sudden conflagration inflicting massive
damage—for reasons that are murky.
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reform program has barely started, and
India’s economy is only about one-third
the size of China’s. Russian President
Vladimir Putin’s growing isolation means
he urgently needs to replace European energy
customers with Asian ones—which
puts the Kremlin in Beijing’s pocket. Despite
talk of an Asia pivot, the U.S. may
well remain too distracted by threats from
jihadi groups and challenges posed by the
intensifying Iranian-Saudi rivalry to devote
full attention to China’s rise.
But China’s rise has a ceiling. This
summer’s stock-market gyrations are a
reminder that opening a state-dominated
economy to market forces takes steady
nerves. There’s no guarantee that shareholders
can handle the stress or that riskaverse
leaders will stay the course. The
same is true of opening a controlled currency
to the unpredictable pressures of
supply and demand. There’s a risk that
volatility will create shock waves that a
rigid political system can’t absorb. China’s
leaders can intervene to avoid near-term
crisis—as they have done this summer—
but emergency measures inevitably become
less effective over time.
A bigger problem: thanks largely to
the one-child policy, China’s people are
aging quickly. In 1980, the median age in
China was 22.1 years, which meant hundreds
of millions of young Chinese were
available to fuel the country’s economic
explosion. As of 2013, it was 35.4. A U.N.
study forecasts that by 2050, the median
age will be 46.3. That means a smaller percentage