Is China Aging Out of Power? A Conversation With Carl Minzner

I'm Dan Kurtz-Phalen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview. I think it's likely that Chinese leaders may take steps that will worsen some of the underlying dynamics that are driving the demographics. And I also think it's likely to mean that they fail to take steps that others in East Asia have relied on in order to cushion their societies against some of the emerging pressures. And I all think that makes for a sort of a mid-21st century China that is more frail, more sclerotic, and brittle as these two things kind of mesh. In 2021, China's population hit a peak of 1.4 billion and then rapidly started to decline. This demographic picture presents enormous challenges in its own right, but Carl Minzner stresses in a new essay in Foreign Affairs that what makes China's future especially bleak is the convergence of demographic decline and political paralysis. This, Minzner argues, is the real story of China. 21st century China. That convergence will define Chinese foreign policy, threaten Chinese stability, and even call into question the future of Chinese Communist Party rule. I spoke with Minzner, a scholar of China at Fordham University and the Council on Foreign Relations, about the drivers of these demographic trends, about how and why Xi Jinping and Chinese policymakers are making the problem worse rather than better, what those problems pretend for Chinese power in the decades ahead, and why all of this should serve as a warning for the United States. Carl, it's great to have you on the podcast and to have your fantastic essay, China's Long Twilight, in our November-December issue. Thank you so much. It was a great pleasure writing it, and it's great to be here with you today. It's fairly widely known that China's demographic picture is pretty challenging, that the population is aging rapidly, and that fertility rates are low, that it's pretty unwelcoming to immigrants, etc. But I have to say that even having a pretty good appreciation of China's demographic picture, it's a great pleasure to be here with you today. I was struck by both the depth of the challenges, what you call China's demographic cliff, and also by how precipitously and recently these challenges developed as you captured all that in the piece. So I think it's worth tracing that trajectory in the numbers. And let's start by going back 20 years ago or so when the world was starting to really kind of fully register the extent of China's rise, and demographic collapse was not something most people were especially attuned to. What did China's demographics look like then? Well, you have to remember that China in the reform era, you know, the period that we associate with China's go-go years, that was an era in which China had a large youth population. So if you think back to sort of 1990, China's median age back then was about 23 years old. And in 2020, it surpassed the United States. It went up to over 40. I think the median age in China right now is around 41. The United States is slightly under 40. So China, which we always associate with China, is a little bit older than the United States. So China is a little bit older than the United States. But it doesn't stop there. It's important to realize that China's median age, because of the rapid decline in births, it's going to go up to about 50 by mid-century. And that also means that the percentage of the population that's 65 and older right now, it's about 15%. It heads up to 30% of the population by mid-century. And then it goes up to 40 to 50% by the late, late in the 21st century. And so that's a very different China. That's a China which is no longer young. That's a China that's going to be very old very rapidly. It'll also be declining because just as in the rest of East Asia, you are seeing the total population begin to decline. Japan slipped over into decline in 2010. China slipped over into total population decline in 2022. And that trend, too, will just continue deep into the 21st century. And if you project forward for the United States, what do those numbers look like? Well, the United States is a little trickier because it partially depends what we do with immigration. Immigration still, it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. So if the U.S. still, notwithstanding trends over the last couple of years with the Trump administration, still continues to be a big part of the U.S. identity, then it's unclear. The United States could still continue to grow. But note that as of recently, I think as of like a year or two ago, immigration and the births resulting from immigration were still accounting for 86% of the United States' total growth. If you told me that the United States stops immigration, we very much agree with you. I think that's a very good point. And I think that's a very good point. Now in China, and where do you expect that working age share to be in the 2040s as you look at? That will continue to fall. I also think the definition of what it means to be working age will also begin to shift. I recognize that at the moment, you know, China's official terminology for what elderly is starts at 60. That's just the internal definition, the way Chinese authorities have referred to that. But what's going to happen in China, both as the youth population declines, you're going to start to see increasing pressures for people to work longer, which, of course, is generally the case if you're in rural China, you're working until you're very old. Japan right now is in the process of sort of continually pushing up the working age, trying to get people to work well into their 70s. And that's going to be that's going to be a reality for China as well. Why was that change so sharp? I think for most people observing China's trajectory, who are not following it as closely as you, there was obviously a lot of focus on overpopulation for a period of time, and then the focus on China's rise. But it took, I think, most observers a bit by surprise that this shift happened just as quickly as it did. Sure. I mean, and one way to think of it is just sort of put it in like a century long context. I mean, if you go back to the 1960s or so, Chinese women, Chinese families were having roughly six children per woman. And that's really the number that the United States had about in the 1850s. What happened after that was sort of a sharp decline well before China began the coercive one child policy in the 1980s. You saw in the 1970s, birth rates begin to go down to like somewhat above two as a result of Chinese authorities