Nov

29

What Will China Be Like In 2025?

Filed Under China | 3 Comments

The National Intelligence Council (NIC) has release an unclassified  report, “Global Tends 2025: A Transformed World” which, as the NIC puts it, offers “a fresh look at how global trends might develop over the next 15 years to influence world events.”

Rather than read the whole very long report, here’s an excerpt from a Strategy Page analysis of the report concerning demographic changes in China in 2025:

China’s “one child” policy (to halt population growth), and the unanticipated appearance of cheap sonograms (enabling parents to determine the gender of their child while there was still time for an abortion) has caused an imbalance in the gender ratio. There are now 115 boys for every 100 girls. Young men are having a problem finding wives. Wealthier urban males attract more women from the rural areas (where 70 percent of Chinese still live), leaving a lot of lonely, poor and angry young men in the countryside. The smaller generations means that the proportion of elderly (made wealthier and healthier by the booming economy) is skyrocketing, while the workforce is shrinking. Both these trends are bad, and will have negative social and economic impacts.

As the NIC points out, the reports is not meant to be an exercise in “prediction or crystal ball-gazing.”  But it does sound like a plausible scenario.  And a countryside full of “lonely, poor and angry young men” sounds particularly bad.


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3 Comments so far

  1. scenario | Digg.com on November 30, 2008 5:40 am

    [...] What Will China Be Like In 2025? As the NIC points out, the reports is not meant to be an exercise in “prediction or crystal ball-gazing.” But it does sound like a plausible scenario. And a countryside full of “lonely, poor and angry young men” sounds particularly bad. [...]

  2. scenario analysis | HP.com HP United States on November 30, 2008 10:11 am

    [...] What Will China Be Like In 2025? As the NIC points out, the reports is not meant to be an exercise in “prediction or crystal ball-gazing.” But it does sound like a plausible scenario. And a countryside full of “lonely, poor and angry young men” sounds particularly bad. [...]

  3. comment garder un homme on August 25, 2009 11:32 am

    Hey, love the blog – i will try and keep up with it!! please keep more coming :)

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