The West is obsessed with China, but often views it with short-sightedness or through inadequate interpretative frameworks. Alessandro Aresu – one of the most lucid voices in the Italian geopolitical debate – reinterprets the Chinese challenge not as an ideological clash between democracy and authoritarianism, but as a systemic conflict between models of power. “China has won” is not a rhetorical statement, it is a methodical provocation: to understand where we are going, we need to decipher Chinese strategic thinking, its historical origins, its industrial logic, the tools of its global influence and its contradictions.
Alessandro Aresu shows us the trajectories of Beijing’s technopolitics, clearly recounting the transformations in the relationships between the Party, capital, technical knowledge and global ambitions. From Confucian roots to artificial intelligence, from enormous advantages in talent to productive superiority, Aresu gives us a picture that goes beyond the dominant narrative of the “empire of control”. It is the story of a political power that is as curious about its adversary as it is aware of its own strength. In this book, the reader is called upon to reflect on the world we are preparing to inhabit: one in which the victory or defeat of the West will depend not only on China, but also on our ability to understand it, without illusions and without hypocrisy.