launching a policy of encouraging people to marry later, to have fewer children. And then, of course, by the 1980s, China, precisely because of this fear of overpopulation, instituted what is now infamously called the one child policy. There were always exceptions, but it was a highly coercive program of controlling births, generally through fines, sometimes with forced abortions. And that regime held up until 2010s. And so for most of the time that people have been paying attention to China, the foot on the part of the state has been on holding the population down. And for Chinese authorities themselves who were locked into this as a central policy, I think in the back of their minds, there was this thinking that as soon as we relax that, those numbers will go up. And they did begin to relax their policy starting in the 2010s. They backed off of the one child policy. But in fact, it hasn't had very little impact. And in fact, births have continued to fall. And what are the what are the theories about why that bounce back didn't happen? Or was it always kind of should it had always been clear that wouldn't go? So it is important to realize that, you know, again, some of these things are paralleling trends people are familiar with in Europe or the United States, which is to say, over the broad spectrum of several decades of over many decades, women and families are opting for fewer children because of increased cost of education of desire to women to pursue jobs. And so there's a project part of China's trajectory, which is not totally unique. But it is important to recognize that throughout East Asia, you have some factors which are driving fertility rates super low. One is conservative gender norms. And so you have some women who are increasingly young women are saying if marriage means taking care of four elderly relatives, you and any children we might have, and giving them a job in the process, count me out. And so that's a big part of what's happening in East Asia. So there's been dramatic drops in marriage rates. And South Korea and China, marriage rates are just between the early 2010s and early 2020s. And so a big part of what's happening in China and elsewhere in East Asia is people just opting against marriage. But the other factor to pay attention to that differentiates East Asia from much of the rest of the world is that because having children outside of marriage is so uncommon, 40% of births in the United States are outside of wedlock. 70% of births in Iceland are outside of wedlock. One to 4% of births in East Asia are out of wedlock. If young people don't get married in China, in Japan, in South Korea, then you just don't have children. And so this trend towards against marriage, perhaps also social atomization is leading towards falling birth rates across the board. I do think it's important to pay attention to those conservative gender norms, because gender relations among young men and women are very, very tense right now in China as in South Korea. What are the birth rates at this point in South Korea? I think that is a warning. Tell us a bit about the trajectories of those countries and where their demographic picture has landed now. Sure. So birth rates in Taiwan and South Korea, like the rest of East Asia, are among the lowest in the world. Specifically, South Korea is at about 0.8 children per woman. Taiwan's at about 0.7. By contrast, Japan looks good at like 1.1. The United States, by reference, is like 1.68. European countries are a little bit lower than that. But the thing to focus on is the birth rate. And I think that's a warning. is how much lower East Asia is across the board. the five lowest societies in the world with the birth rates that are sub one, it's Taiwan, South Korea, Macau, Singapore, Hong Kong. And then China is down around one and possibly heading lower. We haven't had reliable data coming out from China on this front. And I think partially it's because it's becoming politically sensitive. But precisely because this is also exponential, those lower rates, if you're looking at South Korea or Taiwan, be around 0.7, 0.8. It's not just that they are, you know, half that of those European countries like France or Germany that people think of as rapidly aging. It means that this is going to build up far more dramatically over time in terms of how rapidly the societies age. Here, I'll take South Korea as an example. Back in around 1990, if you were South Korean and you looked at the United States, you saw population, you were in South Korea and you were 9% of people lived in single person households. Most Korean people in 1990, lived in a world where you lived with your, not only your parents, but your brothers and sisters and potentially your grandparents as well. And the United States at that point was like 23%. So South Koreans looking at United States at that point saw a society full of young people who, many more young people who are living by themselves. Now, if you're in Korea, 40% of all families are single person households, not single family, just people living by themselves. That consists both of 30, 40 year olds who are unmarried and maybe even more people who are never getting married. It also consists of 60, 70 or 80 year olds who are divorced and are living by themselves. That's a far more atomized world. The United States, we're still in the 20% range of people just only living by themselves. But that trend is going to show up in China too, where you not only have many more older people, but you also have a much more atomized society. And the questions of who takes care of the elderly individuals, who plays the role, who are the laboring forces that support the elderly, those are going to be challenges going forward. As is the question of what it means for young people. What does it mean in these societies when you have an ever shrinking population of young people and they see themselves as a very marginal slice of the overall population compared to this just vast number of elderly on top of them? You wrote an earlier piece for Foreign Affairs in which you looked at everything those other East Asian governments and societies have tried to reverse these trends and came to the conclusion that they're really, almost no policy tools or no policy tools that make significant difference. What did they try and why is there so little ability for policy to affect this, especially given the history you laid out in China of government policy actually achieving the reverse quite effectively? Right. It's easier to push people not to have children than it is to sort of get them to