In China, a stagnant housing sector and slowing urbanization are exacerbating an aging and declining population, with the government likely to avoid coercive family-planning measures in favor of using technology to ease the economic side effects of demographic decline, and Beijing will increasingly retaliate against foreign policies it sees as undermining its tenuous social stability or China's AI revolution. China's accelerating demographic problems — characterized by a slowly growing elderly cohort, rapidly declining birth and marriage rates and a shrinking workforce — are tightly woven into urbanization patterns and the country's ailing housing sector. The latest government statistics, which should be viewed as the most optimistic interpretation of China's economic numbers, show an acceleration of demographic problems in just the last decade — namely, that the country is aging too quickly, having too few babies and restricting immigration such that, in conjunction with housing system issues, longstanding concerns about a...