Many books have been published on the Chinese miracle over the years. It is an abundant literature on a country which has truly finally awakened. We know nothing about this country, absolutely nothing, and it has changed almost in our total indifference. Today is the backlash for Westerners. To better understand this phenomenon, there is a recently released work that you absolutely must read urgently: China at full speed (Arpa editions). This remarkable book by Dan Wang finally allows us to better understand what is perhaps happening to us. Its subtitle says almost everything: China’s quest to shape the future. Not just his, but, increasingly, ours too. And we have clearly missed out because it may already be too late.
While we are obsessed with the United States to whom we feel closest, we become aware in the light of the ongoing wars of our total dependence and our virtual absence of sovereignty. Being dependent on Washington was perhaps not ideal for some, but what about the day when we will be entirely dependent on Beijing? Wang’s central idea is very strong and echoes what we are currently experiencing on the old continent: in a few decades, China has become an “engineering state”. Faced with it, he describes the United States rather as a “society of lawyers”. And the formula can be clearly extended to Europe, which has become a society of standards, procedures, regulations and precautions. We Westerners in general have lost our way by becoming a veritable, totally deindustrialized administrative fortress. We produce more constraints than freedoms!
While we debate, China is building furiously
Because while we debate what should be built, asking ourselves whether we really have the means and capabilities, China is building like crazy; while we regulate the technologies of tomorrow, China does not ask questions, invests massively and produces them. When we think that Beijing already has the industrial apparatus capable of transforming an innovation into mass production in less than a few years. She was already known for that. This is probably where part of the power of the 21st century is at stake: China was the world’s workshop, now it is the future global engineering office. It has gone from mediocre quantity to excellent quality ready to compete with the highest international standards (which until now were mainly Western). How, despite everything we know about the regime, has China managed to rise so high while we have the feeling of starting an endless decline in the West? Because in China, there is a now intangible reality that Europeans sometimes prefer to avoid facing: China knows how to make, build and produce.
She knows how to build infrastructure, trains, ports, power stations, factories and cities. Its high-speed rail network now exceeds 30,000 miles, and between 2011 and 2013 alone it consumed more cement than the United States did in the entire 20th century. Same revolution in energy: China represents a considerable part of the world’s new solar and wind capacity and it has exceeded its own objectives several years in advance. More than half of the new industrial robots installed worldwide are now in China, while Beijing dominates solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles and many industrial chains essential to tomorrow’s technologies. And even in artificial intelligence, where American domination still seemed considerable until recently, Chinese players are progressing at lightning speed. Inventing technology is important, but who today has the greatest global capacity to then produce it on a large scale? China of course. This is what the engineering state means: not only inventing but actually building.
The price of power
In his book, Dan Wang does not play the fool and yet does not naively praise the Chinese model. This Canadian who writes from the United States seeks more to explain than to condemn. The “engineering state” has its dark side: China is an authoritarian and surveillance society. The technologies that make it possible to organize an economy, infrastructure and cities also make it possible to control information, public space and the population. The author is therefore fully aware that the effectiveness of the engineering state can never really be separated from the nature of the Chinese regime. But the result is there: in a few decades, hundreds of millions of Chinese have seen their material living conditions improve, a huge middle class has emerged, consumption has developed and infrastructure has transformed the territory. China has thus gone from the status of a low-cost workshop to that of a leading industrial and technological power (if not already the first).
For this, a form of implicit political contract has been established over the years: strongly limited political freedoms, but, in return, the promise of growth, consumption, stability, social advancement and the return of Chinese power. We should neither idealize this compromise nor consider that all Chinese adhere to it. But it explains part of the country’s trajectory. And above all, it brings us brutally back to our own situation: in Europe we have democracy, the rule of law and public freedoms, and this is a wealth which there is obviously no question of giving up. But have we retained the power and above all the sovereignty to protect them? Unfortunately, we know the answer.
We did exactly the opposite of Beijing
Because for several decades, we have deindustrialized our economies, delocalized part of our value chains and considered that services, finance and design would suffice while others manufactured at the ends of the world. However, today we are discovering the geopolitical price of this illusion: China is now inventing what will become a product coveted by the whole world. We want electric cars but we depend largely on Asia for batteries. The same goes for solar and artificial intelligence, but American and Chinese companies occupy most of the ground; and we talk about digital sovereignty while massively using foreign technologies because we cannot do otherwise. And China, the icing on the cake, has extraordinary reserves of critical minerals which are precisely essential to the industry of tomorrow.
And behind technology comes education. The latest PISA results available in France showed a historic fall in mathematics and a decline in reading comprehension. How can we now catch up? Especially since China is not seeking to purely and simply replace the United States at the head of the world, it is seeking to take the place of all Westerners. And now we’re serving it all on a silver platter. In radically different contexts, all these States which challenge our global leadership have understood that scientific, technical and industrial mastery constitutes a multiplier of sovereignty. Producing its infrastructure, its technologies, its drones, its missiles, its robots or its networks allows it to depend less on others and therefore to increase its strategic autonomy.
When we see China, Russia, and Iran resisting the outdated proponents of the old world, how can we still think the opposite? As Dan Wang points out, China has immense vulnerabilities: demographic aging, debt, real estate crisis, insufficient domestic consumption, industrial overcapacity and political authoritarianism. There is therefore no guarantee that it will dominate the 21st century, especially since the United States, India and other powers also intend to shape it in their own way. But Beijing has something essential: a bulldozing strategy and the industrial, scientific and financial capabilities to smooth the way for it.
*Sébastien Boussois is a doctor in political science, media consultant, researcher in international relations associated with the CNAM Paris (Defense Security Team) and the Geostrategic Observatory of Geneva (Switzerland) and director of the European Geopolitical Institute (IGE).
