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.

By the 2040s, China could lose ten million people a year.

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........

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