The Next 100 Years

a j a pa n e s e va r i a n t
The advanced industrial world will be experiencing a contraction of popu­
lation in the 2010s, and labor will be at a premium. For some countries, due 
to entrenched cultural values, immigration either is not an option or is at 
least a very difficult one. Japan, for example, is extremely averse to immigra­
tion, yet it must find a source of labor that is under its control and that can 
be taxed to support older workers. Most workers with a choice of where to 
go will not choose Japan, as it is fairly inhospitable to foreigners who want 
to become citizens. Koreans in Japan are not citizens of Japan. Even if they 
have lived all their lives and worked in Japan, they are issued papers by the 
Japanese police calling them “Korean” (neither north nor south) and are un­
able to become Japanese citizens. 
Consider, however, that China is a vast pool of relatively low- cost labor. 
If the Chinese won’t come to Japan, Japan may come to China, as it has be­
fore. Using Chinese labor in enterprises created by the Japanese but located 
in China will be an alternative to immigration—and it will not only be 
Japan doing this. 
Remember that Beijing will be trying simultaneously to tighten its grip 
on the country. Traditionally, when the central government is clamping 
down on China, it is prepared to accept lower economic growth. While a 
large- scale, concentrated Japanese presence sucking up Chinese labor might 
make a great deal of economic sense for local entrepreneurs and governments 
and even for Beijing, it makes little political sense. It would cut directly 
against Beijing’s political interests. But Japan will not want the Chinese gov­
ernment diverting money to its own ends. That would defeat the entire pur­
pose of the exercise. 
By approximately 2020, Japan will have Chinese allies in the fight to 
bring in Japanese investment on terms favorable to Japan. Coastal regions 
will be competing to attract Japanese investment and resisting Beijing’s pres­

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100
t h e n e x t 1 0 0 y e a r s
sure and its nationalist ideology. Interior China might not benefit from 
Japan’s presence, but businesses and governments along the coast would. 
The Japanese, with large amounts of money, will have recruited allies in the 
coastal cities who do not want to pay the price that will be needed to satisfy 
the demands of the interior. An alliance between one or more coastal re­
gions and Japan will emerge, confronting the power of Beijing. The 
amount of money that Japan will bring to bear will rapidly divide the cen­
tral party itself and weaken the central government’s ability to assert its con­
trol on the coastal cities. 
China will be seen as part of the solution for countries like Japan that are 
feeling heavy pressure from demographic problems but cannot manage 
large- scale immigration. Unfortunately the timing will not be good. An in­
evitable downturn in the Chinese economy will make the central govern­
ment more assertive and more nationalist. But the central government will 
itself be weakened by the corrosive effect of money. China will remain for­
mally united, but power will tend to devolve to the regions. 
A very real future for China in 2020 is its old nightmare—a country di­
vided among competing regional leaders, foreign powers taking advantage 
of the situation to create regions where they can define economic rules to 
their advantage, and a central government trying to hold it all together but 
failing. A second possibility is a neo- Maoist China, centralized at the cost of 
economic progress. As always, the least likely scenario is the continuation of 
the current situation indefinitely. 
It all boils down to this: China does not represent a geopolitical fault line 
in the next twenty years. Its geography makes that unlikely under any cir­
cumstances, and China’s level of military development needs more than a 
decade to overcome this geographical limit. Internal stresses on the Chinese 
economy and society will give China far greater internal problems than it 
can reasonably handle, and therefore it will have little time for foreign pol­
icy adventures. To the extent that China will be involved with foreign pow­
ers, it will be defending itself against encroachment rather than projecting 
its own power. 

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