India, Feb. 7 -- In times of chaos, quiet developments that should provoke reflection are easily missed. So it is with the news that China's birth rate has fallen to its lowest level since 1949. Over the past decade, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has sought to infuse the Chinese people with a grand sense of collective purpose. But the continual decline in China's birth rate indicates that even its powerful leadership is struggling to address the great anxiety of the modern age - individualism. Commentary on China is usually either dismissive or alarmist. These extremes can be seen in reaction to Xi's vision for China (formally known as Xi Jinping Thought), which is often described in the West as either vainglorious or totalitarian. It is instead better understood as an effort to elaborate a social contract - to explain to the Chinese people what makes their political system legitimate. To wit, it lays out a common objective and the means to achieve it: The shared purpose of the Chinese people is the "grand rejuvenation" of their nation under the decisive leadership of the CPC. Critics focus on these aspects of Xi's vision, which they decry as fostering nationalism and dictatorship, and they console themselves with the futile hope that the Chinese people will decline to pursue greatness or that the CPC will collapse. This approach misses what is distinctive in Xi's vision - and the true challenge it confronts. Notably, Xi's vision rests on a distinctive conception of the good life - the "Chinese" dream - that de-emphasises individual desires and ennobles social virtues. A number of policies that have befuddled observers follow from this. The CPC, whose reputation had been tarnished by pervasive corruption and nepotism, has been subject to purges, and economic and cultural elites whose lifestyles aroused envy have had their wings clipped too. The family unit has been a particular concern, with concerted efforts being made to encourage childbearing and filial piety. An array of policies has been enacted to this end, ranging from changes in schooling systems and housing markets to financial incentives and even increased taxation on birth control. What explains this censoriousness - this bonfire of the vanities with Chinese characteristics? The theory behind it can be discerned in a profound work, America Against America, written in 1991 by Wang Huning, the CPC politburo member often described as China's "chief ideologue". Like famous figures before him - from Alexis de Tocqueville and James Bryce through to Fukuzawa Yukichi and Liang Qichao - Huning sought to decipher "the American phenomenon". "What is the force that has created such a dazzling material civilisation?", he asks. His answer is that America developed remarkable "political and social management processes" that allowed it to do what Europe and Asia had not - namely, to revere "tradition", which preserved the "core values" of a society, and yet welcome "innovation", which was necessary for material progress. Americans secured this extraordinary combination, Huning observes, by being conservative in the public sphere but liberal in the private sphere. They expected, he memorably writes, every president to swear on the Bible, but also gave "reputation and respect" to successful individuals that embodied "the new and different". This bifurcation, which had taken shape over generations, explained why America had social stability as well as technological prowess: It had learnt to discourage and encourage "individualism" appropriately. This analysis, however, did not lead Huning to recommend the American model to his Chinese audience. This is because, as the title of his work indicates, he discerned an "inherent contradiction" in the American experiment. Though America proclaimed both freedom and equality as its "core values", these principles pushed in opposite directions, producing paradox upon paradox. There was freedom, but it was undone by drugs, crime, and hedonism; there was equality, but "powerful groups" and "private consortia" controlled decision-making. Yet, to advocate for the better realisation of either freedom or equality elicited a howl from the other side, which meant that there was an "unstoppable undercurrent of crisis" in American life. The ultimate consequence was that every individual was left to decide what values mattered, leading to quiet relativism or civil strife depending on the seriousness of the issue. For this reason, while "there are pros and cons to collectivism for the development of a society", Huning concluded, "it is clear that collectivism unites more than individualism". Nor should the Chinese fear that they would not be able to develop economically unless they adopted American values, Huning added, because East Asia's rapid rise showed that State-led development, which favours coordination, could generate technological advances as impressive as those generated by American-style individualism. If we take America Against America to be the kernel of Xi's vision, we can see more clearly the challenge it confronts: China's "great rejuvenation" demands patriotic "self-forgetfulness" from all sections of society. The parent must toil for the child; the scientist for the nation; the entrepreneur for society; the living for those to come. It is a grave mistake to denigrate this thoughtful effort to address the question of how a large and complex society - a fifth of humanity - can flourish under conditions of modernity. But it is not beyond question. The fundamental weakness of collectivism, as Aristotle told us long ago in The Politics, is that the individual must be content to say that the common is "mine" (in the sense that they share in it) but also "not mine" (in the sense that it is not theirs alone). This is very difficult to accomplish, Aristotle warns, because experience teaches that "everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest". So, the question before contemporary China is whether "self-forgetfulness" can truly be fostered in our age. The blunt answer offered by plummeting birth rates across East Asia is - no. These societies have achieved prosperity, but in doing so they have created individuals whom they cannot quite control, least of all in their most intimate moments. This leaves China facing a dire choice. It cannot rely on immigration, as this would, Huning notes, introduce "groups" whose "different cultures" would make it difficult to sustain the "core values" of the society they enter. Nor does the CPC have that great spur to self-sacrifice - religion - at its disposal. Perhaps then, in the end, China will have to rely on compulsion, penalizing those who do not have children as unpatriotic. But, in that case, will the social contract on offer still be described by its citizens as "the Chinese Dream"?...