Francesco Sylos Labini

Today’s interest in China coincides with the interest in the so‑called “Chinese miracle”: the greatest and fastest improvement in living conditions for the largest number of people in the shortest period ever recorded in human history. From 1980 to 2020, the share of the population living in extreme poverty was reduced to zero: from about 70% in urban areas and over 90% in rural areas to none. Per‑capita GDP increased twelvefold since 1990, while China’s total GDP in purchasing‑power‑parity terms surpassed that of the United States as early as 2015. Around 700 million people have moved from poverty into the middle class.

In the meantime, China has become the “factory of the world,” increasing its share of global manufacturing from less than 10% in 2000 to over 35% today. This growth has led to a rise in real wages of roughly sevenfold since 2000.

The Chinese miracle can be divided into two main phases, each lasting about thirty years.
The first phase begins in 1972, with U.S. President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to the People’s Republic of China, which initiated the normalization of relations between Washington and Beijing. This phase concludes in 2001 with China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), a crucial step that transformed the Chinese economy, accelerating its integration into the global trade system and opening new opportunities for multinational corporations.

The second phase of China’s development is characterized by the transition from an economy based on low value‑added manufacturing to one centered on scientific and technological innovation. This shift has allowed China to become a leader in many high‑tech sectors. During this period, China effectively became a scientific and technological superpower.

According to Nature’s institutional ranking, 7 of the world’s top 10 scientific institutions are now Chinese, with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in first place. The number of Chinese PhDs in science and technology now exceeds that of the United States, reflecting a strategic, long‑term investment in highly qualified human capital.

Innovation indicators tell the same story: China holds the majority of patents in critical technology sectors, including those with important military applications. A striking example is artificial intelligence, where roughly 70% of global patents originate from China, compared to 14% from the U.S. and 2.8% from Europe. A similar leadership position exists in clean energy—especially solar and wind—where China leads both in innovation and manufacturing capacity.

Thanks to massive public and private investment, the cost of electric batteries has fallen by 90% in less than fifteen years, while the time required to install one gigawatt (GW) of solar capacity has dropped from one year in 2004 to a single day in 2023. In just the first six months of 2025, China installed 250 GW of new solar capacity—roughly equivalent to 150% of France’s total electricity production.

What has happened in China in less than half a century did not occur in the West in three centuries—not despite colonialism, wars of conquest, civil wars, world wars, and the industrial revolution. How was such a historical leap possible?

Pino Arlacchi’s book “China Explained to the West” (Fazi, 2025) seeks to answer this question by examining the philosophical, political, and strategic foundations that made the so‑called “Chinese miracle” possible—a unique path of economic, social, and technological development that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and transformed China into a global power.

Arlacchi immediately emphasizes that China’s rise is not a historical novelty but rather a renaissance. For roughly two thousand years, China was the world’s leading country in economic, scientific, technological, and cultural terms. This millennial supremacy was abruptly interrupted by the Opium Wars, when the British Empire imposed a regime of subordination through its military might—an era known in China as the “century of great humiliation,” which ended only with the communist revolution led by Mao Zedong.

According to Arlacchi, the pillars of China’s renaissance are three, all rooted in long historical traditions.

1. Aversion to war

China is not—and has never been—an expansionist power. A longstanding philosophical tradition holds that war represents a failure of politics, not its continuation by other means. This is reflected in China’s modern history: it has not been involved in any major military conflict since World War II, barring a brief border war with Vietnam in 1979. Today, China has only one military base outside its borders, in Djibouti, mainly serving maritime security functions. By contrast, the United States operates more than 800 military bases worldwide.

2. Meritocratic selection of the ruling class

This principle descends from imperial China, when civil servants—the mandarins—were chosen through competitive examinations. In the Chinese tradition, governing means selecting the most competent individuals. Competence is seen as essential to the proper functioning of the state. The Chinese Communist Party today operates one of the most meritocratic selection systems in the world: its leaders rise from the bottom through years of training, administrative experience, and rigorous evaluation.

3. Building a “Chinese path to socialism”

This model, often described as socialism with Chinese characteristics, is a non‑capitalist system in which the state maintains control over natural resources, raw materials, banks and credit, transportation, strategic infrastructure, and defense. The market is free, but it is used as an instrument of governance. Competition is encouraged, but always within a framework designed to serve the public interest. In this way, Arlacchi argues, China has “tamed the capitalist beast” and put it at the service of building a socialist society.

Some features of China’s economic strategy resemble, albeit on a different scale and in a very different historical context, certain aspects of Italy during the economic boom of the “glorious thirty.” This parallel should prompt reflection on how the neoliberal revolution, beginning in the 1980s, progressively eroded Italy’s productive system while simultaneously undermining the country’s political fabric and long‑term development prospects.

These structural conditions underpin China’s strong social cohesion and anchor the legitimacy of political power in its ability to deliver development. Although freedom of expression is restricted, over 100 million Chinese citizens travel abroad each year without generating significant numbers of political asylum requests—a telling indicator of the government’s broad popularity, estimated at around 90%.

Another key factor in China’s success has been the strongly pragmatic approach of its political leadership, encapsulated in Deng Xiaoping’s famous maxim: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” This pragmatism led to numerous social and economic experiments carried out at the local level: over the past twenty years, several Chinese provinces have functioned as laboratories for new policies, which, once proven effective, were extended nationwide.

China is neither a model to be copied nor a threat to the world. Its millennia‑old history demonstrates the absence of expansionist ambitions and a deep‑rooted orientation toward peaceful coexistence among nations, making multipolarity a natural feature of its foreign policy. At the same time, China’s political and social model—shaped by its own historical evolution—is not exportable.

Nonetheless, China stands as a crucial reference point because it proves that an alternative is possible, symbolically closing the long unipolar phase dominated by the Thatcherite dogma “there is no alternative.” Searching for alternatives is especially urgent today, at a time when Western democracies reveal their structural limitations: insurmountable inequalities in wealth distribution have eroded the foundations of democratic participation. Increasing concentrations of wealth translate into concentrations of economic and political power, making it clear that voting alone is no longer sufficient to ensure genuine democratic agency.

China today represents both the cornerstone of the emerging multipolar order arising from the decline of the American empire and the hope for a global system grounded in peaceful coexistence among peoples. In this scenario, one can glimpse the concrete possibility of ending the cycle of “endless wars” that has shaped the last half‑century of world history.

Pino Arlacchi’s book explains why this renaissance has been possible and what deep historical and cultural roots underpin it.