This week on International Horizons, Jack Goldstone, Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Chair Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and a Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center, discusses the role of age and demographics of social movements in the twenty-first century. Goldstone speculates about the possibilities of regime change in China associated with the role of the youth and their discontent with governments that are losing performance legitimacy, and the possibilities for a slight rise in authoritarianism in India as the growth of the working-age population slows. Goldstone also suggests why Africa will be the great resource of youth for the entire world for the next 20 years, despite the fact that the talent of young Africans is being held back by government corruption and ineffectiveness.

Transcript: 

John Torpey  00:08

Revolutions and violent conflicts seem to be pervasive features of the modern world. What causes these upheavals? What do they achieve? How does demography influence when and where they take place? And what do the recent projections about China’s stagnating and aging population foretell about the future of great power politics?  

John Torpey  00:30

Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  

John Torpey  00:49

Today we are joined by Jack Goldstone, who is Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Chair Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and a Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center. He is the author of Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, awarded the 1993 Distinguished Scholarly Research Award of the American Sociological Association and a number of books about politics, demography, social movements, democratization, and long-term social change. He has appeared on NPR, CNN, Al-Jazeera, Fox News, and written for Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Al-Hayat and the International Herald Tribune. Thanks for being with us today, Jack Goldstone.

Jack Goldstone  01:40

Glad to be here!

John Torpey  01:41

Great to have you. So as I indicated, in my introduction, much of your work has addressed the causes of revolutions; you develop a complex, multi dimensional approach, but population trends have always played a key role in your work. And we’re going to talk about that a lot today. So what should we know about the causes and consequences of revolutions?

Jack Goldstone  02:03

Well, they are complicated. There’s no one model that accounts for all cases; revolutions differ. In fact, today, we see more of the kind of urban and nonviolent variety of revolutions, so-called color revolutions.

Jack Goldstone  02:20

Fifty years ago, we thought of revolutions as more commonly rural and waged by guerilla war. And before that, we thought revolutions were only staged against traditional monarchies and empires. We had this simple modernization model that traditional regimes were the kind of regimes that were vulnerable. Of course, that all got thrown out in the Arab Spring, when it was the modernizing dictators, who all faced revolutions, while the monarchies in Morocco and Saudi Arabia went on.

Jack Goldstone  02:57

So I think the main thing to realize about revolutions is [that] there’s not one type. And that they can occur anywhere, that a government starts to lose the loyalty of its core supporters. That’s not the population at large; you can do without that. But the core supporters of a government are the bureaucratic economic and military elites. And whenever you have a government that is seen as so corrupt, or incompetent or misguided, or just a threat to the well-being of those elites, [there is] a revolution in development.

John Torpey  03:36

So you’ve mentioned the color revolutions in the Arab Spring, of course, but they don’t seem to have had the same kind of consequences as the revolutions that we kind of classically think about [such as] the French, the Russian, the Chinese, that really transformed the nature of not just the political system, but of the economic system as well. Is that perception on my part correct? Is the old kind of revolution that overturns sort of everything, is that sort of out of fashion? Is that a misperception? And if so, why is that the case?

Jack Goldstone  04:16

It’s a good question. It’s certainly true that the kind of big social revolution that seemed to overturn everything has gone out of fashion. That’s partly because the nature of the world has changed. But let me go back a bit. Those big social revolutions took place primarily in countries that were young and [had] fast growing populations and the youth were drawn to radical ideas. They were societies that had a privileged elite that had been dominant for a long time. They were either aristocrats or civil servants with idle and legal privileges. And they were a target.

Jack Goldstone  04:32

So if you wanted to change things, it wasn’t enough to just change the person in charge, you want to get rid of the privileges that kept a group in power. And that was usually done by a combination of peasant uprisings and urban upheavals that made it look like: “wow, everything is exploding.”

Jack Goldstone  05:25

But today, most societies are predominantly urban; you don’t have that huge peasant revolution in the countryside. The places that still have large rural revolutions are places in the Middle East like Yemen or in Africa. And those places do still have the kind of large scale civil war type upheavals. If you look at what’s happened in Yemen: in the Arab Spring, you had a whole country thrown into a civil war, you had a rural religious movement from the North taking over the country. So these things do still happen.

Jack Goldstone  06:07

But I think it’s important to realize that although our attention was caught by the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Communist Revolution, a lot of other things happen, right? We got democracy in Europe primarily through the 19th century revolution.

