Say you're in China's position. The base of your power is your economy, and that's predicated on your workforce. That workforce is now at it's peak, and will

Say you're in China's position. The base of your power is your economy, and that's predicated on your workforce. That workforce is now at it's peak, and will shrink as people retire faster than they graduate from school. As your workforce shrinks and greys, companies are going to look elsewhere for cheap labour and your economic clout will decline. What do you do? There are things working in your favour, such as the inertia of supply chains. But that inertia is finite. You can try to negate the problem. Bet big on automation. Will that become cost effective soon enough, and will foreign owned companies choose to run automated factories in a foreign country when they could run it in their backyard? You can offer incentives to families to have more children (China has already done this), but can you afford to make them big enough to work? Ultimately, you have to plan for the case in which all else fails and your power declines. What's almost as good as a continually growing workforce? The wealth and resources to command other nations' workforces. Hence, the Belt and Road initiative. Bake China's current wealth into the foundations of a global trade empire, and bind those it connects to China. Buy control of resources expected to be crucial in the coming decades, such as rare earth minerals. Also, grab as much territory as quickly as you can while you're powerful enough that the world might not say, "No". Build islands. Pressure other nations to get out of "your" territorial waters. Reabsorb Taiwan. etc.. Xi Jinping is getting his while the getting is good.