Is China at risk for political collapse ?

An article at Foreign Policy predicts the "coming collapse of China."  Whether it happens or not, the rationale behind the prediction is interesting:

China, which during its reform era had one of the best demographic profiles of any nation, will soon have one of the worst. The Chinese workforce will level off in about 2013, perhaps 2014, according to both Chinese and foreign demographers, but the effect is already being felt as wages rise, a trend that will eventually make the country's factories uncompetitive. China, strangely enough, is running out of people to move to cities, work in factories, and power its economy. Demography may not be destiny, but it will now create high barriers for growth....

As a result, we will witness either a crash or, more probably, a Japanese-style multi-decade decline. Either way, economic troubles are occurring just as Chinese society is becoming extremely restless. It is not only that protests have spiked upwards -- there were 280,000 "mass incidents" last year according to one count -- but that they are also increasingly violent...

We have already seen the Chinese people act in unison: In June 1989, well before the advent of social media, there were protests in roughly 370 cities across China, without national ringleaders. This phenomenon, which has swept North Africa and the Middle East this year, tells us that the nature of political change around the world is itself changing, destabilizing even the most secure-looking authoritarian governments...

And as for the existence of an opposition, the Soviet Union fell without much of one. In our substantially more volatile age, the Chinese government could dissolve like the autocracies in Tunisia and Egypt.

There's more at the link, and I should think it's unnecessary to point out that social turmoil in China has worldwide economic and geopolitical implications