China’s Long Twilight

During the boom years of the reform era, from 1978 to the early 2000s, China was a country of productive workers. The working-age population (those aged 15 to 64) rose from 57 percent of the population in 1978 to a peak of nearly 75 percent in 2010. They built the roads, factories, apartment complexes, and firms that powered three decades of close to ten percent annual growth—a 20-fold economic expansion.

But over the past decade, this tide has turned. Beijing’s one-child policy, plus the same social forces that have dragged East Asian fertility to historic lows, have produced below-replacement birth rates for three decades in China—draining the fuel that powered China’s rise. China’s total population peaked at 1.4 billion in 2021 and is now falling by three to four million people per year—roughly equivalent to losing one Los Angeles each year. By the 2040s, if China continues to follow East Asia’s descent to ultralow fertility rates, it will shed around one percent of its population annually—roughly ten million people, more than the population of New York City. At the same time, the proportion of China’s population aged 65 and older will surge, doubling from 15 percent today to around 30 percent in the 2040s, and then rising to well over 40 percent by the late twenty-first century. The size of that cohort in the United States, by contrast, is projected to rise far more gradually, from around 19 percent of the population today to just over 23 percent in 2060.

Put simply, China is entering a century of demographic decline. This change will remake the country’s economy and politics just as dramatically as the last century’s demographic boom did. Back in the mid-twentieth century, improvements in health and falling infant mortality rates led to a burgeoning youth population, which Mao Zedong channeled into revolutionary social change, overturning entrenched hierarchies and remaking society from the bottom up. By 1978, China had a swelling population of working-age adults, and Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic policies of “reform and opening up” astutely plugged them into the global economy, allowing China to emerge as the world’s factory.

Today, as the population rapidly grays, China’s political system is becoming increasingly regressive and rigid. As the Chinese Communist Party pivots back toward one-man rule, its vaunted institutions of technocratic rule are not what they once were. Instead of creatively addressing emerging challenges, the CCP is relying on repression and reflexively following central mandates—no matter the risks. Economically, for instance, policymakers continue to pursue Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s preferred export-driven industrial policy despite the obvious need to boost domestic consumption and strengthen the social security net for the poor.

The story of twenty-first-century China, then, is not just one of demographic decline but also one of political paralysis—and what happens when those two intersect. It is this combination that makes China’s future especially bleak. As China ages, the social pressures bearing down on its political system will only intensify. Mid-twenty-first-century China could end up looking a lot like the sixteenth-century Ming dynasty, a sclerotic political regime rendered increasingly brittle by worsening social, gender, and generational divides. Lest observers in Washington gloat about this fate, however, China’s trajectory is ultimately a warning: demographic decline and political erosion can hollow out any great power—including the United States.

The Politics of Paralysis

As the journalist Li Yuan has observed, the United States suffers from China envy. Tech investors fawn over its latest AI models. Energy specialists are awestruck by its industrial dominance in batteries and solar power. And journalists and analysts often return from visits offering rosy-eyed panegyrics about China’s gleaming transit systems and engineering capacity. Politicians and pundits, meanwhile, often fuse China’s expanding navy and missile tests with Xi’s speeches on “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” to form a single image: a strong state successfully executing a grand strategy for its twenty-first-century rise.

Compared with the political circus in Washington and the malaise in the rest of America, such surface-level manifestations of China’s wealth and power often lead to sweeping conclusions about relative national trajectories. But on closer inspection, Beijing is also undergoing profound political erosion—it just doesn’t look like the process playing out in Washington. Because China’s system is tightly controlled, its descent into personalistic one-man rule does not play out in divisive confrontations on television or erratic social media rants by the top leader. Beijing’s transformation is instead happening quietly but just as consequentially. Over the past two decades, the CCP has come to revolve ever more tightly around a single man. Xi successfully lifted the constitutional term limits on his rule as state president in 2018 and swept clean the top ranks of the party itself at the 20th Party Congress, in 2022, packing them with his own supporters and yes men. Similar purges have regularly rocked the top ranks of China’s military, culminating in 2026, with the removal of Zhang Youxia, Xi’s own handpicked top general, leaving Xi virtually alone at the helm of China’s armed services.

