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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.