AI is ushering in Industrialization 4.0. U.S. President Donald Trump has even taken to calling it “SI”—super intelligence—a sign that its significance reaches beyond industrialization itself. Can China and Europe join hands to lead a Renaissance 2.0, or will they merely watch superpowers turn into super intelligence?
The global landscape is undergoing drastic restructuring. International scholarship offers three main perspectives on the future world order: G2 (a two-power condominium), S2 (two competing systems), and C2 (two civilizations). Moving from the superficial to the essential, these frameworks together explain the nature of China-U.S. competition and the strategic choices facing the European Union.
Although the idea of “two superpowers plus multiple major powers” once surfaced in Chinese academic debate, Chinese authorities have firmly rejected the G2 proposition since the Obama administration. China does not seek superpower status, nor will it accept a hegemonic order of oligarchic joint rule by two major powers; instead, it stands with the Global South and the majority of the world’s peoples. At its core, G2 embodies a hegemonic logic in which a few great powers collude to monopolize global affairs. This runs counter to China’s commitment to a world for all and to an international system that is both equal and orderly. Without equality, the international order deepens injustice; without order, it slides toward chaos and war, as Europe’s modern history of conflict profoundly attests. China therefore rejects zero-sum games and firmly advocates multipolarity and a Global Community of Shared Future.
Compared with the illusory G2, the S2 framework of competition between two systems better captures today’s international landscape. The EU describes China as, among other things, a “systemic rival,” a characterization fully aligned with U.S. strategic assessments. The reasoning behind this status is that China has forged the world’s only independent development paradigm, one that stands outside the U.S.-led order yet remains deeply integrated into globalization. In 2017, the United States marked a decisive shift away from its longstanding policy of engagement with China. Its National Security Strategy identified China and Russia as strategic competitors, stating that they challenged American power, influence, and interests. This is not, fundamentally, an ideological confrontation. Rather, it reflects the fact that China’s system remains independent of capture by U.S. capital, institutions, and hegemony.
Digital ecosystems offer an analogy. Only three major operating-system ecosystems exist worldwide—Android, Apple’s iOS, and Huawei’s HarmonyOS—and there is no fourth. Of these, only HarmonyOS lies outside the U.S. system. Likewise, China stands as the sole force capable of breaking the hegemony of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) civilization and dismantling the global monopoly of private capital. This is what fundamentally drives Washington’s all-out competition with, and containment of, China.
The core challenge of China-U.S. competition lies in jointly overcoming two traps: the Thucydides Trap and the middle-income trap. The 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026 to 2030) will be critical. In it, China must break through its development bottlenecks, reshape its interactions with the United States, and define a new model of major-country relations.
Let us be clear: systemic competition between China and the United States is by no means a new Cold War. The Soviet Union was largely isolated from the Western system, and the Cold War pitted two separate, parallel, and antagonistic closed blocs against each other. Today’s China, by contrast, is deeply embedded in the mainstream global system. The dollar regime, the architecture of the internet, the underlying digital rules, and the globalized division of labor bind the two countries in a deep “root-directory interdependence.” S2 does not mean separation and confrontation; it means two distinct development pathways emerging within a single globalized system.
As Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s “five-layer cake” metaphor illustrates, AI rests on an interconnected technological architecture encompassing energy, chips, infrastructure, models, and applications. This layered interdependence also helps explain why the Chinese and U.S. systems coexist and remain deeply intertwined rather than standing in binary opposition. The United States builds an exclusionary hegemonic order through military alliances and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, enjoying short-term advantages in alliances and rule-setting. China, by contrast, champions an inclusive, equal, open, and universal new system, one that aligns better with the trends of the intelligence-driven era and carries long-term historical rationality.
China consistently rejects the zero-sum logic of the Cold War and of mutually assured destruction (MAD). It pursues instead a vision of win-win coexistence, captured in the ancient maxim: “All things grow together without harming one another; the Ways run side by side without conflict.” The “silicon curtain” erected by the United States artificially divides the world, creating a hierarchical international order reminiscent of Brahmin-style caste stratification. The systemic transformation China champions aims to end global division and antagonism, ensure that the transition away from hegemony is a soft landing rather than a crash, and spare nations the pressure of choosing between China and the United States.
Beyond the power rivalry of G2 and the systemic competition of S2 lies C2: the evolution of, and contest between, two forms of civilization. This is the ultimate core of the great changes unseen in a century. China is the world’s only continuous civilization-state, with an inclusive, pluralistic, and non-monotheistic civilizational DNA. The United States styles itself the heir to the Roman Empire and a “City upon a Hill,” building a global order on a monotheistic, binary, and exclusionary logic of hegemony. Yet China-U.S. competition is not a clash of civilizations. It is a survival-of-the-fittest contest between models suited to the times, a global iteration of the “Three Represents,” the principle that a governing force must represent advanced productive forces, advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of the majority. Whichever model better fits the new technological revolution and delivers high-quality global public goods will guide humanity’s future.
