After decades of accelerated neoliberal globalization, the planet is undergoing a complex transition phase, the outcome of which is still uncertain, during which the Western world and the United States are no longer the only significant players in the field. China, and East Asia more generally, has become the world’s manufacturing and technological heartland over the last 25 years and is vying for global political hegemony, albeit seemingly without an obsession with being “number one.” [1] It is therefore essential to understand the factors that have led to this incredible success.

With China Has Won (Feltrinelli, Milan 2025), Alessandro Aresu – scientific advisor to Limes, essayist, and long-time consultant to various central governments – attempts precisely this. It is a short (144 pages), well-written, and compelling narrative essay that, starting from a deliberately provocative title [2] guides the reader to decipher Chinese strategic thinking and its productive, technological, and geopolitical rise, offering an insider’s perspective on how Beijing views the West. Aresu writes with a dry prose, offering examples and profiles of concrete political and business leaders and citing strategic literature without academicism or weighing down the text. The extensive bibliography in the appendix leaves the reader wanting to delve deeper into the topics covered. Aresu’s essay should be read in conjunction with the much more substantial (528 pages) essay by Pino Arlacchi, La Cina spiegata all’Occidente (Fazi Editore, Rome 2025), which we reviewed a few weeks ago.

Aresu’s essay is based on the thesis that in this historical phase, the ruling classes of the state and of the Chinese Communist Party (a party with approximately 100 million members, selected and evaluated one by one through methods whose selectivity increases as one moves upwards) are intellectually far superior to the political classes of Western countries (notoriously lacking great statesmen for decades), and this largely explains the difference in competitiveness between China and the West over the last 25 years. On the one hand, the communist rulers have collected and perfected the legacy of China’s millenary and sophisticated administrative machine, [3] maintaining political control over a process of economic development that has provided the resources both to lift hundreds of millions of people out of absolute poverty and to invest in the modernization of the country and its transformation into a global manufacturing superpower. While in 1950, China (along with India) was the world’s largest poorest country, with 4.5% of global GDP, the Chinese Communist Party has performed the miracle of transforming it from poverty and Confucian roots to artificial intelligence in just a few decades, combining political “meritocracy” with “engineer rule,” the “development of productive forces,” and “shared prosperity.” On the other hand, however, there has been and remains an inability among American and European elites to understand the historical moment, to adapt to ongoing changes, to read and analyze the transformations underway in the world, and to identify viable solutions to problems that are neither short-term (using protectionism, sanctions, and the most creative financial instruments, but also the most destructive to the system’s stability in the medium to long term) nor the pure and simple reintroduction of political-military strategies of domination (regime change, wars, genocide, racism, imperialism, neocolonialism, and extractivism).

The risk is that, ultimately, the actual outcome of the decisions of the United States and Europe will be to accelerate China’s (and Russia’s) grip, particularly over the countries of the Global South, handing China (and Russia) the tools to accelerate the disintegration of the West. “Never in history has the cultural divide between two adversaries seemed as profound as that between the United States and China in the mid-2020s,” Aresu reflects. “On one side, there’s influencer Laura Loomer, born in 1993, … who gets the head of the National Security Agency fired during the Trump administration; on the other, there’s Wang Huning, celebrating Confucius’s 2,575th birthday. Who will have the favor of the god Wenchang, who protects exams? Who will pass the entrance exam?” (p. 105).

To demonstrate his thesis, Aresu tells the story of Wang Huning (1955), a Shanghai intellectual and politician who began his academic career studying Western political thought and who in 1991 published the book “ America vs. America ” which shaped the way the Chinese ruling class interpreted the “intrinsic contradictions” and opposing forces of its main global adversary, an entity where “affirmative and negating forces” coexist. Wang Huning developed a concept of Chinese affirmation that is based on the adversary that self-delegitimizes, self-weakens, self-destructs [4].