have a young child and then care for it for, you know, decades. So the first thing, you know, Japan in the 1990s, Taiwan and South Korea in the early 2000s, they start to see these trends coming and they really think you see state officials grappling with what do we do? And some of the things they try are all very similar. So it's expanded parental leave. It's more daycare. At some point, you start to get the baby bonuses, financial incentives for people to have children. And none of them really shift the bubble at all. I do think it's important. And this is one of the things that's relevant for China, because China, starting in 2021, began adopting all of those same measures as well. Recognize that those policies often, if you're talking about parental leave, if you're talking about baby bonuses, many of those are directed at people or families who already have one children and you're trying to encourage them to have more. If the fundamental problem or one of the fundamental challenges you have is young people who themselves are not coupling up and are sort of either for their own reason saying, I'm not interested in being in a relationship. And we're in a society where having children by yourself just isn't an option that has a big impact. So I do think some of the problems the societies are running into is that none of the measures that they're adopting really address some of the underlying gender dynamics. And those conservative gender dynamics can be really problematic, particularly for young women, in terms of whether or not I want to get into a relationship or a marriage. I want to turn to the political dimensions of this because that's a central part of the new essay. But maybe just pause for a meta question before getting there. I know when demographers talk about these projections over several decades, they're very, very careful to qualify and caveat it appropriately. And then it's the rest of us who take those as prophecies, more or less. As you look at the history of demography and efforts to understand this, how accurate are those kinds of projections? I mean, how likely do you think it is that, what's your confidence that the projections are going to be more or less accurate? Totally. And that's a very fair question because anytime you're playing with demographics and demography and you're sort of making assertions about what's going to happen 100 years in the future, you don't totally know because things could change. But it is crystal clear. I mean, because we know who's alive as a one-year-old right now, we know how many people will be 20 or 21 in 20 years. So the near-end stuff is very clear. These projections of what China's going to look like in 2040, 2050, those are very certain. I would go a little bit further and say precisely because you can actually look at some of the underlying dynamics that have already been taken place in Taiwan and South Korea in the decades that are leading up to the present. Those also give you an additional confidence level about what's likely to happen in China for an extended period of time going forward too. It's hard for me to conceive of how the marriage rate or the decision to have children just dramatically changes within five to 10 years. It certainly hasn't in the rest of East Asia. And so it's difficult for me to imagine how that will happen in China. So out to 2050, 2060, we're going to see a lot of change. And I think that's what's going to happen. And I think that's what's going to happen in the future. So I feel pretty confident. What could happen later on, that does get a little swishier. Right. So if a major war or the arrival of artificial general intelligence kind of transforming societies in fundamental ways that we can't entirely anticipate, that could cause a disruption, but that's going to be farther out. That's persuasive. The powerful thing, as I said about this piece, is that it brings together these two strands of demographics and politics. And let me just quote a great line from the essay here. You write, the story of 21st century China is not just one of demographic, decline, but also one of political paralysis. And what happens when those two intersect? There's a lot to unpack there. But I suppose the first dimension of this that I'm interested in drawing you out on is the way in which political paralysis is in part a product of or a reflection of the demographic changes. Obviously, it's exacerbating those as well. But to what extent is it driven by those? I tend to describe it as sort of two separate trajectories. So it's important to realize that the demography is pursuing its trajectory. I do think China, politically, and this goes sort of to my first book, it's important to realize how much China is different now in 2020 from what it was even 20 years ago. And the overarching narrative that I tell is that China is sliding away from the reform era and it's moving into the counter reform era. So China economically has exited its go-go years. Politically, what some had once vaunted as a vigorous, technocratic, one-party state is kind of decaying into a more sclerotic, reactive, and personalistic regime. Now, under a leader who's already in his third five-year term is setting himself up for his fourth five-year term. And we have no signal that there would be anybody who would take his place rather than it turned into a fifth five-year term. So that's a very different China from one where you had regular turnover of top officials. This is a China that is really kind of sliding into something like extended one-man rule. And ideologically, it's closing up and closing down. And so I really think the question is when these two things intersect, what happens? And the short answer that I have there is I think it's problematic. I think it's problematic because I think it's likely that Chinese leaders may take steps that will worsen some of the underlying dynamics that are driving the demographics. And I all think that makes for a sort of a mid-20th 21st century China that is more frail, more sclerotic, and brittle as these two things kind of mesh. You note in the piece that so much of this is about Xi Jinping and one-man rule and the kind of personal system that has undermined some of the more technocratic parts of Chinese governance that accounted for some of its success in earlier decades. This is not a question we can answer with any precision, but what is Xi Jinping's understanding of the demographic challenges? And what is Xi Jinping's theory of the case here, if we try to at least kind of sympathetically understand that? Yeah, I mean, so I don't have any direct insight into what Xi himself is thinking. I can't see. So when I look at some of the stuff that came out in 2021, so, and this is 2021 is where you see China, Chinese authorities begin to pivot in this strongly pro-natalist direction. Previously, 2016, they're releasing the grip of the one-child policy. They're turning into a two-child system. 