The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: China's Prospects for 2025 (original) (raw)

In the words of John Lee, "speculation about the future depends on assumptions, and making assumptions only makes an ass out of oneself. But we must still plan for the future" (Lee 28). As individuals living in an unprecedentedly interconnected world, our lives are increasingly effected by events that occur far away from us, rendering necessary thoughtful consideration of what the future holds, not only for our own nation, but for other nations as well. Today, few nations beyond the United States can be said to consistently exert substantial influence on the global system; however, China's meteoric rise over the past several decades indicates that China, already significant on a global scale, will continue to be important in the years to come. For this reason, it is crucial that any "plan for the future" accounts for the direction in which China is headed. Although the opacity of China's political-economic system makes any prediction about its future difficult, there exists a dilemma at the heart of China's system involving three interdependent factors which lead me to believe that, by 2025, China -while having avoided collapse -will have been limited to a moderately-strong, authoritarian system similar to the one that exists today. These three factors are: first, a focus on economic growth; second, environmental degradation; and third, Chinese society's most problematic idiosyncrasies -elite corruption and demographic imbalance.