As Aresu writes: “The assault on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, has made ‘America vs. America’ enter the legend” (p. 34) and can be considered as an event that certified “a ‘nihilism’ that has now become ‘the American way’” (p. 95). Aresu considers Wang Huning’s story as a paradigmatic case of the political-intellectual history of the Chinese ruling class. In his narrative, Wang Huning becomes a sort of Virgil, a prophet who guides him and the reader on the path to understanding the complexity of China’s political, intellectual, and economic history of the last 60 years. The book does not focus on economic rankings or records, but rather explores the cultural depth and long-term strategy that have led China to its current position of power. The author uses the title as a useful statement to push the reader to ask fundamental questions about the West’s place in the new world order that is emerging from the progressive destruction of the old “rules-based order” by the United States (which had primarily built it) in the face of the exuberant economic, political, and military rise of China and its allies (BRICS, SCO, ASEAN, and other new institutions of multipolarity [5]. It’s an invitation to shift our focus and recognize that, in the 21st century, the center of gravity is no longer necessarily Western (no longer just Atlantic, but also and above all Asian or Eurasian, with open cooperation with the Global South). This is true even if Aresu doesn’t see the Chinese “victory” as a definitive end point: it’s the result of a coherent, long-term strategy (directed and planned public and private investments in the “real economy,” protection of nascent industry, higher education, control of the interfaces where the game is decided—regulations, platforms, logistics) pursued especially over the last 25 years (the years of US-led economic and financial globalization) that the West has struggled to understand or effectively counter.

It’s difficult to predict what will happen in the next 25 years. Aresu emphasizes that China will have to confront real fragilities: declining demographics [6] struggling real estate market, financial weakness (including high levels of public and private debt), dependence on imported food and energy, vulnerability to the global economic slowdown (with Chinese exports becoming increasingly unsustainable for the rest of the world), weak domestic consumption growth, under-pressure youth employment (the most recent data show urban youth unemployment at 16.9%), enormous socioeconomic and territorial inequalities, and other signs of structural strains on economic and social growth. Will the Chinese Communist Party be able to maintain power? How long will a balance that accepts high levels of internal control (as well as relative inequalities and social and territorial marginalization) to fuel external projection hold up? Aresu, rather than providing answers, offers a toolbox for asking the right questions: reading the documents, examining the plans, studying the histories of the main players, and understanding where capital and brainpower are going. However, there is no critical analysis of the Chinese model conducted “on the ground” (similar to that conducted by Wang Huning in the United States in the late 1980s), so we learn little or nothing about the internal contradictions of Chinese society in its process of modernization and the construction of “market socialism with Chinese characteristics.” And this is undoubtedly the book’s main weakness. “China vs. China” is yet to be written.

The West and China’s interpretative myopia

Aresu argues that the West often views China myopia, using outdated and inadequate interpretative frameworks that fail to grasp the complexity of Chinese strategy.[7] For years, it has been said, “China copies, China steals, China doesn’t know how to innovate.” After several decades of uninterrupted annual GDP growth, the West thought for years that the Chinese economy would eventually collapse. The complexity and complexity of the Chinese system is often poorly understood or interpreted as clichés in Western journalism and mainstream media. Meanwhile, China has become a manufacturing superpower in just a few decades, being able to exploit a vast domestic market, becoming indispensable in certain material and technological supply chains, and a protagonist beyond expectations of digital revolutions, such as the smartphone. The technology that has characterized other Asian manufacturing powers has been brought to a huge scale by China in this century. Once we understand that the iPhone existed thanks to the companies and workforce of Taiwan and China, we understand this process. It’s no coincidence that Aresu dedicated his book “To the Chinese and Taiwanese researchers and workers who made our digital life possible.” According to Aresu, China has become an economic superpower because it has worked on innovation at scale. We are in the age of scale, from the “scaling laws” of artificial intelligence (laws that aren’t laws, taking the perspective of Moore’s Law to the extreme, towards “as long as it works”[8]) to the dynamics of contemporary production. Therefore, in this historical era, China’s strength lies in its ability to implement technology on a gigantic scale, and therefore access markets of hundreds of millions, even billions of consumers. Many of the companies Aresu discusses in the book didn’t “invent” their technologies in “zero-to-one” terms, from Huawei to TSMC, from BYD to CATL. However, they have refined the power of scale in different ways (organizing production, logistics, value chain integration, and commercial distribution). By its very nature, China is a great power of scale: in infrastructure, energy infrastructure, production capacity, logistics, and human capital.