2021, it's a little different. That's when they do start building the kindergartens. That's when you start to see the parental leave policies. And then subsequently, that's when you start to see the financial bonuses. And that's because of just the shock of population peaking that year, them realizing it. My gut is also, they got the results of the 2020 census. And I think they were looking at that and they saw this is going to be different. And they're like, we've got to do something. And if you were looking at the directives that are coming out, there is this new, - Can I pause on the census? Does that mean they did not, I have no understanding of how often China conducts a census. So they did not have a clear, Chinese authorities did not have an especially clear picture of this as it was changing rapidly from 2010 to 2020 is the upshot there. I think that they could have convinced themselves in the 2010s that, well, it's not that low. And then they were looking at now we're dropping much further. Seeing that they've taken the foot off, they've changed the one child policy in 2016 and it hasn't happened. And then you start getting into how do we produce, how do we get people to have children? So Chinese family planning authorities themselves now have adopted a very different tone. This, of course, is the organization that up until several years ago was charged with restricting births. In 2023, the vice president of the China Family Planning Association said, we advocate for marriage and childbearing at the appropriate age, which means encouraging young people to do what they should do at certain age stages, to date when it is time to date, to get married when it is time to marry, and to have children when it is time to have children. So really, some of the language that's coming out of the policy planning people, the same guys who were enforcing the one child system, you know, 10 or 15, 20 years ago, it's now kind of like the grandma who's kind of encouraging you, you really are supposed to sit down and have children and get married. And it doesn't work. Let me try to press you again to speculate on how Xi Jinping might understand this. He's adept when it comes to preserving his own power. He's very fixated on the party's power. So you have to imagine that he's attuned to this. There must be some theory of the case. It may not be working, but there's surely some plan that he has. You would think so. But I mean, OK, you've got a couple of things you've got to remember here. OK, the China's Politburo, 24 people. They're all men. I mean, so that's the they've got the Politburo Standing Committee above that. But they're all men, too. So first, do you think they have a really good insight into what women are thinking? That's point one. Point two, age wise. I mean, you know, he's the generation where you you think the goal is to just motivate people. If we can drive Chinese people forward to recognize the goal of development, the goal of self-definition, of building the party, that ideological force is the way in which we will rejuvenate China. And I think when it comes to thinking about births, you can easily imagine that starts. You start thinking about is if we can just get people to understand what the goal is, we can convince them to do what they should do. I mean, and you hear an echo of this when you hear Chinese authorities talking about, you know, the lying flat movement of the young people, the fact that young people today, both men and women, feel that the economic prospects that they face are worse than their. Parents, you know, you hear what the party is saying and you recognize that they think that it's like, no, you guys are just slackers. You're you're not doing what we did back in the late 21st century. And at least in my read, there's an element of a just a you know, it's it's the older generation kind of looking at the younger people and thinking back up, kids, you know, get with the program. And there can be a disconnect between not understanding what what the realities are that are facing the young that are facing women. Yeah. Well, return to. My conversation with Carl Minster after a short break. Two from artificial intelligence governance to changing Pacific trade. Global policy is being rewritten in real time. 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If you go into that museum and you look at the lower floors, you see the narrative that has always existed in the PRC about women having an important role in the revolutionary project. You can be train drivers, you can be engineers. You, too, are a part of the revolution. You get up to the top floor, which is the thing that's been created in the last two years. It's all about women's role in the family. And it's about imperial, you know, the section where they have the imperial. The the the imperial paragons. It's all men, with the exception of one women. And they're, you know, the glories of family and like, I'm really worried if you push that narrative through on young women. And if you have a more negative attitude about divorce, this can really exacerbate some of the underlying tensions in China. And just this is where I start worrying that you start replicating many of the problems, the conservative, more conservative norms that are in existence in South Korea, Japan, which are challenging. And those societies, but China, which nominally socialist, you could think of as going in a different direction, actually begins reifying certain conservative gender norms as state policy. And that then ends up deeply affecting the trajectory of fertility and marriage in China going forward and worsening things for women's rights as well. Right. Because rather than inducing women to have more children, as the maxim suggested, in fact, makes it less likely that they'll want to get married. It alienates them. Exactly. And, you know. If I were asking me, I mean, the key thing you would want to be, you want to adopt a policy that's supportive of young people. You want to be encouraging and you want to be taking you want to be anyway. But that doesn't seem to be what Chinese leaders are doing. If you accept that there's very little that can be done to significantly change the demographic picture, what are