by Rod D. Martin
September 25, 2026
Xi Jinping needs the U.S. market because Beijing destroyed its future. That’s the essential starting point for understanding this week’s White House summit.
China faces a demographic disaster, a fact rarely appreciated in the West, but understood all too well by Xi Jinping. The One Child Policy was a catastrophic human rights violation, expressed in the anguish of millions of mothers and in the millions of abortions forced on them by the state.
But that’s only the beginning of the nightmare. China’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is just 0.92: simply to replace the existing population that number has to be 2.1 or greater. It’s likely to stabilize at just 0.8, because young Chinese women have been indoctrinated into the small family (or no family) dogma.
At that rate, China will lose 75 percent of its population over the next 75 years: it will actually be smaller than the United States. But that’s not the immediate problem Xi must solve. Such an unprecedented population implosion doesn’t take place evenly. First the number of retirees balloons. It has to be supported by an ever-shrinking working-age population. It will get far, far worse before it gets better.
The immediate problem is real estate. China’s people have long made real estate investments their primary means of saving for retirement. That made sense while the construction boom was on, as 300 million Chinese streamed from the countryside into the cities.
But it doesn’t make sense anymore.
China’s shrinking generation of young adults is supposed to buy its surplus real estate while supporting the ballooning retiree generation that depended on it as a store of value. The Party built an economy around the assumption that prices would keep rising, even as it prevented the birth of the people who would have paid them.
As it turns out, if there are fewer people but the same number of houses and apartments, prices go down. A lot.
The Ghost Cities Compound the Problem
It gets worse. Much worse.