It’s possible to go technology by technology and see where China stands. Its progress can be measured in the industrial structure of the so-called energy transition, in the material structure of the world (steel, copper, other raw materials, rare earths, chemical treatments), in the electronics supply chain (assembly, interconnections, optics, components required for energy storage systems, converters, transformers, etc.), in various telecommunications standards and their implementation (5G, 6G, and more), in commercial drones, logistics, ships, semiconductors in all their segments, new materials, weapons systems, space, and civil aviation. China’s performance in these various sectors varies, but it nonetheless promises very rapid advancement. However, China currently represents the only global player with the capacity and will to catch up and surpass the United States in the technological arena. While the Trump administration denies there is any climate problem and attempts to block US investments in the sector by all means possible, in addition to thwarting related international agreements, China has become by far the country investing most in the sector (usually at least as much as the rest of the world combined) and the technological leader across a wide range of related products, from electric cars and trucks to wind turbines, solar panels, and large storage batteries. Its products are now tending to conquer global markets, despite the boycott by the United States and part of the European Union. Without Chinese technologies, it will be impossible to effectively combat climate change. The country also appears to have reached peak emissions in 2025, well ahead of the previously established 2030 target. Even the zero emissions target, officially set for 2060, will presumably be reached much sooner, between 2050 and 2053.

“China has won” because it has become indispensable. Indispensable to global value chains, potentially capable of producing more knowledge and technical progress than any other power, including the United States. This was clear at the October 30, 2025, meeting between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump in Busan, South Korea, where a trade truce was agreed. China can now confront the United States as an equal. In a war that has been going on for quite some time, at least since the days of Barack Obama and his “pivot to Asia,” Trump had waged a battle months before the meeting, imposing tariffs of over 140% on Chinese products, convinced that China, like the European Union and many other countries, would bow to US demands. But Xi responded blow for blow with weapons that ultimately neutralized his adversary. And everyone perceived that the Busan meeting sealed China’s victory. The weapons of victory are its near-monopoly on refined rare earths and magnets. On the other hand, the vast majority of drugs used in the United States also depend on supplies of basic components (specialty and diversified chemicals) from China. Furthermore, it should be noted that without Chinese components and goods, the price level of most consumer goods sold on the US domestic market would have skyrocketed, and some products would have become difficult to find.

Chinese strategic thinking

The core of the book is to decipher what Chinese leaders and intellectuals think of Westerners and what their vision of global development and power is. Faced with the economic, productive, technological, and entrepreneurial success of China today, Aresu has Wang Huning say that “someone should write the book ‘Confucian Ethics and the Spirit of Socialism'” (p. 65). Aresu notes that “when in 2022 General Secretary Xi Jinping presents the new Politburo Standing Committee, he declares to the press that the Party must be like a student preparing for a never-ending exam” (p. 103). Compared to the 15th and 16th centuries, when the undisputed power of the Celestial Empire did not translate into global hegemony, but into glorious isolation, [9] up to the humiliating Western impositions of the 19th and 20th centuries (which led to the “century of humiliation” from 1849 to 1949), the Chinese Communist Party is trying to remedy this with inventions integrated into the existing social and political system, trying not to upset its cultural traditions. Cybernetics, a subject A term that has become of capital importance in the current technological climate, as its Greek root, kybernetes, suggests, becomes “the art of steering the helm.” This task is entrusted to the celestial bureaucracy: “guardian of the invincible balance of immobility, of an order based on sovereign indifference.” To resolve its own shortcomings, China has thrown itself into the waves, becoming thalassocratic. For the moment, it has seized the means to sail the oceans. “Like pebbles to ford the river,” in 2010 China surpassed South Korea as the world’s largest shipbuilder. The United States remains at 0.1% of global production.

Translating economic superiority into geopolitical leverage remains a complex task. But the Chinese have begun to cross the river. They intend not to stop. Looking at the internal dynamics of the United States, China is demonstrating caution. It markets itself as a “responsible power.” It criticizes the exploitation of human rights and the breakdown of the “rules-based international order” as arrows in the quiver of Western imperialism. On the brink of an increasingly intense civil war, the United States is showing signs of implosion, reassessing its strategic needs in its own “backyard.” The factions are arming themselves for the showdown. The social contradictions of US capitalism and its intrinsic weakness and weariness are increasingly evident, and the possibility of its adversary committing suicide, suffocated by its own contradictions, is growing. Aresu has his prophet Wang Huning say: “America’s struggle with itself will resemble Dürrenmat’s tale of the Winter War in Tibet: a constant and grotesque battle, fueled by a desire for suicide. It doesn’t matter who prevails. The point is that, fighting against each other, they will become distracted. In the chaos, they will look at the finger, never at the moon. China will suffer slowdowns in financing, will have less money to invest, many will steal, but America’s distraction, its laceration, will remain the main trend” (p. 99).

