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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.