Yes i heard the opinion on the Japanese economic situation that it's hopeless because you can't fix something that ain't broken. Japanese have a problem with demography, not economy, their labor force is shrinking and people are getting older which explains their GDP being stuck, no other problem to speak of than that.

And here China will also find itself in the similar situation soon due to their one-child policy for the last 40 years. And it will be even worse than Japan's. Fortunately U.S. demographics is healthy - it's nice to have a conservative and religious society :)

With the risk of picking on details (sorry if it sounds that way!): From what my understanding (and also what I've heard is the story from Chinese people and gov) is that the situation of China regarding demographics is the way it is because Mao promoted population growth without end, mainly because a larger workforce would be able to outperform in output (which we've actually seen now is true). The downside with that policy was that there were no thought taken to when it would end, and the government/leaders that came after saw that a growing population would be impossible to feed (it was a big problem already for Mao) and it would eventually cause a sort of population bubble. Thus, they enforced the one-child policy to stop this. The current Chinese government seems to be quite aware of the demographics problems. According to official statistics (based on from what I've heard from a Chinese person), they estimate China will grow from the current 1.3 billion population up to 1.6 before it stagnates and possibly decreases. Considering the problems of a decreasing population and skewed demographics, they have started to loosen up the one-child policy however so there seems to be thinking within the top of China that they need to make a slow transition back to a more healthy size of the population.

By the way, this seems also to be the case in general with the top leaders in China. As been previously stated, China is probably way behind on the prerequisites to be able to run a working democracy (compare for example many of the countries where democracy have been quickly forced upon a country such as many of the countries where the US have been engaged in various conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan as well as countries in Central America). The positive sign from the leaders in China is their current and (as it looks anyway) real fight against corruption, which is a huge problem in any democracy (it seems anyhow). Of course, education is another problem but it seems like maybe there's not so much that can be done right now that let it take the time it takes to develop (since old people in general are not targeted for the educational system).

This, in combo with my comment where I mention Hans Rosling's interesting statistics, makes me quite positive about the future of China. Hopefully it lands rather than crashes and perhaps it is healthier to the country to avoid a crash and slowly manage the much needed creative destruction rather than face the consequences of a crash. A crash may for example cause a lot of social unrest, which probably will become a larger problem for China as their growth slows. Hopefully, they'll plateau into a healthy developed country, similar to what (in my opinion) it seems like Japan did. Although we don't here much about it, China is a much bigger countries with many more different groups of people than Japan (as far as my knowledge goes anyhow) and I think social unrest has much bigger potential as a serious issue to China's well-being (and thus probably the world's well-being since we do so much trading with China).

China has a long way to go and lots of problems such as corruption, educational level of the average man, transparency, human rights, and so forth. I hope for the best! :) My 5 cents anyway!