The role of Wang Huning and other Chinese political and business leaders

China’s rise is the story of an intellectual, technological, industrial, and geopolitical advancement that also encompasses the history of the men who made it possible. A key element of the book is the analysis of Wang Huning, considered by informed Western observers to be the “eminence grise” of the Chinese Communist Party and Xi Jinping’s ideologue. Wang Huning has served under all the general secretaries since 1995 (Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping), joining the Politburo Standing Committee of the People’s Republic in 2017 (currently fourth in the seven-member hierarchy). Aresu uses Wang Huning’s life and vision—particularly his observations of America’s moral and social decline in the 1990s, collected in the book “America vs. America” ​​(1991)—as a lens to understand how China shaped its rise and how it intends to avoid Western mistakes. In the footsteps of the great Chinese theorist Sun Tzu who claimed that it is necessary to know the enemy and oneself to win the war, Wang Huning studied the United States “on the ground” and glimpsed the fault lines in Washington’s power before they even fully materialized [10]. Then, there are the stories of the great red capitalists – capitalist-engineers and tech-entrepreneurs – who have impressed capitalist dynamism on the Chinese economy: the story of Ren Zhengfei (1944), Huawei’s veteran of technological warfare [11]; the story of the Minister of Science and Technology Wan Gang who learned the best of German skills, studying and working (at Audi) in Germany, and then became the true demiurge of Beijing’s electric car strategy [12]; the story of the chemist Wang Chuanfu (1966), founder of BYD; the story of Robin Zeng of CATL; Liang Wenfeng’s story (1985) of DeepSeek (as of early 2025 the most downloaded AI app ahead of ChatGPT on Apple’s App Store, a new “Sputnik moment” of shock technology for the United States); the story of Lei Jun, the “Chinese Steve Jobs,” of Xiaomi, the smartphone and now electric car giant; the story of Wang Xingxing (1990) of the robotics company Unitree, the one with the somersaulting robots; the story of Jack Ma of Alibaba, “humiliated for challenging the financial and regulatory power of the Party, for suggesting that power in China can be contested, or suspended” (p. 65), but later rehabilitated; the story of Taiwanese-American Jensen Huang, founder of NVIDIA, the American chipmaker.

Together, these figures embody an era in which profit-driven innovation and pervasive Communist Party control coexist, with politics remaining firmly in command. As Arlacchi argues in his book, “The Chinese state is not in the hands of the economy, as in [Western] capitalism, but it is the economy that is in the hands of the Party-State” (p. 205). But also the story of those who understand these people, who understand what’s happening, like Charlie Munger (1924-2023), Warren Buffett’s historic right-hand man. This also speaks to differences within the US system, because on one side there’s Charlie Munger, who’s been investing in BYD since 2008, [13] while on the other side there are the automotive leaders in the United States who understand absolutely nothing and then find themselves calling for the imposition of a 100% tariff on the import of Chinese electric cars because they’re much better than the ones they make.

Techno-politics and technological domination

The book builds on Aresu’s previous works on the geopolitics of technology (including “The Dominance of the 21st Century” and “The Geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence“), examining how China is using technological innovation (particularly AI, value chains, and critical clean technologies—solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles) not only for economic success but as an instrument of geopolitical power. Aresu invites us to understand China as a “state–party–technology–capital”: an ecosystem in which industry, politics, and research support each other with long-term objectives, unlike other countries. According to Aresu, global competition is not just between companies, but between technological ecosystems; semiconductors, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and “green” technologies form value chains where political power weighs as heavily as industrial power. As Arlacchi notes in his book: “The true peculiarity of the Chinese system lies in having created an environment where the private interests of the capitalist and the public interest in national development are not opposed but aligned, through a sophisticated institutional architecture that channels the entrepreneur’s animal spirit toward socially beneficial objectives. It is this institutional architecture that constitutes the true secret of the Chinese economic miracle” (p. 361). 