Jack Goldstone  06:24

So revolutions of 1830, in 1848 they weren’t entirely successful, but they weakened the monarchies and paved the way for democratic reforms. China had a kind of urban revolution in 1911 that overthrew the Empire, it didn’t finish the job. And that’s why the Communist Revolution occurred.

Jack Goldstone  06:45

The revolutions we’re seeing today, like the overthrow of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, like the color revolutions in Ukraine, Philippines, they’re not as sweeping and total as the great social revolutions. But those great social revolutions are pretty rare. That’s kind of you’re looking at a special subset of all the cases that people have risen up against their governments.

Jack Goldstone  07:15

And most revolutions are less than ideal in what they deliver. So most of the color revolutions did change the government, they did produce some move toward greater democracy. But they often produced democracies that were flawed: you still have a lot of corruption, you still had a lot of infighting among the elites. The process of having elections was something that required correctness.

Jack Goldstone  07:42

So it took a while for revolutions in places like Ukraine and Indonesia, even still Hungary and Poland, to kind of make that long leap from authoritarian party type governments to liberal democracies. That’s a process that’s still unfolding. But we still see the revolutions going on.

Jack Goldstone  08:06

Now, let me leave you with one special thought. What we’re seeing in countries that were young, as I said, is that there are more radical revolutions. So when you have something crazy, like ISIS sweeping through the Middle East, that’s usually led by radicalized young people. But when you have more peaceful — the kind of “urban occupy a square,” demand the government to change until it leaves, those types of large scale — urban non-violent revolutions are what you usually see in more mature societies. Places where the median age is in the mid 30s rather than under 25.

Jack Goldstone  08:47

And in fact, most countries that have a more mature population and a more complex economy have moved toward democracy. We saw this in Korea, in Indonesia, in Eastern Europe. And there are only a handful of countries that are kind of defying this trend. So China, Russia, Belarus, Cuba, Thailand, in a sense, they’re kind of demographically overdue to cast off their dictatorship, and have some kind of nonviolent, democratizing revolution. So I think if we look around the world, we’re still seeing a lot of revolutions. And I think we’ll see more, I think we’ll see some kind of popular movements to change the government in Russia and China within the next 10 to 15 years.

John Torpey  09:39

Interesting. You’ve talked about youth [and] the age structure of the populations. And that’s always been a key feature of your work. And some of the more recent stuff that you’ve written has to do with the role of youth bulges in societies. And as Africa gets larger and larger in terms of population size, and younger and younger at the same time, that seems like it could be a real problem area. So I wonder if you could talk about what’s the role of youth and the age structure of the population in generating these kinds of upheavals.

Jack Goldstone  10:17

I think it’s important to think about youth, not as kind of idealized, frozen in time rebellious young people. It’s important to see them in the context of their life course. So youth, work children, they become young adults, and they have their eyes on the future. If it’s the case that you have a fast growing population in a country whose economy is growing, and can absorb a good increase in the labor force, and the young people are effectively educated and socialized, so they can look forward to: “yes, at this stage in life, I’m supposed to be in school, and then I’m supposed to get a job, and then I’m supposed to get married, and then I’m supposed to build a career.” And if they can do all of those things, then having a good sized youth cohort can be positive for the economy and the government. It is the way China flourished from the 1980s onwards. And in the 1970s, the youth were encouraged to go on a rampage. That was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Mao said, “we need to radicalize society.” But a few years later, under Deng Xiaoping, the same youth were told: “hey, we want you to prosper, we want you to think about how to get rich, how to get jobs.” And the economy invited foreign investment, rewarded local governments for economic growth, and the youth stuck to the role of factory work and becoming the workshop of the world. And that worked very well for China, India is now trying to do the same thing with its youth population. 

Jack Goldstone  11:32

Youth becomes revolutionary and radical when as it moves from childhood to youth to young adulthood, it can’t latch on to those kinds of stages that make sense. So if you say: “okay, I’m supposed to go to school” and you go to school, and you get an education. And then as you get into your late teens or early 20s, you realize: “hey, there are no jobs for me.” The economy here is suffering from corruption or obstruction. And the jobs that I was promised, or expected, I can’t find. And then you get youth unemployment in the 20 to 25% range, and then people start looking for ways to change society so that it will work for them.

