The end is usually slow then suddenly..

China is having a serious financial crisis at the moment. It based it's economy on exports and now a lot of companies are leaving in order to shorten supply chains and aviod the south china sea.

As companies leave it looses access to the intellectual property it based those industries on.

Its population is collapsing due to the one child policy and massive over reporting.

China has a very unstable future.

It wouldn't actually make the statement untrue. It doesn't say 'only/exclusively dying societies...' and it's not really the spirit of the statement either. I think it's meant to be more poetry than a scientific theory.