the right policies for for managing that decline, for cushioning the effects of it? And what is China doing or not doing along those lines? Yeah. I mean, this is a challenging thing. So I think, you know. Not making things worse is one key thing. So try not to do that. I do think the other things to realize is that any society is going to face lots of challenges as a result of the aging process. And those changes, those challenges can be things like how do you care for an increasingly large elderly population? It can also be how do you begin to financially alter dynamics with social policy to ensure that you are responding to the needs of the needs of the young, responding to the needs of the elderly. Elsewhere in East Asia. Here's one example. One thing that has been crucial in allowing Taiwan, Japan and South Korea to respond to the pressures of a rapidly aging society is migration. So people don't think of East Asian societies as immigration straight states. And that's true because the migrant labor flows that come into Taiwan or South Korea, Japan usually aren't like Australia or the United States, people who have a path to citizenship. But nonetheless, there's been a dramatic change elsewhere in East Asia. Where the populations which once had almost no foreign immigrant, migrant flows, 0.1% back in 2000 and back in 1990 in Taiwan and South Korea in terms of foreign residents, they now have about 5% of their population that consists of people from the outside. These are the Vietnamese or Filipino care workers. These are the people who are filling the blue collar jobs that are no, you lack the youth population to fill. So that's been an important buffer for those societies to respond to some of these pressures. One question for China is, does China begin to move in that trajectory? It seems inconceivable at the moment, but you would have said the same thing about South Korea in 1990. And so that's one example. I can go into the social policy stuff, too. I mean, yeah. Tell us about what the right social policies would be in that case. So, right. So one of the other things to realize is that elsewhere in East Asia, you've had relatively comprehensive national health care. Systems that have helped to ameliorate the challenges associated with, you know, a rapidly aging society. You also have at least some motion. movement towards creating sustainable pension systems, which actually are not as generous as elsewhere in Europe or the United States, but that provide some level of support, particularly for an aging population. China is very different because China is far more split. China, both in terms of pensions and health care, is almost two different worlds. You have literally two different pension systems, two different health care systems. The health, the pension system that exists for the established urban population, those are the folks not just in Beijing and Shanghai, but Chongqing, all of the major cities, are far more beneficial and far more comprehensive than that which is available for migrants or the rural residents. And it's not just slightly, it's vastly. Sort of in terms of pensions, it can be 20 to 1 in terms of the benefits. So you could have retired state employees who are finished stopping working at even as early as 20 to 1 in terms of the benefits. So you could have retired state employees who are finished the early, early 60s and enjoying something close to replacement level pension and thus decades of a relatively good life. But in the countryside, you have people who are basically working until they will die because there is little, they have to just pay for everything themselves in terms of their pensions. So too in health care, vast discrepancies. And I think what's the balance in those populations? Roughly half, half, say, you know, 700 million on the pension systems. That's going to be a real challenge going forward. I mean, the sense of what this means for the divisions in China going forward, when the DD driver, who is sort of, he's a gig worker, like Uber, doesn't have a regular salary, scrimping and scraping not only to provide for himself, but to send money back to his aging parents in the countryside, who now may have some health condition, while the people in the urban areas enjoy relatively comfortable benefits for themselves as well as for their children. So I think that's going to be a real challenge going forward. This is going to be a big gap in China going forward. And unfortunately, there's been little sign that Chinese authorities really want to take steps to address this. Part of it because now Chinese authorities are more resource constrained in what they can do. They have many other priorities. And also because they're very hesitant to touch the benefits of the existing urban population, fearing that if you anger the retired cadres, the retired state employees, these are folks who are more connected. They're based in the urban areas. And so I think that's going to be a big challenge going forward. And also because they're very hesitant to touch the benefits of the existing urban areas. This is increasingly a source of resistance that authorities, even in a one-party state, are kind of reluctant to touch because of the possibility for social unrest. So this is going to be one of those problems where it just may percolate in Chinese society for a long period of time. Do you see any real debate about changing approaches to migration in China? There are. The interesting thing is, China's complex, both on the pension or healthcare front, as well as on the migration front. It's not like you don't see efforts to do things. So for example, on the pension front, there's been this long delayed move to raise the pension age, which has just kicked in, but it's very slow. Similarly, on the immigration front, one of the interesting things is Chinese authorities themselves, for their own interests, have played around at the edges with opening doors to allow people to flow in, not so much in like mass migration or anything. But back in 2020, there was this effort to sort of introduce a green card system to begin to allow some level of foreigners to come in to fill jobs. Often the idea was diaspora related, Chinese who maybe want to come back. So too, in 2025, last year, there's this effort to introduce a K visa, which would attract young tech talent consistent with Xi Jinping's goals of making China a tech hub. One of the interesting things to realize is that you get big blowback on the part of Chinese citizens. So in 2020, it was very much directed at Africans. There was this idea that, oh, my goodness, you know, this is going to be an inflow that's going to allow people from others, just particularly Africa to come in. And what is this going to mean for China? 