Our New Chinese Overlords
January 5th, 2011




Martin Wolf isn’t Tom Friedman, but he, too, is getting ready to welcome our new Chinese overlords.

I don’t want to be the crazy guy ringing the fertility bell every time someone brings up China, ranting and pointing out that they’re heading toward a dramatic population collapse which will force the country to make a very hard choice. In a few years they will have some 300 million retirees with no children to care for them and no state-sponsored pension or welfare system. The Chinese government will have to do one of three things:

1) Significantly raise taxes on workers to pay for the care of the geriatric bulge.

2) Significantly cut spending in other areas (such as infrastructure or defense) to stand up a massive welfare system.

3) Send their old people out into the countryside to die.

But like I said, I’m not going to blabber on about that this time. Instead, I’ll just ask this: How can China hope to compete in a globalized world with their appalling lack of diversity? The Chinese are 91.5 percent Han Chinese with a handful of other Asian groups making up a an 8.5 percent minority. And because their immigration laws are pretty tight, China isn’t going to get less Chinese any time soon.

Seems to me that we hear an awful lot about how crucial diversity is for national success, how it fosters all sorts of synergy, creativity, energy, blah-blah-blah.

Either diversity really isn’t particularly important, or the Chinese economic dynamo is going to have to find some way to overcome their tragic ethnic monotony.



  1. tubbylover69 January 5, 2011 at 8:24 pm

    Kind of like the Japanese. And the Germans. And the Scandis. Brits too, during their heyday. Man, if only those guys had more diversity, they might have amounted to something!

  2. REPLY
  3. Jeff Singer January 5, 2011 at 9:21 pm

    Maybe they are keeping North Korea around to eventually have the Koreans take care of their old people?!?

    “tubbylover69” — you rock my world. Also, don’t forget the diverse French in their heyday and really going back in time, the Greeks, Romans and Persians.

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