By Wu Hongsen
A collapsing property market, high unemployment, shrinking consumption, falling corporate profits, and the closure of large numbers of factories and shops — these phenomena are often described as an economic crisis or a great depression. Yet economic crises and depressions eventually come to an end. Even Japan’s “three lost decades” still allowed it to climb back up from the bottom.
China’s situation is different. What it faces is not an economic crisis but a comprehensive collapse—not merely a great depression, but an overall march toward death. This is inseparable from the model that drove its economic rise over the past forty years. That model determines that once it fails and disintegrates, the crisis cannot be alleviated or overcome through partial policy adjustments. What follows can only be an end at the level of the entire society: the simultaneous collapse of six major pillars — economics, demographics, society, culture, ecology, and institutions.
I. The foundation of a society is demographic continuity. China’s birth rate has fallen below the levels seen in countries at war or struck by disaster. Young people are actively choosing not to marry, not to have children, and not to reproduce, leading to a rapid decline in the population. When an entire generation collectively decides to “stop giving birth to the future,” the death knell of society has already rung: the labor force dries up, the economy becomes unsustainable, aging spirals out of control, social welfare cannot be maintained, talent is exhausted, and innovation stagnates. The first signal of social death is when people choose to withdraw from the future.
II. Upward mobility for the young has been shut off. When class stratification solidifies, elites inherit privilege, education loses its value, and young people fall into despair and collectively “lie flat,” society loses its vitality. This means the heart of society stops beating. Innovation, culture, and institutions die along with it.
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III. Once a society’s economic system collapses structurally, what follows is regression rather than stagnation. State-owned enterprises and power intervention squeeze out market vitality; innovation is suppressed by politics; private enterprises steadily exit; foreign capital withdraws on a large scale; and the trend toward global decoupling accelerates. As a result, the entire society is forcibly dragged back into a model of low efficiency, low innovation, and low freedom. This is the mark of a retreat from modernization to a rigid, ossified society.
IV. Ecological collapse hollows out the material foundation: groundwater depletion, river pollution and drying, severe soil contamination, and mounting threats to food security in northern China. Without water, without land, without sustainable resources, the economy cannot function, the population cannot survive, and society cannot be sustained. The death of society begins with the land.
V. When thought is strangled, culture is disinfected, and society collectively sinks into numbness, the spirit dies. In today’s China, academia is controlled by politics, creativity is exhausted, and art, literature, and film have become tools of propaganda. Public opinion is comprehensively sealed off, while young people are spiritually hollow, cynical, passive, and despairing. Society can no longer generate innovation or cultural energy.
VI. The system is incapable of self-correction. Power is highly concentrated, the rule of law has deteriorated, information transparency has vanished, social organizations are comprehensively suppressed, and ideology replaces rationality in policymaking. Society has lost its “capacity for evolution” and is therefore destined to become rigid and lifeless.
Originally published in Chinese on Dec. 12, 2025.
Editorial note: Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Vision Times.
