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.

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.

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 has its own Baby Boom generation. And China's baby boom generation, because of the size of China itself, is the world's largest baby boom generation.

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.

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.