Jack Goldstone  12:40

And then when you have a large group of radical youth; they can draw in other groups after them, they become a disruptive factor. Now, that’s not enough for a revolution; it’s also necessary for the government to have some weaknesses, maybe an economic setback, inflation, financial crisis, because the youth have to bring society along with them. But once they do, they’re often the kind of a fuse that lights the explosion that makes revolutions happen.

John Torpey  13:09

Right. So you’ve now mentioned a couple of countries that I’d like to talk about in somewhat greater detail. And of course, the first is China. And my question revolves around the recent attention that’s been given to findings that the population is aging rather dramatically. And you’ve written very recently, I think in Noema, about what this is going to foretell for Chinese society. A society that not very long ago, we all thought it was overtaking us — we didn’t necessarily all think that — but many people thought that China was this juggernaut in a way that had massive and fast economic growth, and seem to be challenging us on the economic front, and to some degree on the military front.

John Torpey  14:03

But these reports about the age structure and the growing dependency ratio in the population suggests a rather different future. So I wonder if you could talk about some of the things you were writing about in this Noema piece.

Jack Goldstone  14:18

John, you and I are old enough to remember the early 1980s, when everyone said Japan is poised to take over world leadership from the United States. “Japan is number one,” that was the slogan. And of course, China, especially Chinese Nationalists, like to think that the West is failing, and that China is on the path to becoming the number one nation in the world. But they’re mistaken just as the Japanese were.

Jack Goldstone  14:44

When I talked about my theory of demographic structural change, we talked about how having too many young people that the system cannot absorb can create stress that leads to upheaval. And it’s really not about youth per se, it’s more about the mismatch. That is social institutions, political, economic, social mobility, are designed to process a certain volume of population that kind of enters the school system, enters the labor market, enters retirement. And when those institutions are working, that process is smooth. But when there’s a change in the population, so that the institutions no longer can handle what’s coming through, that’s disrupted. 

Jack Goldstone  14:44

And China is now facing [this] from the opposite direction; they handled their population surge to become the workshop of the world. But they also adopted policies that said: “hey, we don’t want population growth to get out of hand, we need to slow it down.” And they succeeded extremely well. So much so that population growth now has gone into reverse. And that’s another form of severe disruption. But I don’t think they’re equipped to handle [this], because their population decline is not coming along slow and gradual, [it] is really almost falling off a cliff. That’s partly because of the decline in birth. But even more the decline in marriages.

Jack Goldstone  16:09

Chinese women, like Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, all across Southeast Asia, are basically told: “you’re not going to have a career unless you devote all of your efforts to work.” Just like the men who are expected to work long hours and devote themselves to the company. But if you have children, in order for the children to succeed in a very competitive exam focused environment, mothers are expected to nurture their children through the competitive school exam tutoring activities process.

Jack Goldstone  16:41

So women are basically told: “hey, you can either be a full time corporate samurai like the men, or you’re going to be a full time mother nurturing your kids; it’s impossible to do both.” And so the marriage rate has fallen by 50% in the last 13 years. Birth rates are setting lows that haven’t been seen since the 1970s. And all of this means that the labor force, particularly the young people coming into the labor force, are going to dry up in the next 20 years. And I think that’s going to really put the brakes on China’s economy. And it’s going to really hit the housing sector hard because the demand for housing depends on households’ forming, and those are just not happening now in China. And so many people in China have put their wealth into housing. It’s going to be just like the Japanese property bubble of the 1980s, which really knocked Japan off the growth trajectory for decades.

Jack Goldstone  17:42

So I think China’s going to face a crunch. But unlike Japan, which had developed into a democracy at that point, and dealt with the economic reversal by shuttling prime ministers and parties, there is no one to blame for the coming economic slowdown, except Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. And I think they are going to be paying a price in terms of rejection of their program. We saw some of that with the protests against COVID policy. The Chinese population is very capable at this point of organizing and protesting policies that they see as harmful. And I think they’re not being prepared for what’s going to be a sharp drop in real estate values, sharp drop and growth. You already have some young Chinese [using the] hashtag “we are the last generation.” They see problems ahead. They worry about what’s going to happen. And I think China is going to have to deal with a lot of internal turmoil. They’re not going to be able to take over the world.

