I am wondering if we may be seeing the beginning of the end of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people to borrow a phrase. I lived the Japanese "miracle" first as a student in Japan, then as a businessman there, and finally as a U.S. trade negotiator with Japan in the 1980s. China has wrought an even better miracle than Japan. But like Japan, it has assumed that real estate prices can only rise, that there is no such thing as excess production capacity, and that it has to export to live. Like Japan, it has bought, stolen, and forced transfer of technology to reach a point where, being at the leading edge or close to it, it must increasingly invent the technology itself. It speaks oftne of the 1.4 billion united Chinese people. But, like Japan, it is now entering entering a period of population decline which some forecasters say will cut the Chinese population in half by the year 2100. Xi's and the party's obsession with zero covid is doing serious harm not only to the domestic economy but also to the interests of foreign investors who for the first time in forty years are seriously considering diversification of production away from China. Is the answer to the question, "will China get rich before it gets old" no? Will the increasing recognition of this reality make China more or less aggressive diplomatically and militarily?