Therefore, a key aspect of Aresu’s text is its focus on industrial policies—such as the Made in China 2025 plan launched in 2015—which have invested significant public and private resources in refined rare earths, chips, electric batteries, and digital platforms. Aresu links hardware, software, and regulations: export controls (for example, on refined rare earths), investment screening, and data security. A crucial factor is that China has tens of millions of people studying at universities that have consistently improved significantly. Every year, more scientific articles are produced, more patents , ^and more specialized courses of study are launched on the topics that define industrial and technological capacity on a massive scale. Every four or five years, China is capable of producing the entire pool of highly qualified US workers in STEM subjects (about 16 million), and in the next 20 years, China alone could have a pool of STEM workers equivalent to that of the rest of the world. All of this has an effect within this gigantic human capital machine that ultimately, as Aresu notes in detail in the book, with dozens and dozens of names and cases, ends up enveloping the US adversary. In the book, Aresu explains with numerous examples, life stories, and details that the US tech giants are dependent on Chinese talent [15].

At scientific conferences and research laboratories, the number of Chinese is extremely high. Therefore, there is a double dependency. Chinese and, more generally, Asian talent is the determining factor in the world, but the United States is the great magnet for talent, attracting these people more than others. Therefore, to understand where we are going, we must consider where Chinese talent will choose to live and whether the United States will be able to maintain this role or whether Beijing will be able to retain and bring back these diaspora talents over the next ten years. [16] Since 2018, the United States Department of Justice has launched the China Initiative to counter the risk of intellectual property theft and the threat to national security deriving from the transfer of American technology to China. This measure involves the intervention of the FBI and threatens to accelerate the flight of Chinese and Asian-American scientists from the United States. This is further proof of the US’s tendency to self-destruct, of “America against America.”

The role of Europe

In this scenario, Aresu believes Europe can be the “third shore” only if it stops thinking of itself as an audience and acts as an actor: with an explicit industrial policy (Europeans have missed the boat on the various digital revolutions: personal computers, the Internet, smartphones, social media, and even artificial intelligence), intelligent use of the golden power, protection of European talent and research hubs, and an environment where new businesses can be founded and grown; channeling capital, primarily from private institutional investors, toward innovation (rather than letting it drain from large US asset management funds to Wall Street and US Treasury bonds). Otherwise—Aresu warns—Europe will remain a playground for others, forced to chase foreign standards and platforms. The key, for Aresu, isn’t to cheer: it’s to equip ourselves with the operational tools to avoid being subjected, especially now that Trump has made it clear that Europe isn’t sitting at the table but is part of the menu. Europe must decide whether to remain the powerless, subordinate, and declining eastern periphery of the Atlantic world under US domination, or whether it can establish itself as an autonomous political, institutional, and economic role within a reconstituting Eurasian system.

(Transform Italia)

