Behold the majesty of the 'Chinese Dream,' a phrase so vacuous it makes a Hallmark card look like a Nietzschean treatise. We were told this would be the century of the dragon, a period of geopolitical dominance that would see the decadent West groveling at the feet of the Forbidden City. Instead, we find ourselves squinting at a roadmap where the destination isn’t global hegemony, but the economic output of Aruba. Yes, Aruba. A Caribbean rock known primarily for its blonde beaches, offshore banking, and tourists whose primary contribution to civilization is the invention of the neon-colored sunburn.

Xi Jinping, a man who carries the weight of a billion souls with the grim stoicism of a librarian who knows where all the forbidden books are buried, has set his sights on 2035. The goal? To reach the status of a 'moderately developed' country. In the sterile language of the World Bank, this means hitting a GDP per capita that rivals the giants of the middle tier. It turns out the dragon isn't breathing fire; it’s checking the exchange rate for a timeshare in Oranjestad. It is a staggering admission of reality that the global commentariat is too polite to mock, but I am not polite, and reality is the only thing worth mocking.

To reach this 'Aruban' height, China must navigate a demographic terrain that looks less like a mountain and more like a vertical drop into a concrete abyss. The workforce is shrinking, the birth rate is in a terminal coma, and the youth are 'lying flat'—a protest movement that involves doing as little as humanly possible, which is, ironically, the most honest reaction to the modern world I’ve seen in years. While the American Right shrieks about the 'China Threat' to justify another trillion dollars in military spending for boats that won’t float, and the American Left wonders if they can import China’s high-speed rail without the associated authoritarianism, the actual country is desperately trying to figure out how to pay for the pensions of four hundred million elderly citizens with a tax base that is currently more interested in video games than building the future.

The math of the 2035 goal is, to use a technical term, hilarious. To match the living standards of a place like Aruba or Greece, China needs to maintain growth rates that the laws of economic gravity simply don’t allow for a maturing superpower. You cannot build your way out of a demographic collapse by constructing another hundred thousand empty apartment blocks in cities no one wants to live in. It’s like trying to cure a heart attack by buying a faster treadmill. Yet, the CCP clings to these targets because, without the promise of 'Greatness,' all they have left is a surveillance state that tracks your facial expressions while you realize your life savings were tied up in a Ponzi scheme disguised as real estate.

Meanwhile, the West continues its performative panic. The hawks in Washington treat every CCP white paper as a blueprint for world conquest, failing to see that the blueprints are mostly just frantic sketches of a man trying to plug a hundred leaks with ten fingers. They fear the rise of a new empire, oblivious to the fact that the empire is mostly concerned with avoiding the 'Middle Income Trap'—a fate where you get just wealthy enough to be bored but not wealthy enough to afford the therapy required to deal with that boredom. This isn't a clash of civilizations; it's two elderly men arguing over who gets to sit in the comfortable chair before the nursing home closes.

There is a profound irony in China’s aspiration to become Aruba. Aruba is a protectorate of the Netherlands, a vestige of a colonial past that China spent the last century claiming to transcend. Now, the pinnacle of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Xi-Jinping-Thought is to achieve the same economic density as a vacation spot for Dutch retirees. It is the ultimate synthesis of historical struggle: after a hundred years of revolution, blood, and iron, the end goal is to be 'moderately developed.' It is the geopolitical equivalent of a 'Live, Laugh, Love' sign hung over the ruins of a steel mill.

We are witnessing the slow-motion collision of ideology and biology. Xi wants a rejuvenated nation, but you can’t rejuvenate a nation that has collectively decided that the future is too expensive to participate in. The West wants a rival to fear, because without a rival, we might have to look at our own decaying infrastructure and intellectual bankruptcy. So, we all agree to pretend that the race to 2035 is a titanic struggle for the soul of the planet, rather than a desperate attempt by a massive bureaucracy to ensure they don't end up poorer than a small island where the most significant industry is selling shells to people from New Jersey. In the end, humanity remains a species of deluded optimists, rearranging deck chairs on a ship made of debt and hubris.