- Author: Pedro Tellería
- Date: 12/17/25
- Website: PedroTelleria.com
- Topic: Geopolitics
- URL: pedrotelleria.com/article.php?id=34&lang=ES
Let’s get straight to the point: the question is no longer whether China is a dictatorship and Europe a democracy. That discussion is exhausted and, deep down, irrelevant.
The important question is another:
- which model is capable of transforming knowledge into economic, technological, and strategic power in the medium term?
- And, even more uncomfortable: which model is self-destructing today by its own decision?
1.-China and Europe, opposing approaches
China is, de facto, a “Capitalist Dictatorship.” Not in the moral sense, but in the operational one: 1-limited private property, but respected as long as it serves growth; 2-functional markets, but directed; 3-productive capitalism subordinated to national objectives.
Europe, by contrast, is a 1-bureaucratized and infantilized democracy, where voting has become marketing, 2-the State an omnipresent manager, and 3-politics a permanent exercise in kicking the can down the road.
From that asymmetry the central conflict of our time is born.
- Europe believes it can redefine economic reality by decree. It believes it can decide, from offices and political summits, how energy must be produced, at what cost, with which technologies, and on what timelines, without paying a structural price.
- China, on the contrary, adopts a brutally pragmatic position: “you make your energy more expensive, shut down your industries, and calm your conscience; I will produce cheaply, grow, and supply you with whatever you need.”
While Europe debates moral objectives, China executes power strategies.
2. Liberalism: ignored warnings
It is worth remembering something easily forgotten: the great thinkers of liberalism were never naive. They did not believe in utopias, nor in magic decrees, nor in perfect societies designed from above.
- Adam Smith never defended greed, but the spontaneous order that emerges when there are prices, competition, and clear rules. His warning was simple: when political power picks winners, the system stops allocating resources efficiently.
- Hayek was even clearer: the central problem of any complex society is dispersed knowledge. No one—no committee, no ministry—can know enough to plan an economy correctly. When it is attempted, error-correction mechanisms are turned off.
- Milton Friedman insisted that economic freedom does not guarantee political freedom, but without economic freedom, political freedom ends up being a fiction. When the State controls most resources, it also controls vital decisions.
- Popper warned against large-scale social engineering: systems that promise perfect results often fail catastrophically, because they do not know how to correct in time.
They all shared a basic intuition: power without feedback ends up destroying what it claims to improve.
Europe has ignored these warnings. China, curiously, has learned some of them—not out of liberal conviction, but out of survival instinct.
3. Science, engineering, and production: the real cycle of power
Modern prosperity does not come from science in the abstract. It comes from a much more concrete cumulative process:
- Basic science → applied engineering → industrial production → learning by manufacturing → technological mastery.
Europe led in science for centuries. The United States did so during the 20th century.
China has gone through the entire cycle in barely four decades. First it copied. Then it manufactured. Then it improved. Later it optimized. Finally, it began to lead.
This is visible in electronics, semiconductors, computing, automotive, renewable energies, and increasingly in new-generation nuclear energy (SRM, HTGR, ...), including advanced technologies such as molten-salt reactors (MSR).
This is not accidental. Whoever manufactures learns. The factory is the real laboratory of engineering. Each iteration reduces costs, improves processes, detects failures, and accumulates tacit knowledge that is not in papers or patents.
Europe has been abandoning the factory—and with it, learning.
4. Energy: the variable no one can fool
There is an uncomfortable but historical truth: a society’s quality of life is closely linked to its per-capita energy consumption. More available energy means more productivity, more goods, more mobility, more comfort, and more technological capacity.
This is not an opinion. It is a historical pattern.
- Europe has decided to make its energy more expensive deliberately—not as a side effect, but as a political objective. It has imposed restrictions, implicit taxes, poorly designed electricity markets, accelerated shutdowns, and a moral narrative that turns cheap energy into something suspicious. The result is predictable: less competitive industry, lower investment, and production flight.
- China has done the opposite. It has prioritized abundant, stable, and cheap energy. It has diversified sources. It has invested massively in generation, grids, and industrial capacity. And it has understood something fundamental: without energy there is no sovereignty.
Europe has confused moral leadership with economic disarmament.
5. The hard diagnosis: Europe’s self-destruction loop
The process is clear and self-reinforcing:
- Expensive and unstable energy.
- Falling industrial margins.
- Less productive investment.
- Deindustrialization.
- Stagnation of real wages.
- Social unrest and emotional voting.
- More political intervention, more regulation, more costs.
- Even more expensive energy.
It is a closed loop. A system that degrades itself.
Politics responds to unrest with subsidies, debt, and promises. It does not correct the root cause. Bureaucracy grows. Economic calculation disappears. The State controls more and more resources without assuming risks or responsibilities.
China fails in political freedoms. Europe fails in the ability to produce wealth. In the medium term, that second failure is lethal.
6. Will there be a ceiling for China?
It is often said that the Chinese model has an inevitable ceiling due to lack of freedom. Maybe. But there is a prior, more uncomfortable question: who is building its ceiling first?
Europe is building its own through costs, slowness, regulation, and strategic self-limitation. China, meanwhile, accumulates capital, infrastructure, talent, and industrial capacity.
China’s risk is a big mistake. Europe’s risk is a slow but certain decline.
7. The final question
None of this is inevitable. These are political, cultural, and strategic decisions. Europe could change course. It could recover competitive energy, reindustrialize, simplify processes, respect economic calculation, and once again turn knowledge into production.
But that requires abandoning moral comfort and facing the physical reality of the world.
The question remains open—and unavoidable:
- Do we resign ourselves to disappearing as a relevant actor on the global stage?
- Or do we fight to remain a civilization capable of producing, innovating, and deciding its own destiny?
There is no decree that replaces energy.
There is no narrative that replaces the factory.
And there is no future without real economic power.
Pedro Tellería
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