While in Italy Berlusconi was justifying cuts to universities and research with the slogan: “Why should we pay a scientist if we make the most beautiful shoes in the world?”, China was heading in the opposite direction—rapidly becoming a true scientific superpower.
Today, it has overtaken both the United States and the European Union in the number of high-impact scientific articles published annually.

Its rise has been extraordinarily fast: compared to the 1996–1998 average, China’s scientific output has increased eighteenfold, and 3.6 times compared to 2006–2008. In 2003, the U.S. published twenty times more scientific articles than China; by 2013, that ratio had dropped to four, and by 2022, China had surpassed both.

This achievement is the result of a long-term investment strategy. Between 2012 and 2022, funding for basic science grew from $10 billion to $32 billion, while investments in applied research and experimental development doubled from $70 billion to $140 billion. With 1.87 million researchers (compared to 1.43 million in the U.S.), China today trains far more PhDs in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), and by the end of this year, it is expected to graduate twice as many as the United States.
All ten of the most productive research institutions in the world are in China, and together they publish nine times more high-impact papers than the second-ranking country—often the U.S.

This strategy has transformed China’s economy, making it competitive not only in manufacturing but also in advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, 5G, renewable energy, and electric vehicles. In 2021, China accounted for 37.8% of all global patent filings, compared to 17.8% for the U.S.

According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, China is now the global leader in 57 out of 64 critical technologies examined—an extraordinary reversal from 2007, when the U.S. led in 60 and China in only 3.
At the same time, the global economic balance has shifted. While in 1991 the G7 countries represented the core of the world economy, today their dominance is in question. The combined GDP of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) has now surpassed that of the G7, marking a historic realignment of global power.

The central issue for the United States—and, by extension, Europe—is the increasing financialization of the economy. Finance has curbed industrial innovation: today, for an engineering PhD, it’s more rewarding to work on Wall Street than in a research lab.
The paradox is that the real economy—the one that generates actual innovation—is being sacrificed at the altar of financial gains. This has hollowed out the productive base, widened inequality, and undermined the material foundations of political legitimacy in Western nations.

When states can no longer guarantee economic well-being, they shift their legitimacy to promises of protection from external threats: immigration, terrorism, autocrats, and so on. This is the root of the new militarism sweeping the West: a belligerent drift that fuels current conflicts and prepares for future ones—helped along by extremists and “security decrees.”

European governments, in particular, are preparing for war with Russia not out of strategic necessity, but political desperation. The economic model that once ensured widespread prosperity is collapsing; power is slipping away, and with each election cycle, a new “phenomenon” must be invented to continue enacting the same policies.
Even the middle class is shrinking, and the crisis is no longer marginal—it affects the majority of citizens, who increasingly struggle to access essential goods and services.

Yet governments continue to pour resources into militarization instead of strengthening the welfare state. A storm is brewing: a confrontation between an out-of-touch ruling class and a citizenry driven to anger, frustration, and hardship.
With no real solutions in sight, the elites fall back on the oldest trick in the book: unite the masses behind a war, distract them with nationalism, and try to preserve a crumbling order.

But this is a reckless strategy. War will not resolve the system’s failures; it will only deepen the crisis.
Europe is not on the brink of an external invasion—it is on the brink of internal revolt.
And if the elites persist on this suicidal path, the real explosion won’t come from foreign tanks, but from the streets of our own cities.

(Published on Il Fatto Quotidiano)