By James Palmer
Welcome to the final edition of Foreign Policy’s China Brief for 2025.
Compared with what lies further ahead, next year may be relatively quiet for China. The following year, 2027, marks both the end of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s unprecedented third term and a frequently cited benchmark for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s ability to attack Taiwan.
Though Beijing is keeping a lower profile amid global turbulence, there is plenty of trouble bubbling under the surface. What can we expect from China in the year ahead? Below, we offer our four best bets.
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A Turn on Women’s Rights
A woman is seen under the Chinese flag at Ordos Airport, in China’s northern Inner Mongolia region, on Aug. 14.Pedro Pardo/AFP via Getty Images
China is kicking off the new year with a tax on condoms and other contraceptives, one of several measures aimed at boosting the birthrate. Official demographic data for 2025, expected in mid-January, is likely to be bleak. China’s total fertility rate has fallen to around one child per woman, about half the level needed to keep the population stable.
Reversing such trends is notoriously difficult, as much of East Asia has already learned. More supportive policies, such as stronger financial and legal support for parents, would help. But local government budgets are already strained, and Xi is ideologically hostile to welfare measures.
Instead, demographic anxiety is more likely to fuel a reactionary turn on women’s rights. The Chinese government has repeatedly attacked feminism and arrested feminists, while officials obsess over the perceived decline of traditional masculinity in pop culture.
Most troubling are signs of pressure on reproductive rights. The one-child era showed China’s willingness to violate women’s autonomy, including forced sterilizations. In recent years, there have been signs of renewed state intervention. In 2023, a Chengdu court ruled that abortion without the husband’s consent violated men’s rights, and more recently, one county in Yunnan urged women to report their menstrual cycles to authorities.
These trends intersect with the entrenched sexism of China’s tech and business elite. Some Chinese billionaires are imitating Elon Musk’s hyper-pronatalism, while misogyny is growing both online and offline, fed by resentment among so-called surplus men unable to find wives.
A Rocky Relationship With Japan
As the year begins, China and Japan remain locked in one of their sharpest confrontations since the 2012 Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands crisis. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s repeated suggestion that her country could intervene in a future Taiwan conflict has infuriated China, prompting canceled Japanese performances, naval standoffs, and a trade cooperation freeze.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s reluctance to back Japan may embolden China in the dispute. Even if tensions cool, targeting Tokyo is an easy rallying point for Chinese officials and nationalist influencers. Takaichi is also benefiting politically: Public approval for her government’s stance stands at 61 percent.
With domestic political dividends at stake, Tokyo is likely to test Beijing further and respond less cautiously than in the past.
One flashpoint could be a potential visit by Takaichi to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan’s wartime dead, including convicted war criminals, and houses an ultranationalist museum that downplays Japanese imperial aggression. Takaichi’s late mentor, former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, made such visits both in and out of office.
A Failed Economic Pivot
People shop for food at a supermarket in Zaozhuang, in China’s eastern Shandong province, on April 10.AFP/China OUT via Getty Images
China is still trying to pivot its economy toward domestic consumption—long an elusive goal. A recent article by Xi has elevated this as a government priority, made more urgent by global uncertainty and the prospect of a renewed trade war with the United States.
The effort is likely to falter for a few reasons, chief among them that Chinese households simply aren’t confident enough in the future to spend. The declining birthrate reflects deep anxiety about the future among young adults, while the COVID-19 pandemic shattered trust in government competence and convinced people that they needed to save for future disasters.
Local governments’ troubled finances pose another obstacle. With debt high and revenues weak, officials are leaning on petty revenue extraction, such as police extortion, further discouraging small businesses and fueling protests.
Finally, China’s scientific successes mask the fact that the tech-driven economy works poorly for much of the population, as Scott Kennedy and Scott Rozelle wrote this year. Despite Xi’s genuine interest in the rural poor, the economic and political clout of urban elites continues to distort policy toward the most successful 10 percent, rather than the bottom 50 percent.
An AI Disaster?
Here’s my wild swing for the year: China may see a major, high-profile disaster—on the scale of the Wenzhou train crash or Tianjin explosion—with a root cause being the misuse of artificial intelligence.
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 in early 2025 resulted in a new phase in China’s AI push. The country has been more cautious (and less swayed by tech mogul hype) on AI governance than the United States. But at the ground level, the pattern looks familiar: a rush to deploy technologies without clear limits or understanding, producing waves of failed projects.
So far, the consequences in the United States have mostly been comic or inconvenient. But China’s mix of corner-cutting, routine corruption, weak oversight, and limited technical literacy among local officials raises the risk of something much worse.
One can easily imagine a county government handing a large language model (LLM) responsibility for winter heating requirements, managing critical pharmaceutical supplies, or monitoring infrastructure repairs, for instance.
It’s also likely that AI misuse collides in some form with political paranoia and not just because of LLMs’ track record of delusional spirals. We’ve already seen China use predictive models in service of repression and mass arrests in Xinjiang. Applied more broadly—to monitor online speech or track local government spending—they could generate massive false positives.
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