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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Since the first Gulf War in 1991, the Chinese have been increasing their military budget roughly by 11 percent a year on average. There's no way that China will be able to sustain that sort of military expenditure. And then the most important reason is because of its population changes.

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.