2025, when they played with this last year, one of the targets were Indians. There was this idea among active online audience that you're going to have Indian tech workers come in competing for jobs in an increasingly straightened economy for young college graduates. And also, are they going to compete for, you know, marriage prospects too? And this is where some of the toxic ethno-nationalist sentiment can, you can see almost steps that Chinese authorities themselves have taken are actually torpedoing. There's been reluctance to kind of significantly move forward with either of those precisely because of the blowback Chinese authorities are getting within their own, within their own system. There are a couple of powerful analogies that you draw on in the, in the essay. One is, of course, to these other East Asian countries. The other is to the Ming dynasty. I think we often tend to talk about the last imperial dynasty, the Qing, in, in discussing the CCP or the Soviet Union. But you see the, the Ming dynasty, both in the kind of arc of CCP history, but also in the emerging worldview. Draw out that analogy. What, why is it, why is that so powerful to you? Yeah, this is one I'll appreciate. I had, it was a lot of interesting discussions with you. And I think that actually really helped me. I totally agree that this is one interesting parallel to think of because particularly if you're imagining what China will look like in several decades, I think it's going to look more like the United States or it's going to look more like maybe it's a communist system. So should we look towards the Soviet Union and think, but I do think it's really important to just look at China also in a sense of like what versions of it, of itself could exist. It is a large country, large civilization with long history. So it also helps to remember that China has grappled with different versions of who are we and what do we want to be? The thing that worries me is if you actually look at some of the choices Chinese authorities are making right now, it's going to be a lot of different things. It's going to be a lot of different things. It's sort of an increasing pivot towards nativism and increasing pivot, at least on the part of the top towards very regressive gender norms that are at least coming out of Beijing, a sort of a sclerotic resistance to change because you don't want to affect the interests of the established elite. I can sort of look back to sort of the late Ming dynasty, which is sort of late 1500s, early 1600s, which you had a once a flourishing, powerful dynasty that, you know, Zheng He and the treasure fleets, which were very, very powerful. And then you have the, you know, the, you know, the going out to visit India and Africa, there, there was a period in that dynasty where it was very open. It was very vigorous, but as that dynasty sort of crept along and part of it was also developments within the political leadership at the top, part of it was a dynasty that was just becoming slightly more, somewhat more reactive. I can point to things in the, in the Ming dynasty, particularly at the end that make me look at trends within China now. And while never saying it's an identical parallel, it strikes me as a warning sign because that's where you can start to have these broader social forces begin to fuse with political trends at the top to produce a sclerotic atmosphere, which is more brittle. And that kind of is the story of the unwinding of the Ming dynasty at the very end. You handled the historical analogy quite carefully in the piece, and that's, that's appropriate, but let me try to get you to handle it slightly less carefully here. If you, you look at the end of the Ming and you look at that, that process of, of decay, and decline, what, what is the specific warning about? What would that look like in, in, in the modern CCP version? Right. So, I mean, I think it's, it's useful to sort of remember back to the late Ming itself. I mean, so this is a dynasty that was once flourishing, that it had, you had the treasure fleets of Zheng He that had sailed to India and to, and to Africa and had embraced sort of this idea of interactions with the rest of the world. But that by later, by the late 15th century, you had a more native-ish, a more isolationist direction. You had decades of fiscal profligacy had begun to come home to roost where you started to have greater fiscal pressures building on the state. You saw in the effort of the state to begin to try to put more of that burden on the entrenched interests within the urban areas. And you saw the entrenched interests in the urban areas, the gentry class pushed back and said, you know, we're uncomfortable bearing those. And they sort of torpedoed some of the reforms, the, the, the single whip reforms that Ming officials were pushing in the late last decades of the 1500s. You also saw in the late Ming a succession crisis where the, one of the emperors was locked into this decades-long battle with his own bureaucracy, which ended up paralyzing the regime as it was sort of entering its final stages, as well as mounting problems among the rural, the rural population who was feeling, fiscal pressures, was feeling the effects of famine. All of that came together, both in unrest that coupled with political sclerosis and tension at the top to basically produce an imploding of the regime. And so you never want to say this is exactly what's going to happen, but I think sort of focusing on like what happens when a regime becomes increasingly sclerotic, particularly when it also has a regime that's going in a one-man direction. And again, you have China itself. Also look at Putin, you know, that's also an example of a, of a state that's now well into single-man rule. Bad decisions get made. And then you stop responding sort of the interests of the people at the bottom. And you can tell a story where there's a component of that's what's happening in China today. And I, without saying exactly what's going to happen, when I think of the demographic and the political trajectory, there's some, some element of that is what I'm worried about for China in the 2040s and 2050s. The history of the Ming, we have read a lot about their scrutiny of Soviet history and attempt to learn those lessons of Qing history. Are they attentive to the Ming history? So I tell you, you know, this is actually, I do follow the historians who talk about this