With a birth rate once so great that, in 1979, the Chinese government implemented a controversial “one-child policy” — enforced with fees that pushed many second and third children of poor families into a shadowy, extralegal existence — the world power now faces the opposite problem: so great a downturn in births that the population no longer reproduces itself. By 2040, nearly one-third of the Chinese population will have reached retirement age.

Government efforts to stave off the shift have been too little, too late: the one-child policy was upped to a two-child policy in 2015, then a three-child policy in 2021 — but the financial incentives offered by the government are not enough to cover the expenses of large families in a country increasingly plagued by wage stagnation, endemic overwork, and limited opportunities (whether through higher education or workplace advancement) to improve one’s financial standing.

Neighboring Japan, the classic example of demographic transition, demonstrates one potential future for the Chinese economy: as a manufacturing country becomes increasingly elderly, its productive output plateaus. The Japanese economic boom of the 1990s waned as its population aged out of the workforce.