for decades. It also resulted in a considerable gender imbalance in China, due to a strong cultural preference for boys, that has drastically reduced family formations, as well as produced a great many very lonely guys.
Exorbitant living and education costs, the Covid 19 pandemic, and an archaic hukou household registration system that separates rural citizens from urban ones, have all furthered depressed Chinese fertility rates in recent years. And to date, economic incentives and other pro-childbearing policies have had no real effect in reversing the trend. Like Japan, for cultural and political reasons, China is also unable or unwilling to bring new young people in through immigration. To the contrary, people are far more likely to emigrate out of China than in.
This “Japanification” presents a massive impediment to China’s grand ambitions of becoming the world’s paramount nation. After all, how do you sustain robust economic growth with a precipitously declining workforce? Or build military strength and project global power while spending enormous chunks of GDP supporting and caring for nearly half a billion elderly people?
To make matters worse, the calm global conditions that enabled China’s meteoric rise have disappeared. China is now faced with exactly the opposite: a deglobalizing world of intense Cold War competition with America and its allies actively seeking to thwart China’s economic and geopolitical aspirations.
But while Americans may feel somewhat comforted by the prospect that China, like Japan, will simply extinguish harmlessly as an economic and geopolitical adversary, there is also cause for serious concern.
As author Hal Brands posits in his book The Danger Zone a declining China may be even more aggressive and prone to risk-taking than a rising one, as the window of opportunity to achieve its ambitions closes. In this respect, Brands views the next decade as the critical period before China’s demographic and other domestic challenges truly take effect.
Magnifying the pressure, Xi Jinping, who has cast himself in the role of a great man of destiny and compelled others to as well, has stoked the fires of Chinese nationalist sentiment to a fever pitch. Domestic expectations of China’s “unstoppable” rise are now simply enormous. If Xi fails to realize them, would he or the CCP, even be able to survive? Xi may deem it necessary, and politically useful, to increase tensions with the United States, as nothing distracts from domestic travails like an existential external threat.
Indeed, China is already becoming more aggressive. In recent weeks alone, China has brazenly sent a spy balloon across the continental United States, openly threatened imminent conflict with the US, and announced huge increases to its defense budget. These actions may be merely a harbinger of things to come as China’s demographic condition worsens.
Of course, it is possible that China could successfully disarm its demographic time bomb or perhaps at least diminish its blast radius. China could, for instance, discover a novel way to suddenly juice fertility rates, or supplement lost economic production through technological innovation. And if all else fails, the CCP could simply resort to forcing people to have children, something based upon past experience, they are certainly not above doing.
But time is not on China’s side. With each day that passes by the demographic situation grows ever more dire, and the specter of Japan looms larger.
At this point, though, the future is still uncertain. And whether China can ultimately avoid Japan’s fate and overtake America, or become just another failed contender, remains an open question. Discovering the answer, however, may prove to be an extremely dangerous endeavor.
Buckle up, the highway to China’s demographic danger zone is sure to be a very bumpy ride.
I hope you are correct about China’s future demographic collapse. However, America’s current constitutional collapse may be more detrimental. In 2020, the Democrats led by Obama were able to steal the US Presidential Election from the real winner, Donald J Trump, and were able to get away with it thanks to a corrupt FBI, DOJ, and CIA. The US is now being destroyed by domestic terrorists and traitors by the continuing “fundamental transformation” of America during this illegitimate third term of Obama. Corrupt and demented Joe is the puppet surrounded in the White House by Obama hacks. And one of the “elite captures” by China was the Biden Crime Family, which received 31 million dollars from China. Xi may be a dictator but he wants China to succeed. Unfortunately, Obama hates America and wants it to fail.
These facts need to be shared with the public by candidates for President, and made the centerpiece of the campaign. The media will do its best to hide these existential issues, and most voters will simply regard them as “fringe”, if they even hear of them at all.
I am convinced that much of our government had been corrupted, and as a result our leaders are compromised and our Constitution routinely circumvented! THIS is what I want to vote on, not slogans and freebies!!
You forgot to mention the very cooperative Fourth Estate (aka Fifth Column) when discussing the stolen election. Their contribution must not be minimized.
Nor the small, wealthy, demographic who owns all the national media.
Yep. I’m afraid we’ll collapse long before China does….
Japan has the third largest GDP of any nation on earth. They’ve achieved this with a population size about half of the USA. The growth of the USA population has engendered strife and chaos of every sort, while Japan enjoys social stability and quality of life that is the envy of the world. I am inclined to think that a declining population is not a curse but an opportunity to better allocate resources if done in a rational manner, that is, with decisions not driven by left wing woke insanity. Population growth in itself is not always a good thing.
Let’s not forget that Japan’s population is almost entirely homogeneous. That makes it a lot easier to work together. Diversity is definitely not our strength; it is a liability.
“DEI” is likely the most vicious, anti-American liability America has inherited.
Per our Good Book they’re definitely going to try. China’s newfound alliance with Iran and Russia reads like the text of Ezekiel.
Sounds like we should help them by escorting some recent illegal immigrants to China to add vibrancy and increase the birth rate. Haitians, Nigerians and Congolese would be happy to help. At least with the latter part.
China will not let this opportunity pass them by. They have invested heavily in our corrupt political/military leadership, fentanyl poisoning of our youth (military aged), tech. and industrial theft. They have arrived to the point of a guaranteed military victory over the United States.
China will not be stupid enough to not strike, and they will not be stupid enough to leave any of us around to make problems for them in the future.
Our short lives, under China’s rule will be spent in hideous work camps.
We need serious people in W DC!
Need to zero out the Bolshevik-Jacobin Communists in W DC!
Joe Biden is their not-so-secret weapon, they own him and until he is removed from
his false presidency China will stay actively subversive of America. But then what,
who in Washington can be trusted?
They also own Putz Minister Trudeau in Canada.
The one-child policy would have worked out if things had gone as planned. But in the traditional mind set of most families, that one child had to be a boy.. Therefore, after so many baby girls being killed after birth to make room for a boy, the demographic problem escalated: all those boys who grew up and wanted to start a family, had difficulty to find a female partner. They imported brides from Korea and from other countries, but mixed marriages not always work out well. Still, the long suffering Chinese people don’t face extinction anytime soon. The growing antagonism between China and the rotting western super power will have no winner, I’m afraid.