When you arrive in China nowadays, one of the first things you note is the emphasis placed on you, a non-Chinese person, being an outsider.

China, the world's most populous country, 1.3, 1.4 billion people, will in the next decade or so have to begin looking for people outside of China.What does this mean? China will have to become a much more welcoming society. It means that China will have to attract immigrants from other countries in order to slow the aging of the population.

The one-child policy was based on some faulty science and had, as an ambition, reining in Chinese population growth, so as to enhance the per capita wealth of the country.

We're seeing China push very hard in its immediate neighborhood, particularly in the maritime zone surrounding China, to kind of create a security zone for itself, trying to lock in the territorial and maritime gains that it can now, before a period of much more difficult choices arises some time in the 2020s.

The reason the United States is not aging rapidly in terms of its demographics is because we accept people as newcomers to this society in numbers that far surpass any of our major peers or rivals.

China will have the biggest aging crisis that the world has ever seen over the next generation, and this happens at a time when Chinese ambitions, geopolitically speaking, are expanding.

Emphasis in China is done aggressively. Sometimes, this is done rudely, but most of the time it's just done routinely. It's just a normal thing in the course of your encounters with Chinese people in every walk of life.