Foresight No. 3: China’s Future to 2035 (full note, PDF)

Foresight, prospective note No. 3. Driss EFFINA, PhD. October 2026. PDF, 30 pages, 17 charts and diagrams, 12 tables.

China ends 2026 with real growth of 4.6 percent over the first nine months, a record trade surplus, a fourth consecutive year of population decline and a property sector still contracting by a fifth a year. The debate on its future tends to swing between two stories: a system that will outgrow every rival and a system that has reached its peak. This note asks a more precise question, the one that matters for the next decade: can the current political economy absorb its internal and external pressures, or must the regime change form for China to keep advancing? It builds six original tools from IMF (October 2026), World Bank, NBS and other official data: a regime resilience accounting of six measurable pillars from 2010 to 2035; a “demographic clock” that compares China with Japan and Korea at the same old-age dependency ratio rather than the same calendar year; a demographic growth accounting to 2050; a rebalancing arithmetic linking the household consumption share to capital efficiency; a fiscal-demographic squeeze to 2050; and an external pressure index.

Inside the full note:

• The model in 2026: what still works and what broke
• Regime resilience accounting
• Demography: the clock and the arithmetic
• The rebalancing arithmetic
• The fiscal-demographic squeeze
• The techno-industrial offset and its external limit
• External pressure
• Does China need regime change to continue its rise?
• Scenarios to 2035, with a horizon to 2050
• A dashboard of leading indicators
• Implications for policy, businesses and investors
• What to watch

Read the free preview: A New Bargain, Not a New Regime.