stuff. And the fascinating thing is you would think that this would be like, I feel like a clear lesson for people to look at in a negative tone. But my understanding is that the academic discourses that are going on is you've actually got some within academic, but also party supported circles who are kind of going in the Ming revivalist mode, which is to say that if you're looking at the Ming itself, it's also, we had foreign pressures and we turn towards a revivalism of Neo-Confucianism of our own internal values. And the Qing were a multicultural state that was problematic and they collapsed because of X, Y, Z reasons, but the Ming was different. I feel like that's a very odd conclusion to be drawing when you're looking at the Ming, particularly you're looking at the late stages. But this, I think for any readers who sort of follow history, you want to follow what seemed like archaic or abstract battles within, over history within China, because I think this is an interesting indication of some questions as to where China may go. And just on this particular point, the other thing I would say is the Tang dynasty. I would say that if anyone in China was really focused on a good dynasty, the Tang was cosmopolitan, it was open, there was a far greater role for women. Now, the problem was it was also a multi-ethnic ruling elite. It was both Central Asian and Chinese. And so if you're going in. A nativist direction, maybe you don't think that looks good, but the Tang, many Chinese people think of it as like one of China's best dynasties. And so I keep thinking that there's this alternative reality where Chinese authorities start looking back to the better versions of themselves, of China, even in a one-party state and being like, why can't we start lifting that up? But, and, and, and, and this is like before a thousand, this is like, you know, right. 800 AD too. Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. That that's totally fascinating. I would, I would love to watch a debate between you and a party historian on the right lessons, the Ming, but we'll save that for another. If you imagine, I mean, you, you have a line in the piece where you say by mid century, Beijing will be chronically short of the workers it needs and will likely end up on the wrong side of a new kind of populist discontent. It's not hard to imagine that presenting a real threat to the stability of the CCP, to the sustainability of the CCP. Right. And that's right. I mean, I, I really think there's sort of in the, in the long term, I also sort of think there are two ways, the failure to address these, these things can play out in a couple of ways. So one is what you're phrasing, like it's the more dramatic problem. There's huge split in Chinese society, the haves and the have nots, all of these things get exacerbated as China ages. And this doesn't work out well in terms of producing pushback unrest. You're seeing that now. I mean, if you look at things that are developing among people in many societies, whether it's pension challenges and the problems of the youth in France whether it's things in India, whether it's things in our own society, so you, you can see some of the issues that crop up regardless of your political system. And I don't think they don't exist in China, in China. It's just that currently they're kind of being submerged, but these things can blow up. So that's one possibility. The other possibility is recognize that sort of young people may also just decide what's the point. And then this is the lying flat. This is the, you just don't marry, you don't have children. And this is the story of China, just kind of even more rapidly aging, going in the direction of Japan and the like, but of course it's far more small. It's more split than Japan. So I don't think it, I do sense it being more turbulent in the end than, than the rest of East Asia, but it could also be just, it worsens the demographic decline. You also suggest in the piece that this is part of what's driving the, the intensification of the security and surveillance system in China, that, that part of this is about, about monitoring what, what you talk about as though the four lacks or the party talks about as the four, four lacks, no spouse or children, no job or stable income, no normal social interactions. No financial assets. All of this is, is heavily affected by the demographic trajectory. Right. I mean, if this is where, you know, if you start looking at the security fears that you're seeing echoed out of Chinese authorities, and I mean, really, I mean, they are also looking at sort of violent outbursts by, by some people like the, the guy who can't get a job, the guy whose wife left him and he didn't get the money in the divorce. They are worried about these very, these things that are beginning to bubble up in Chinese society. But you're totally correct that what they're, the response rather than some sort of redistributed system to sort of say, let's figure out how to really address healthcare for the aging population in the rural areas. It's really more reactive. It's sort of saying the problem, you know, the security problem is that we have unemployed youth who are starting to complain about things. The problems are that there is a sector of society that is not, um, that is not getting jobs and the like, and if you start viewing them as security threats and then beginning to sort of send your forces and send your monitoring apparatus to treat them as such, I don't think that ends up addressing the problem. I think ends up sort of radicalizing the people who are on the other end of it and leading you to overlook the far deeper structural things that are causing these problems. What do you imagine the, the implications of these trends to be when it comes to China's foreign policy to its, to its role in the world? There's obviously been a shift over the last, I don't know, five or six years when it comes to consideration of China's rise and the kind of shift to fears about what a declining China might mean. How do you connect these two? So the instinctive reaction that often people ask me, it's the assumption that China gets more aggressive. This is the, we have lots of unmarried young men and thus Chinese authorities in Beijing are more interested in aggressive foreign policy to divert the anger of the youth. I don't totally rule that out. But I also think that it really is important to also recognize how fearful Chinese leaders are themselves. I mean, the idea that things could backfire and that all of this rising tension could actually produce the thing