Xi is now set to assume a fourth five-year term as party general secretary in 2027 and has given no sign as to who might take his place in 2032, when he will be 79 years old. An aged, isolated leader increases the risks of policy missteps in China, just as it does in the United States. But China’s slide from an efficient technocratic state into lifetime rule under an aging autocrat underscores a fundamental reality about the two countries’ trajectories: unlike China, the United States can still choose differently—in the midterm elections, in 2028, and every few years thereafter. China’s politics, by contrast, are far more stagnant.

Most critically, the stifling political atmosphere Xi has created is draining Beijing’s ability to respond to emerging problems as earlier generations once did. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Chinese leaders under Deng were able to kickstart China’s era of rapid growth through rural reforms that completely reworked Maoist economic orthodoxy. As Zhao Shukai, a key party official involved in those reforms, has noted, Beijing’s ability to do so depended on a degree of “openness in the political structure, both in top-level power relations and in the ideological sphere.” That same era of flexibility saw party leaders empower competent and efficient officials to boldly address other pressing economic challenges, such as when General Secretary Jiang Zemin charged Premier Zhu Rongji with overhauling the tax system in 1994 to put China’s central finances on a firmer footing.

As Chinese politics regress, such flexible problem solving is giving way to rigid orthodoxy. Cadres now find themselves pressed to dogmatically pursue Xi’s signature policies regardless of the consequences. Back in 2022, for instance, Shanghai officials under Li Qiang, then municipal party secretary, abandoned their tentative efforts at a lighter, targeted approach to handling the spreading Omicron variant of COVID-19 when it became clear that such a policy would conflict with the “zero COVID” policies on which Xi had staked his personal legitimacy. The result was a brutal, two-month lockdown of Shanghai that left many without reliable access to food and medicine, and which became the template for lockdowns throughout China later that year. Rather than being censured for the debacle, however, Li was elevated by Xi to the top ranks of the Politburo Standing Committee in 2022 and made state premier in 2023. He now loyally leads Chinese officials on Xi’s push for industrial manufacturing and an export-driven growth strategy, despite concerns from economists about deflation, mounting overcapacity, and declining consumption.

Xi is not solely responsible for the stultifying inertia that is spreading in China’s society and state. Ever since the “color revolutions” of the early 2000s in post-Soviet states and the Arab Spring in 2010, party elites have grown more fearful of social unrest. Chinese authorities have tightened their grip on the media, the legal profession, and civil society, limiting the space for Chinese citizens to discuss mounting social woes and extinguishing emerging calls for deeper political reform. Space within the ranks of the CCP itself has similarly constricted, with few now willing to consider reforms that might seriously affect the vested interests of entrenched social groups. Back in the 1990s, by contrast, Zhu pushed through the wrenching restructuring of state-owned enterprises to secure China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization—even though it threw tens of millions out of work and fueled massive labor protests. Accepting such short-term pain in pursuit of long-term gain was once considered one of China’s defining advantages, but Beijing today shows little comparable appetite for such measures.

Consider the party’s hesitancy in addressing the financial ramifications of China’s demographic decline. For decades, China’s retirement ages were among the lowest in the world: 60 years old for men, 55 for white-collar women, and 50 for blue-collar women. Unsurprisingly, Chinese researchers have predicted that the main urban pension fund covering some 500 million urban workers, retirees, and cadres will be exhausted by the mid-2030s. Raising the retirement age has thus been on Beijing’s to-do list for well over a decade. Yet authorities have moved extraordinarily slowly and timidly. Even though a phased increase was finally announced in 2024, it will not be fully implemented until 2040 and will still leave China with among the lowest retirement ages in the world: 63 for men, 58 for white-collar women, and 55 for blue-collar women.

Similarly, the CCP has put off addressing the stark inequality in benefits between urban and rural residents. Xi’s much-touted “common prosperity” campaign did little to narrow the gap between China’s rich and poor, nor did it address the wide discrepancies in state pension and health-care systems. In 2022, some 138 million urban retirees drew an average pension of $6,080 per year, roughly 18 times more than the meager $345 received by China’s 175 million rural and migrant retirees. Chinese scholars and officials regularly call for improving the benefits provided to rural residents as a means to stimulate domestic demand. But the reason genuinely redistributive measures have not been implemented is simple: party officials fear alienating the urban beneficiaries of the current system—civil servants, state employees, and middle-class urbanites, many with direct ties to the party itself—far more than the marginalized rural and migrant communities, which have limited capacity to mobilize.

