When a society's most aspirational role models (e.g., K-pop stars) are contractually celibate and childless, it creates a powerful cultural script against coupling and family formation. This mimetic effect can significantly impact national birth rates by devaluing parenthood as a life goal for an entire generation.

China's policy to combat deflation focuses on cutting excess industrial capacity. However, this is deemed insufficient because the root cause is weak aggregate demand. A sustainable solution requires boosting consumption through social welfare, an approach policymakers seem hesitant to implement on a large scale.

Statisticians now believe local Chinese governments have lied about demographics for over 25 years. The realization came from plummeting tax receipts, suggesting millions of children thought born in the late 90s never existed. The country's population may be overstated by 100-300 million people, accelerating its collapse.

China’s economic strategy prioritizes technology and manufacturing competitiveness, assuming this will create a virtuous cycle of profits, jobs, and consumption. The key risk is that automated, high-tech manufacturing may not generate enough jobs to significantly boost household income, causing consumer spending to lag behind industrial growth.

Despite rhetoric about shifting to a consumption-led economy, China's rigid annual GDP growth targets make this impossible. This political necessity forces a constant return to state-driven fixed asset investment to hit the numbers. The result is a "cha-cha" of economic policy—one step toward rebalancing, two steps back toward the old model—making any true shift short-lived.

China deliberately maintains an undervalued renminbi to make its exports cheaper globally. This strategy props up its manufacturing-led growth model, even though it hinders economic rebalancing and reduces the purchasing power of its own citizens.

China's plummeting birth rate is not just about cost. It's a structural issue where highly educated, professional women are opting out of childbirth because male partners are not stepping up to equally share the temporal and financial costs, creating a significant "parenthood penalty" for women.

The dramatic drop in China's Fixed Asset Investment isn't a sign of economic failure. Instead, it reflects a deliberate government-led "anti-involution" campaign to strip out industrial overcapacity. This painful but planned adjustment aims to create a more streamlined, profitable economy, fundamentally reordering its growth model away from sheer volume.

Beyond raw materials, China's national ambition is to achieve near-total self-sufficiency. The prevailing mood is that there is "nothing for which it wants to rely on foreigners a single day longer than it has to." This philosophy of aggressive import substitution signals a fundamental break with the logic of reciprocal global trade.