John Torpey  18:40

Right. So there’s another dimension of this that may be a Daniel Bell “cultural contradictions of capitalism” kind of moment, and that is this movement, I think it’s called the laying down movement, you know?

Jack Goldstone  18:53

Lying flat 

John Torpey  18:54

Lying flat. Exactly. So is that a substantial thing? Or is that just something that caught a journalist’s eye. Are people saying: “we don’t want to work so hard.” A lot of people [are] saying, “we don’t want to work so hard. We don’t care about making all the money,” you know, the kinds of things that people said in the 1960s and after.

Jack Goldstone  19:13

It’s a problem, because it’s not just for a few kids in China. Japan has the same phenomenon: the “hikikomori” kids who stay home. They don’t see a future for themselves in the world. So they stay in their parents’ basement and play video games. There’s something similar now happening in China where a generation of young people with their college graduates can’t find jobs because China doesn’t have enough white collar professional jobs. It’s got rich as a low wage manufacturing economy. And that’s where it got stuck; the consumer economy is still too small, a portion of China’s economy is government directed investment.

Jack Goldstone  19:53

So college graduates are frustrated; they can’t find jobs they think suit them. People who didn’t get into college are frustrated by the exam system that they feel each of them pushed to the sidelines. People who migrated from the countryside and run into the problems of this urban permit, the “Hukou” system, feel like they’re second class citizens.

Jack Goldstone  20:15

So there are a lot of young people in China, not all of them by any means, but once who feel that the system has turned against them. And rather than devoting their energy to supporting this system and building it and doing what the Communist Party wants them to do, they’re kind of going on strike. They say: “well, if I have no hope of getting a promotion, because I didn’t get a degree from the right college, I’m just going to do the minimum and get my salary.” Or if “I’ve got to work on the sidelines, because I can’t get a full migration permit for the city where I have to live to find work. I’m just going to do my wage work, and I’m not going to think about ways to build a company or work for the future.” 

Jack Goldstone  20:55

So you have a lot of people saying: “if society is closing doors to me, I’m not going to keep banging on those doors, I’m going to sit on the bench and enjoy my life: I can watch Tik Tok, I can do video games, I can go for walks in the park. And until society takes me more seriously, I’m not gonna do what they expect.” So it’s a big phenomenon.

John Torpey  21:15

That’s interesting. So as these developments are taking place in East Asia, which all seem to point in rather problematic directions. India seems perhaps to be vying now for certainly the largest country in population terms. The economy’s doing pretty well in India. But there are lots of questions about the leadership and what kind of direction Narendra Modi is taking in India, this sort of Hindu nationalist orientation. So I wonder if you could talk about what’s the foundation of this Hindu nationalist movement? What’s his sort of social base? And, where do you see things going for India in the near future?

Jack Goldstone  21:59

Well, Modi has turned India’s economy around. And he deserves credit for that. At the same time, he is creating a more Hindu nationalist, exclusive idea of what India is as a country. And he’s encouraging a more authoritarian style of government, a lot of sweeping executive power. Now, that’s not necessarily bad for India’s economy. But people certainly worry about whether India will become a country like Hungary, which kind of steps away from democracy in order to get more social stability. And in the short run, India’s economy is probably going to do very well: there’s still a lot of potential for its young population to improve education and output. They have their own billionaires building up iron, steel, pharmaceuticals, [and] international trade. So they have the resources at the top.

Jack Goldstone  21:59

Now what they lack is a long term population growth trajectory; people look at India and say: “oh, it’s gonna become the largest country in the world.” That’s true. But a lot of that growth is due to greater life expectancy among people who are now in their 40s and 50s, who now will probably live for 20-30 years. And that didn’t happen in India in the previous generation. So the growth of young workers is already slowing down. India’s fertility rate is already down to two children per woman. So in another 20 years or so, the fast growth of India’s workforce is going to end. And then they’ll start to run into the same kind of problems that China is entering now.

Jack Goldstone  23:42

But for the next 20 years, India is going to grow. It may be a little bit more authoritarian. But India also has a pretty strong rooted democratic experience. So I don’t think Modi is going to somehow turn the whole country into a dictatorship, that’s really not in the Indian political spirit of the last over seventy years. 