These twin trends—an aging Leninist system sliding toward one-man rule and mounting political inertia in the face of anything that might trigger social unrest—have eroded China’s governance capacity. Even as the country heads toward a demographic cliff, Beijing seems incapable of preparing for the social challenges it will face in the decades ahead. China can build new high-speed rail lines or aircraft carriers but not, it seems, a sustainable social safety net for its rapidly graying countryside.

GO FORTH AND MULTIPLY

Political paralysis is only part of the story. Beijing is also actively steering China toward a reactionary version of itself that will worsen its demographic woes rather than help address them. With Xi’s dire warnings of foreign cultural infiltration, his demands that officials look to China’s “excellent traditional culture” in fusing Marxism with Confucian norms, and his praise for “women’s special role” as “virtuous wives and good mothers,” Beijing is stoking a nativist, neotraditionalist revival and reasserting patriarchal gender norms.

Beijing’s emerging worldview echoes that of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). After a century of Mongol rule, the Ming dynasty began with a brief excursion into the outside world in the form of the famed treasure fleets of the early fifteenth century. But then the Ming pivoted toward an insular and reflexively conservative vision of China. Mongol rule had been deeply humiliating, and Ming leaders grew suspicious of foreign influence. They worked to restore what they saw as authentic Chinese civilization.

The parallels with today aren’t hard to find. In the Ming era, for instance, foreign beliefs such as Manichaeism, a Persian faith that had flourished under Mongol rule, were suppressed. Similarly, since 2010, Beijing has steadily departed from the more relaxed policies of the reform era and pursued the Sinicization of faiths such as Christianity and Islam. And ethnic minorities during the Ming dynasty were pressured into intermarriage, just as the 2026 Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress codifies Beijing’s new policies on forcible ethnic assimilation.

The Ming dynasty also saw a pivot back toward neo-Confucianism and its restrictive views of women’s roles in the family—views similar to the talking points currently being handed down by central authorities to the official All-China Women’s Federation: “Do a good job in family work and give full play to the unique role of women in promoting the family virtues of the Chinese nation and establishing good family customs, which is an important task assigned to the Women’s Federation by the Party Central Committee in the new era.”

At the welcome ceremony for U.S. President Donald Trump in Beijing, May 2026 Maxim Shemetov / Reuters

This Ming dynasty redux will exacerbate China’s demographic problems. Plunging marriage and fertility rates across East Asia reflect deep tensions between women’s aspirations and society’s calcified gender norms. Between 2013 and 2024, new marriages in China fell by roughly 55 percent, as women and men alike backed away from family formation. Yet the all-male Politburo, one of China’s top party institutions, seems to think that addressing this trend is merely a question of finding the right incentives to push citizens toward marriage and children. In 2021, it launched a new slate of pro-natalist initiatives including baby bonuses and parental leave policies while restricting access to divorce, abortion, and vasectomies. It also reworked stamps, textbooks, and public art to showcase multichild families as ideal. Unsurprisingly, the tone-deaf and regressive nature of Beijing’s policies and language not only has had little impact but is also worsening China’s gender relations.

If Beijing can’t persuade its own citizens to have children, it might use a lever that other graying societies have used to address the challenges posed by rapid aging: immigration. Throughout the world, rapidly aging countries have resorted to foreign labor to fill jobs left vacant by shrinking workforces and to care for surging elderly populations. Even once insular South Korea is welcoming more migrant workers to make up for its low birthrate. Foreign residents now make up roughly five percent of its population, up from near zero in the early 1990s.

The CCP’s embrace of nativism, however, makes this option difficult. Census results in both 2010 and 2020 revealed that foreign residents made up 0.1 percent of China’s total population—roughly the same percentage as Taiwan or South Korea in 1990. But whereas those two societies turned toward greater openness in the following decades, China is heading down an increasingly ethnocentric path. Over the past decade, Chinese authorities have cracked down on foreign cultural products such as films, and since 2016 they have designated April 15 as National Security Day, which is marked by propaganda banners, school activities, and TV programs warning citizens to be on the watch for foreign spies. This messaging will not only make it harder to attract the foreign workers that China needs in the years ahead, such as eldercare workers. It is also priming the Chinese population to resist them.

