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.

Baby boom generation in China will start to hit retirement age in the very next few years, let's say by the end of this decade.

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.

Soon numbers of Chinese people will exit the work force, and the Chinese work force, which has already begun to shrink, will shrink in a vastly accelerated way. And so China's going to face huge retirement costs and Social Security costs, health care costs, related to this immense aging of the population.

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.

As I set out to begin photographing Shanghai, I encountered the insider/outsider phenomena in the most personal of ways. You would walk into an old neighborhood in the center of city, and people would begin to point at you. People would begin to talk about you, spreading the word about the outsider who has wandered into their midst, look at him, he's got a camera, what's he doing, is this allowed, is this OK, how should be respond to him.