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

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 a demographic decline and political paralysis. This, Minzner argues, is the real story of twenty-first-century China. That convergence will define Chinese foreign policy, threaten Chinese stability, and call into question the future of Chinese Communist Party rule.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan 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; about what those problems portend for Chinese power in the decades ahead; and about why all of this should serve as a warning for the United States.

You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.