that Chinese authorities most fear, which is rebellion, which is turning against the party itself. I think that can also make Chinese, Chinese leaders also far more conservative and worried about pushing the bubble precisely because we don't know how this could turn out. And I do remember also sort of some of the political dimensions of what's taking place. For all of the purges that are happening politically at the top in the United States, the Chinese military command has now been totally purged and Xi Jinping himself is at the top. There is a very unsettled dynamic at the top in China. And I don't know what that produces. I think there is a lot of concern about where this could go. Of course, one possibility is China just like. Putin or like, you know, Beijing, just like Putin, an aging dictator could send his send his make a very bad decision and then you do end up with something aggressive. But it could also be that you have someone who is just highly concerned about any unrest. And that makes China much more fearful of pushing overseas in any way. Let me close with the really powerful warning at the end of the piece. Most of the piece is, of course, about China, but you do say at the end that there's a warning for America. And just again, to quote the piece you write, Washington must avoid worsening its own demographic problems through the kind of self-defeating policies that are deepening China's struggle. What would those self-defeating policies look like in the U.S. context? And to what extent do you see that beginning to happen? To what extent are you are you acutely worried that we are starting to to enter the same kind of cycle? Yeah. Well, I mean, you asked the question. So I would basically say that, you know, the one key question for the United States, just like for China, is what version of ourselves do we choose? Do we choose a highly reactive, highly insular, highly neo-traditionalist version of ourselves? And that we in the United States, at different points in our history, we have made those choices. We can worsen all of our own challenges as well. We back we give up our heritage of being an immigrant country. All of our demographic pressures get more problematic. We make the question of marriage and childbirth the next front in our own gender wars. And our fertility rates at like one point six could start going down even more dramatically. We fail to address our problems, you know, zoning, high costs of housing, the obstacles that are preventing the next generation of American youth from finding getting their own start in life. We too will have problems. And so the hopeful story that I would tell is that, you know, some of the choices that were made just within the last week, particularly in the national political stage, are part of the United States beginning to opt for a different version of itself. I would hold out that hope for China as well. Within its own trajectory. We would make a better choice for itself, but I can't affect China. But if the United States does opt for this better version of ourselves, I do think we can actually respond in a more constructive way to limit some of the challenges we're going to face as we too begin to encounter our own challenges of demographic, caused by demographic aging and youth, the decline of the youth population. And what would it look like if China chooses a better version of itself? This is imagining a lot of change. And the leadership and everything else, but what does that look like? So literally, the two versions I hold out in the book are the Tang Dynasty and revolutionary China. So the Tang Dynasty is a version of China in which it begins to embrace, you know, you take your foot off the neck of Chinese women, you begin to articulate a version of China that is perhaps open to sort of outsiders. So at the point where you do need flows of elder care workers, and in my world, or the way I would be thinking of it, you got to imagine it's elder care workers. workers from areas that are yet poorer than China who want to flow into rural China to provide those services for elderly people who are in very poor areas and need assistance. So I'm probably looking at like Africa or other places, but you'd have to have a fundamental reworking of what the definition of China is to imagine the possibility where you're thinking of China in a more open term. That's why the Tang dynasty is a sort of a version of China where you're thinking of a more gender, a more open set of gender norms, a more open set of accepting outsiders flowing in in some form. And revolutionary China from sort of the 1950s, that's the point at which you're willing to challenge existing entrenched interests. And that's where perhaps you channel some of the energy to say the differences between rural and urban populations are a new form of exploitation and thus maybe we need to start cutting some of the benefits of the cadres and the state-owned employees in order to build meaningful health care systems for the rural population. At the moment in China, that's almost incomprehensible to think about because China is under Xi. You're in a very reactive, reactionary mode. But is there a world in which Chinese authorities can say, well, we did overturn systems to try to make things better for migrants and rural population at an earlier point. Maybe we need to get a little of that energy back. Well, Carl, I'm confident that your piece is being read among party circles and government circles in China. So perhaps you can affect those choices a tiny bit. But for now, thank you so much for the great piece. I should say it draws on your forthcoming book, As China Ages. Which will come out on January 4th, 2027. There you go. Thank you for that plug. I should have done that earlier. But it's a great piece and a great book. And this has been a great conversation. So I really appreciate it. You're very nice. Thanks so much, Dan. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for listening. You can find the articles that we discussed on today's show at foreignaffairs.com. This episode of the Foreign Affairs Interview was produced by Rachel Powell, Adrian Feinberg, and Kanishk Tharoor, with audio engineering by Todd Yeager, and original music by Robin Hilton. Special thanks as well to Irina Hogan. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you like what you heard, please leave a comment. ForeignAffairs.com. Spotlight. To sign up for Dan Kurtz-Valen's free weekly newsletter, featuring more of the clear-headed analysis that you enjoy here on the podcast. Sign up today at foreignaffairs.com. Spotlight.