The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Slavery Can't Fix China's Demography || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

To be thorough in our discussion of China's demographic collapse, we must explore as many potential solutions as possible...even if one of those is a UAE-style model of imported workers (aka slavery).Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4oEtJ06

Everybody, car video today, running errands and don't have time. Anyway, I've got a question here that's come in from the Patreon crowd. And it's about experimenting with new economic models. So the world that we're moving into is facing population collapse among people who are under age 55, hitting places like China, Japan, Korea, and Germany and Italy first, and then moving on from there to other places. So the question is, how about some models that we generally look down? upon because they're, you know, gauche. Like slavery, specifically, could China replicate something like the United Arab Emirates has done, where the population is basically sustained

by a huge imported workforce that does all the serious work? Could you do something like that while the Chinese age into mass retirement? Two problems with that strategy. Number one, they're already doing it to a degree. Keep in mind that while 90% of the population of China is Han Chinese. There are a number of minorities that haven't been completely genocided into non-existence. And one of them, the Uyghurs of Western China and the Zhijang region, are already existing in a degree of slavery. They station Chinese communist loyalists within the homes of people to make sure that people don't have kids. And anyone who shows any sort of religious inclination like wearing headgear, for example, or maybe saying a prayer in private,

is sent off to a re-education camp, which is based. basically a work camp. And so almost everyone who has installed a solar panel in the last four years is benefiting from that system on a global basis because the silicon is processed and turned into solar voltaics in Jijang. And that really hasn't moved the needle very much. Now, of course, there are only so many Uyghurs versus, you know, Billion Hahn. Which brings to the second problem is scale. When you're in the United Arab Emirates and you only have a single digit number of million of Arabs that need to be supported with imported workforce. That's one thing, especially when you're drawing people from, say, Palestine or Pakistan or India. But there are a lot more

Han. And so you would need to import bare minimum, geez, at least 100 million people in order to make a system like that work. And the scale of that just is not possible. And if you look at the countries that border China, there's no easy source. Russian Siberia is largely unpopular. Everything east of the Ural's is under 15 million people. Kazakhstan has more people than that, but most of them aren't in the border region. Most of them are further north. You got Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Again, the eastern reaches are completely unhabitable.

And if you go south, you're hitting Vietnam. And if the Vietnamese hate Chinese more than anyone else, Myanmar is jungle and mountain. And most of their people are, again, on the other side of the mountains. And, of course, India is on the other side of the Himalayas, and that is everyone. So you'd be having to bring in literally tens of millions of people from at least a couple thousand miles away. So the feasibility of that is not great. But keep questions like this coming because we're going to have to figure out something.

As the world depopulates, the relationships among supply and demand and labor and capital are all breaking down. And the models that we have now, whether it's fascism or socialism or communism or capitalism, simply aren't going to work much longer. for a lot of countries. And the sooner we come up with some other ideas, the better.