Jack Goldstone  24:06

So I think what we’ll see is India becoming a stronger actor on the world stage, a bigger force in the international economy. But remember, even today, India’s GDP is only about a fifth the size of China. So even if India’s GDP doubles over the next 20 years, which would be strong growth, it’s not going to replace China in the world economy. They don’t take India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, all those countries have to grow rapidly in order to create a kind of new growth pole in South Asia. 

John Torpey  24:42

Right. Maybe one last question, since we’re sort of running out of time. I mentioned Africa in my question, which was really about youth bulges. But the reality is that Africa is growing in population terms pretty dramatically and there are a lot of mouths to feed. And it’s not clear that Africa is having the same — it’s a mixed picture —  kind of economic experience that India is having (however low the base in the Indian case). So I wonder what you foresee for Africa and for all those Africans who are going to be on the planet in the coming years. 

Jack Goldstone  25:24

This is a situation where I really think the future is up to us. It’s not given by the raw demographic data. Africa will be the great resource of youth for the entire world in the next 20 years, because the youth population is stagnant now already in India, Vietnam. It is shrinking in China and shrinking in Europe. Something like two thirds of all the children in the world being born now are born in Africa and South Asia. And by mid century, it’ll be more than half of all kids in Africa. Now, that’s a great opportunity.

 Jack Goldstone  26:01

You have an enormous population of young people who want to be productive, who are really anxious to learn the latest skills to get work. We see that Nigerians are great entrepreneurs, Ethiopians have built the airlines that fly all over Africa. Kenya is becoming a major exporter. There’s so much talent in Africa. But it has been held back by government corruption, ineffectiveness. And the West has basically played along with that. And we kind of look at Africa, “oh, well, that’s a bad place. It’s a potential problem. Let’s try to wall it off.”

Jack Goldstone  26:36

If we do that, Africa is going to be headed for disasters. But if we look at Africa, and say: “when we wanted copper, cobalt and oil and gas, we went to Africa and developed those resources.” If we now say Africa has enormous numbers of young people who could be the labor force for the world for the future, we don’t want them to migrate to Europe and America, we want them to be productive in place the way China’s population was in the 1980 to 2010 period. If we help Africa, if we look at that as a resource for the global economy, how can we put Africa’s youth into productive work? How can we help them with education? How can we help them with private investment? I think that’s a great opportunity.

Jack Goldstone  27:26

So I believe the notion that the world’s future will depend on Africa having a good future. But which way Africa’s future goes? Are they going to be the next China economic powerhouse of a massive labor force for the world? Are they going to be like the Middle East and kind of one revolution after another violence/conflict? That’s a very open question. I don’t think it’s all determined to be a choice that Africans make, and that their friends around the world make together.

John Torpey  27:56

So you don’t see them as compensating for the declining demographic profile of Europe [and] of Japan. Obviously, these places have to change their outlook for this to happen at all, they have to change their outlooks about immigration. Right. So some of this population growth in Africa would seem to me to be inevitably bound for some kind of migrant migratory trajectory. But on the other hand, as you say, it probably is better to assist them and give them opportunities where they are, not everybody wants to leave where they are.

Jack Goldstone  28:34

Here are the numbers: it’s certainly true that America and Europe and even East Asia will need immigrants to do jobs that we don’t have the young people to do. Some of that’s going to take care of the elderly, some of that [is] simply construction, landscaping. We will need migrants. But the population of Africa is gonna grow from 1 billion to 2 billion by mid century, and maybe two or 3 billion or more in the second half of this century. There’s no way that even 10 or 20% of that population could move safely and acceptably to the west. We’re not looking at a world where two or 300 million migrants can be absorbed. 20 or 30 [million] may be vital, but most of the young people in Africa, if they’re going to be productive, will have to be productive in those countries.

John Torpey  29:26

Great. Got it. Well, that’s a fascinating “tour d’horizon” of what’s going on in the world and where it’s going. But that’s it for today’s episode. I want to thank Jack Goldstone of George Mason University for sharing his insights about revolutions, demography and conflict in the modern world. Look for us on the new books network. And remember to subscribe and rate international horizons on Spotify and Apple podcasts. I want to thank Oswaldo Mena Aguilar for his technical assistance, and to acknowledge Duncan Mackay for sharing his song “International Horizons” as the theme music for the show. This is John Torpey saying thanks for joining us and we look forward to having you with us for the next episode of International Horizons.