[The author Carl Minzner is a Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Professor at Fordham Law School, US.]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 […] 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.

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Between 2013 and 2024, new marriages in China fell by 55 percent.

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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.

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