Where Have All of China's Workers Gone?

China’s demographic hangover is here, and it is as unexpected and unpleasant as the morning after a 30th birthday. Given the facility with which the government has managed difficult economic transitions in the past 20 years -- forcing the military out of the market economy in the 1990s and initiating the Panda Boom later that decade -- the purely economic dimensions seem daunting, but no more so than the other feats the CCP has pulled off. Instead, it’s the social and political dimensions of the demographic hangover that seem most perplexing.