In August 2025, authorities announced a new visa aimed at attracting young, talented foreigners working in STEM fields. This was consistent with Xi’s stated goals of making China a world leader in manufacturing and technology and competing with developed countries for global talent. But the popular backlash was immediate and furious. China’s youth unemployment rate stood at 18.9 percent that same month, and young people took to social media to rail against the government for selling out their interests. Posts on the topic racked up tens of millions of views in mere days. Some commentators who defended the government were called “race traitors.” Others speculated that Indian tech workers might surge into China and compete for jobs or marriage partners. More than a year later, there have been no reports of any such visa having been issued.

Domestic resentment toward “outsiders” presents yet another dangerous divide emerging in twenty-first-century China. China is not simply aging; it is likely to approach the centennial of its founding in 2049 with core social cleavages—between men and women, Chinese people and foreigners, urban and rural residents—deepened and embittered by decades of stagnant governance and backward-looking values. By midcentury, Beijing will be chronically short of the workers it needs, and it will likely end up on the wrong side of a new kind of populist discontent.

THE TIME BOMB

For some American policymakers, the top risk of these trends is war. In their 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China, Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warn that demographic decline could push a “peaking China” to roll the dice and try to seize Taiwan before rising social pressures and economic constraints begin to bite in earnest. Such a fear is not absurd. A more apt framing, however, is not a rational, calculated gamble, but a severe miscalculation by an aging, isolated leader. As with Russian President Vladimir Putin before he decided to invade Ukraine in 2022, or with U.S. President Donald Trump before he launched a war with Iran in 2026, an elderly Xi could very well find himself insulated from reality, surrounded by cowed subordinates, and stumbling into catastrophe.

But the deeper risk for China is internal. In the near term, as current trend lines continue, China is poised for political stasis. It will likely make no serious efforts to address the woes of rural areas or to cut the benefits of privileged groups. A generation of youth will experience anemic economic growth and weaker job prospects compared with those of their parents, amid a stagnant political climate that is increasingly hostile to women in particular, all of which will result in people further opting out of marriage and family formation. As China ages, such trends will produce rising discontent, and China’s state apparatus will be steadily drawn into using comprehensive surveillance and “grid management” techniques—methods developed to contain ethnic minorities in Xinjiang and disgruntled petitioners throughout China—to handle it.

Indeed, Chinese authorities have already begun refashioning the tools of their security state in response. In 2023, Beijing created the Central Social Work Department and charged it with monitoring those suffering from any of the “four lacks” (no spouse or children, no job or stable income, no normal social interactions, or no financial assets, such as a house or car) or any of the “five losses” (failed investments, career or life setbacks, emotional imbalances, mental illness, or failed personal relationships). Beijing views such individuals as potential security threats capable of mass attacks, such as the November 2024 rampage in which a 62-year-old man, dissatisfied with the property settlement after his divorce, drove his car into a crowd and killed dozens.

The coming decades will see Beijing steadily “securitize” all the social problems arising from China’s demographic shifts. In the 2030s, aging party leaders living in rarefied Zhongnanhai compounds may look out and see superficial stability. Chinese tech billionaires may convince themselves that they, too, are immune from the concerns of the rabble. But increased repression and surveillance are not a long-term solution. These privileged few will be sitting on a time bomb of their own making, similar to that faced by political and economic elites during the waning years of the Ming dynasty.

By the late 1500s, the once vigorous Ming was severely eroding. Decades of fiscal profligacy, including the costs of an extended conflict with Japan in Korea, had drained the imperial treasury. Reformist officials such as Zhang Juzheng attempted to plug the hole in state finances, pushing through a series of reforms in an effort to broaden the tax base and force the gentry and landed elites to shoulder a larger share of the mounting fiscal burden. But the gentry fought back. After Zhang’s death, in 1582, they successfully unwound his reforms, posthumously disgracing him as a warning to others who might seek to target their privileges and wealth. The financial burden of an empire in distress fell instead on ordinary peasants.

Simultaneously, the Ming court slid into political paralysis. The Wanli emperor (1572–1620) spent two decades of his reign locked in an extended standoff with his own bureaucracy over the question of who would succeed him. The result: a political vacuum at the top. With the throne disengaged from governance, petitions and reports from officials piled up unread, crucial state posts went unfilled, and the imperial bureaucracy splintered amid poisonous factional infighting.

