(An old Chinese Globe. Note that as of 2024 the CCP does not control Taiwan)
China in 2024 - Big issues it is struggling with
Falling birth rate & an aging population. China’s birth rate appears to be around 1.0 live births per woman. Oddly we see this exact same problem of a drastic fall in births and a commensurate aging of the population across most of East Asia. South Korea has a stunningly low female fertility rate of 0.7 - meaning the average South Korean woman will give birth less than one child. No nation has ever seen a birth rate this low before now. The number of births per woman to simply maintain the existing population needs to be 2.1. Anything lower and your population will start to decline. Japan is only slightly higher than South Korea and its population has been declining by about half a million per year since 2020. China’s population is estimated to drop from 1.4 billion today, to 1.2 billion by 2060, and down to 1 billion by 2080. The average age of the Chinese population will increase dramatically over the next 40 years.
Transforming the Chinese economy from one based on export of manufactured goods to a more mixed economy with more imports from other nations (not just raw materials) and a larger internal market. To take just one example, while China can clearly build 20,000 miles of high speed rail lines inside China, who else will pay the PRC to build similar projects in their nation? China has built high speed rail in a few other nations, such as Kenya, and Indonesia, but other nations which can afford such infrastructure projects are more likely to build their own than buy a Chinese system. [Sadly, in California, we have selected the worst of all choices: we are spending tens of billions of dollars and are making such slow progress that the California high speed rail project will likely never be completed.]
Managing International Diplomacy. The last time the Chinese had an effective and robust foreign policy was during the first half of the Tang Dynasty (630 to 755). For the last 1,300 years, the Chinese have been unable to establish relations with other nations based on mutual respect and near-equal status. China has been a good ally so long as your country treated China as its quasi-ruler. However, China has not been willing to treat other nations as equals. For example, Japan insisted on being treated as an equal and China’s response was to cut off nearly all relations with Japan from 1000 to 1900. For another example: China signed a treaty with Russia in 1687 (the Treaty of Nerchinsk) but China refused to set up an embassy in Russia, nor did China make any effort to understand Russia or its European neighbors to the west. To be fair, China has been making a serious effort to create a new foreign policy since 1990.
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