Footnotes

1. China’s vision is of a multipolar world of equals, where each country can pursue its own development model without external interference (in line with the Confucian concept of “harmony in difference,” which prioritizes economic and cultural influence over the projection of direct military power). In numerous speeches, Xi Jinping has articulated the “five principles for a new international order”: mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence (See my article here .). China’s proposal to the world is not one of military expansion, but rather that of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the peaceful and cooperative investment program that builds infrastructure and other public and economic assets and now involves over half the world’s countries.
2. “China Won” is the slogan coined by a former U.S. trade representative to China, Michael Froman, a lawyer who worked for Mastercard and Citigroup. He is currently the president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
3. An organism, the “celestial bureaucracy”, characterised by the hierarchy of officials, the specialisation of roles and offices, the presence of registers and archives, the central role of the class of literati-officials, whose access to a bureaucratic career is regulated by the “examination system” (Goaokao). A thousand-year-old system of meritocratic selection that had been abolished before the 1911 revolution and then reinstated in 1977 by Deng Xiaoping. Aresu has his guide Wang Huning say that “We have inserted the permanent revolution into this system. And then, having experienced the contradiction firsthand, we returned home: to the celestial bureaucracy” (p. 18).
4. Wang Huning’s 1991 book is a kind of “Democracy in America”—Alexis de Tocqueville’s book after an observation tour of the United States in 1831—the fruit of his eight-month study trip to the United States in 1988–1989. Through vivid descriptions and factual accounts, rather than abstract theories, Wang Huning offers an objective yet critical analysis of America’s strengths (modernity, entrepreneurial dynamism, economic strength, the capacity of universities to educate, research, and technology) and weaknesses (individualism, family breakdown, yawning economic inequalities, “culture wars,” and commodification) in numerous aspects of its society. In his words: “With this title, I intend to demonstrate that America contains contradictions that cannot be dismissed in a single sentence. In the past, there was a dogmatic view of American society as merely the ‘exploitation of surplus value’, a ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’ and nothing more. Now there is another extreme: some imagine the United States as a paradise, rich and flawless. In reality, American society corresponds to none of these descriptions and often finds itself in fundamental contradiction with them. There are strengths and weaknesses, and wherever there is a strength, there can also be a weakness. America is a contradiction; it contains multitudes. This is what I mean by ‘America vs. America.’” Wang Huning discovers paradoxes at every turn: a country incredibly rich but also full of homeless poor and people who do not live a dignified life, a democracy par excellence that is “not all that democratic” and a society with advanced education but “full of problems.” From its uneven development and ancient political spirit to its colorful national character, its multilayered social regulation, flawed elections, and undercurrents of crisis, the book provides “an in-depth analysis of multiple social strata” to answer the fundamental question: “Why does America exist?” This in-depth study aimed to advance understanding of capitalism and, indirectly, socialism. The study of the “American phenomenon” was driven by a dual responsibility as a Chinese scholar: to understand America in order to “better understand ourselves and the world, and more effectively explore the path to China’s prosperity.” His observations in “America vs. America” ​​deepened Wang Huning’s skepticism toward Western-style democracy, reinforcing his belief that a country requires “respect for authority and tradition” to prevent internal weakening. Having survived (like other leaders of current China) Mao Tse-tung’s “cultural revolution”, Wang Huning is considered the theoretician of Chinese “neo-authoritarianism”,According to him, strong leadership is necessary for China’s stability and political reform. He is a longtime advocate of a strong, centralized state, arguing that radical democracy (such as the “Cultural Revolution”) would lead to chaos in China and that modernization must be managed by a unified central authority.
5. China’s rise is entirely internal to a historic rebalancing of relations between the North and the South of the planet, a rewriting of the rules of the game that for centuries have favored the West. Chinese foreign policy is consistent with the more equitable and peaceful profile of a new, advancing multipolar and polycentric order. The Chinese system has no extroverted vocation; it does not benefit from the synergy between colonialism, militarism, and capitalism. From 1978 to today, Chinese foreign policy has consistently favored stability, economic development, cooperation, and “harmonious relations” over military expansionism or direct confrontation. China, despite its growing global standing, shows no intention of assuming the role of global policeman that the United States has sought to play for the last 80 years.
6. In 2025, China’s population declined for the fourth consecutive year , with the birth rate plummeting to another record low, despite the introduction of policies aimed at encouraging people to have children. China has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, with approximately one child per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. Registered births fell to 7.92 million in 2025, or 5.63 per 1,000 people, down 17 percent from 9.54 million in 2024 and the lowest number since records began in 1949. According to data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the population decreased by 3.39 million to 1.405 billion, a faster decline than in 2024, while deaths increased from 10.93 million in 2024 to 11.31 million. Births in 2025 were roughly at the same level as in 1738, when China’s population was only about 150 million.
