One way to win a war is to let your opponent commit suicide.
Americans have a habit of thinking about China in this light.
For the longest time, our country’s intelligentsia assumed Beijing’s Communist system would collapse on its own, just as the Soviet Union’s did.
Of course, the West had a policy of containment toward the USSR — in contrast to a policy of encouraging China’s integration into global institutions like the World Trade Organization in the 1990s and 2000s.
But if relying on globalization to turn China into a democracy was a failure, today optimists see another way to get Beijing to defeat itself.
The strategy depends on demographics.
Chinese birth rates, like those in most of the industrialized world, have plummeted.
India surpasses China as the world’s populous country this year, according to United Nations estimates.
Each has more than 1.4 billion people, but India is still growing while China’s population, as of last year, is shrinking.
China’s own National Bureau of Statistics says the fertility rate — births per woman — is only 1.0 to 1.1, far below the replacement level of 2.1.