On its current trajectory, China risks repeating this arc. Beijing will likely suffer from a lengthy period of political inertia under Xi, coupled with a hollowing out of bureaucratic capacity—and then see a succession crisis in the 2030s or 2040s. With its boom years in the rearview mirror, signs already abound that China is facing financial constraints, as well. Local governments are running deficits, with many struggling to pay teachers and civil servants their salaries and benefits on time. The burden is falling, once again, on society’s weakest. Rural and migrant residents enrolled in the state health-care program have seen their insurance premiums soar—20 percent annually over the past two decades. Unable to keep up with the costs, some 83 million have simply decided to drop their coverage in recent years.

Taken in isolation, none of these developments spell disaster. But together, they point to a midcentury China in which every major social fault line will have been widened by decades of state policy. Leadership turmoil and a weakened state, as seen with the enfeebled late Ming, could well fuse with latent social tensions to produce an existential crisis. In the 1620s, a wave of Ming budget cuts drove Li Zicheng, a cashiered postal clerk, into banditry before he rose to lead the rebellion that brought down the dynasty in 1644. Cuts to pensions or benefits of China’s own state employees in the coming years might produce a modern equivalent. In the 1630s, it was an influx of drought- and famine-stricken peasants that resulted in the expansion of Li’s ragtag forces to challenge the imperial throne. Perhaps water scarcity across northern China in the 2030s or 2040s—made worse by climate change—or a rural and migrant population left without adequate health care for themselves or their aging parents, might supply the same combustible material that the starving Shaanxi peasantry did four centuries earlier.

All this may be hard to imagine in the gleaming China of today. But the internal, incendiary forces that burn great powers rarely appear dangerous until the moment they ignite. Twenty years before their respective nations hit their own crisis points, it would have been equally hard to identify the kindling that would bring an obscure Austrian painter, an unremarkable Soviet KGB officer, or a brash American real estate developer to the center of world events.

America’s Choice

For Washington, there is still a very real need to respond to the threats China poses with its specific policies—its escalating military pressure on Taiwan, for instance, or its state-subsidized industrial overcapacity now flooding global markets. But some U.S. policymakers may be tempted to frame this response in the sweeping language of existential struggle, as a “generational challenge” to prevent a “Chinese century.” Washington should not hand Beijing this gift. The reality is that Beijing’s own choices are undermining China’s future. As internal discontent mounts, Chinese leaders will look to deflect it, framing the root cause as America’s civilizational rejection of China’s rise. Embracing that framing does Beijing’s scapegoating work for it.

Moreover, this framing feeds the kind of internal overreaction that tears apart the U.S. social fabric. Such narratives fuel panics like the Second Red Scare in the 1950s, which drove the brilliant scientist Qian Xuesen back to China, where he emerged as the father of China’s rocket program. A similar dynamic is unfolding today: a hardening climate of suspicion in the United States, marked by ever-tightening visa policies and dozens of state laws barring Chinese citizens from owning land, is pushing ethnic Chinese scientists out of American labs and contributing to a huge drop in international student enrollment (down 17 percent in 2025).

Americans have long thought of themselves as belonging to a young, vibrant country, regularly refreshed by immigrant flows that put it on an utterly different demographic trajectory from an aging Europe, Japan, and now, China. But the United States is facing its own challenges. Its fertility rate fell below replacement level in 2008 and has been sinking since. Meanwhile, the country is turning against immigration, which has accounted for the vast majority of population growth in the United States in recent years. Thanks to the current administration’s crackdown on immigration, data due out in 2027 could well reveal a U.S. population that is now declining for the first time in its history.

Washington must avoid worsening its own demographic problems through the kind of self-defeating policies that are deepening China’s struggle. Politically, the United States is still very different from China. But it, too, is showing unmistakable signs of political sclerosis. Congress, whose members are collectively the third-oldest on record by average age, has not funded the federal government on time since the late 1990s. Government shutdowns, meanwhile, have become routine in American governance. The United States also suffers from wealth and income inequality that is comparable to China’s—a gap that likewise makes it difficult to undertake reforms that threaten entrenched elites. Zoning regulations, for example, protect the property values of homes owned by aging residents while hampering young people as they try to buy homes, build careers, and start families.

All this points to a United States that will soon experience the same kind of reckoning that China is undergoing today. But demographic crisis is not destiny. It is the accumulation of choices—whether to support families or dictate to them, welcome immigrants or wall them out, lift up the young or protect entrenched privilege. Under Xi’s rule, China no longer has the luxury of choice: it is walking into a dead-end, closed version of itself that will worsen its demographic decline. The United States, however, can still choose differently. 

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