7. One of Aresu’s merits is to revive what remains of Western Sinology’s vitality, paying homage to scholars such as Étienne Balazs, Joseph Needham, and Jonathan Spence. These names represent a bygone era, when the study of China was still intellectually ambitious, historically grounded, and politically aware. Today, by contrast, Western understanding of Asia appears fragmented, confined to a detached academy that, even when insightful, remains ignored by political power.
8. Moore’s Law is an empirical observation formulated by Gordon Moore in 1965, according to which the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (microchip) doubles approximately every two years (or 18–24 months), keeping the cost constant and increasing the performance exponentially, thus driving the progress of electronics for decades, but is approaching physical limits and slowing down, pushing research towards 3D solutions and new materials to extend it.
9. Aresu recalls the story of the great fleet of about 200 ships and 30,000 men led by Admiral Zheng He who between 1405 and 1433, during the Ming dynasty, carried out major expeditions in East Africa, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, from Java to Ceylon. But after Zheng He’s death, the fleet was dismantled.
10. Sun Tzu, the Chinese military general, strategist, philosopher, and writer who lived during the Zhou Dynasty, considered the greatest Chinese theoretician of the art of war, maintained that “to string together a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the pinnacle of excellence.” His idea was that wars are avoided or won through stratagems, deception, surprise, the use of intelligence, counter-information, and symbolic and psychological warfare. These prescriptions are the exact opposite of those of Clausewitz, who favored hand-to-hand combat, the physicality and brutality of battle, and the total annihilation of enemy forces as the goal and fundamental principle of war.
11. Aresu recalls Huawei’s corporate oath: “Our feet stand on our ancestors’ dream of prosperity in the hope of national renewal. We are an honest force, making great progress. We must aim for the advanced technology of the United States. We must follow the great management ability of Japan. We must follow the glorious tradition of the Chinese nation. Let us build our own high-level and high-quality team to better serve the motherland and the people.” Aresu notes that Premier Jiang Zemin, enthusiastic about the oath, also insisted on adding the sentence: “We must learn the meticulous and hard-working spirit of the German people” (p. 67). On the other hand, Deng Xiaoping had urged learning from the world during his southern tour in 1992 (the reference was to Singapore, then one of the most important “Asian Tigers”).
12. Aresu notes that “In 2012, to illustrate China’s progress in science and technology, Wan Gang quoted the famous Tang Dynasty poem: ‘The white sun fades between the mountains, the Yellow River flows to the sea. If you want to exhaust your gaze by a thousand miles, climb one more floor of the tower’” (p. 61).
13. Chinese car companies are waging a price war among themselves. Many will die, others will survive. It will be a painful process. But BYD, now with more than 130,000 engineers and a million employees, is already the world leader in electric cars, having surpassed Elon Musk’s Tesla in 2025. Aresu points out that Warren Buffett’s right-hand man, Charlie Munger, saw its rise and understood what was happening. The fools in this story were the Western car companies, and it’s good to know that the blame for what happened, the blame for the loss of European jobs, lies primarily with them, with their incompetence, their inadequacy.
14. Zhejiang University now ranks second in the world in generative AI patents, between Google and Microsoft. Some of Microsoft’s patents, on the other hand, come from its Chinese research lab. Entire computer science, electrical engineering, and robotics departments in the United States are populated by Chinese students and researchers. AI conferences in the United States are all co-organized by Chinese researchers.)
15. Aresu has Wang Huning say “that the classes into which the computer has divided the world are two: Asians, especially Chinese, and Asian-Americans, especially Chinese” (p. 54). The conclusion is that America’s days are numbered if it doesn’t continue to feed on Chinese minds; perhaps in the meantime it can count on Indian ones. Bangalore’s engineers have been a key resource for the American tech industry for years. 
16. The 11 researchers at the Meta group pursuing the ambitious goal of building a program equal to or more powerful than the human brain are all immigrants educated in other countries, seven of them Chinese. More generally, the US high-tech industry relies heavily on Chinese engineers. Therefore, if the Trump administration continues its policy of cracking down on Chinese scientists in the United States, Silicon Valley companies will be left behind in the race for leadership in the AI ​​field. Indeed, several top-tier Chinese researchers have already left the United States and returned to their homeland. It’s likely that many more will follow. In this regard, Aresu’s story of Zizheng Pan, a former intern who, after spending the summer of 2023 in the legendary NVIDIA research group led by Bill Dally, turned down a full-time offer and decided instead to return to China to join the startup DeepSeek, is exemplary. Aresu emphasizes that the revival of the “United Front” under Xi Jinping refers primarily to a renewed emphasis on the diaspora as a resource for national rejuvenation. From 2012 onwards, the Party-state has intensified ties with Chinese scholars abroad, transforming scientific mobility into a tool of soft power. In the history of the Chinese Communist Party, the United Front (tǒngyī zhànxiàn) represents the political strategy aimed at creating alliances between different social groups to strengthen the Party’s position and consolidate state power. In 2018, an institutional reform transferred the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (Qiáobàn) from the State Council to the United Front Work Department of the CCP Central Committee. Since then, all political, cultural, and ideological coordination activities related to the diaspora have thus been further transferred from the state to the Party sphere.