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China's political stability may be more fragile than thought. The country faces huge domestic challenges -- an aging population lacking any form of social security, wholesale problems in the financial system that dwarf those revealed in the U.S. sub-prime loan mess and the breakdown of its health system. These problems are as big as ever, but China has fewer resources to meet them than we thought.

There is the gross domestic product and then there is accumulated wealth. The accumulated wealth of a nation, especially one like the United States, dwarfs the GDP. If you have a huge population that is dirt poor, you have a whole lot of nothing. And when, as a government, you have destroyed the ability of that population to care for itself in its old age by destroying the traditional means of doing so in exchange for some socialist future promise, you've bitten off a huge chunk of indigestable trouble. Of course, the Chinese government may choose to do to the overpopulation of old people what it did on the infant side and mandate death for seniors with all their property reverting to the State. It would fit in with the utilitarian chic of Communism.