AI for All vs. All in AI
The divergence between the two civilizations comes sharply into view in the new era of the AI revolution—or, as Trump now calls it, SI. The United States has adopted an ‘All in SI, All for SI’ mindset that prioritizes capital and hegemony, with AI serving the monopolies of a handful of tech giants and the games of geopolitics. China adheres to ‘AI in all, AI for all.’ The first half empowers every industry and serves the real economy; the second puts people at the center and benefits all of humanity.
The two models yield vastly different strategic outcomes. The United States suffers from severe AI anxiety. To preserve its technological hegemony, it pours massive resources into chips, capital, computing power, and electricity. In doing so, it fuels huge AI and financial bubbles, deepens social division and internal friction, and repeats the logic of the Star Wars program, which sought to draw the Soviet Union into an arms race so costly that it helped bankrupt the Soviet economy. This time, however, the costs are mounting at home. Iran has shattered the myth of U.S. military hegemony, and China’s AI innovation is now dismantling the myth of U.S. technological hegemony. Together, they are eroding the foundations of American hegemony.
The traits of Chinese civilization—non-monotheistic, open, inclusive, moderate, and harmonious—match the demands of the intelligence era perfectly: decentralization, universal sharing, and pluralistic coexistence. In his dialogues with Arnold Toynbee in the 1970s, the Japanese thinker Daisaku Ikeda explored the potential of Eastern civilization to contribute to world peace, stability, and a more unified humanity. The U.S. system rests on subjugation, exploitation, exclusion, and monopoly. Chinese and East Asian civilization draws its strength from inclusiveness, openness, universality, and symbiosis. The value of the East Asian model lies in achieving technological autonomy, risk control, and security self-reliance within an open system.
AI is deconstructing America’s dual hegemony, built on military power and the dollar, and eroding its hub-and-spoke alliance architecture. In the short run, Europe still relies on the United States for its foundational infrastructure and core technologies, and its weaknesses are obvious. In the long run, however, systemic competition is essentially civilizational competition, and the China-EU logic of harmonious coexistence will ultimately prevail over America’s binary, winner-takes-all hegemony. The key to breaking the China-U.S. deadlock is to refine the philosophy of symbiosis, launch a China-EU AI Manifesto, and forge a new paradigm of digital civilization distinct from that of the United States.
Europe’s Third Path
The United States is trapped in AI anxiety: its technology is captured by capital, self-constrained, and bogged down in internal friction. Europe, for its part, legislated stringently and prematurely, imposing constraints before development and stifling its innovative vitality.
Chinese civilization, by contrast, embodies seeking truth from facts, education for all, and comprehensive inclusion. It neither deifies AI nor becomes enslaved by technology. It puts people first, upholds the coexistence of all things, and pursues a pragmatic approach of regulating during development and developing under regulation. Free of Western a priori binary thinking, it is better suited to the laws of innovation and iteration in the intelligence age.
The EU has no intention of replicating the breakneck, Silicon Valley-style growth plan of the United States, nor of simply copying China’s framework of industrial deployment. It seeks a third path: rule-led, anchored in human rights and Trustworthy AI, and deeply engaged with vertical industrial applications. My core proposition is this: while the third path has taken shape on the rule-making front, its real-world implementation in computing power, capital, and industrial ecosystems remains highly uncertain.
At the heart of this third path is Trustworthy AI: establish the rules first, then develop the technology. Human rights, privacy, and algorithmic explainability are embedded across the entire AI lifecycle. Without abandoning frontier models, the EU focuses on integrating AI into high-end sectors of the real economy such as industry, healthcare, and energy, pursuing “technological sovereignty” rather than full self-sufficiency.
This approach rests on two pillars. The first is regulatory. The AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive AI legislation, introduces risk-based, tiered regulation: it bans AI that poses unacceptable risks, strictly controls high-risk AI, and mandates systematic risk assessments for general-purpose large models. The Brussels effect then does the rest, since any global company seeking access to the vast European single market must comply with these standards. In this way the EU exports global norms for AI governance, using rules to win the global discursive power that offsets its technological weaknesses.
The second pillar is industrial: the AI Continent Action Plan. Going beyond ethical debate to close gaps in computing power, the plan builds European AI factories and EuroHPC supercomputing clusters, nurtures domestic foundation models, and focuses on AI for industry, medicine, climate, and energy. Drawing on Europe’s strengths in advanced manufacturing, it pursues vertical-sector AI rather than competing head-to-head with China and the United States in the parameter race for general-purpose large models.
The underlying philosophy of the EU’s AI path is that technological innovation must not override fundamental human rights, and that AI’s growth must be controllable, explainable, and accountable.
Several conditions favor the EU’s third path. First, Europe enjoys a soft-power advantage in rule-setting. It has long prioritized human rights and data protection, as the GDPR demonstrates, and it carries clout in global negotiations on AI governance and ethical standards. Because many countries in the Global South are wary of unconstrained AI hegemony, the EU’s narrative of Trustworthy AI holds real appeal.
Second, Europe has an advanced manufacturing base. German industry, precision manufacturing, medical devices, and pharmaceuticals are world leading. That makes industrial digitalization and industrial AI natural avenues for Europe. Third, Europe has a deep research heritage: a strong talent pool in the basic sciences, mathematics, and computer theory, and top universities and research institutes capable of supporting foundational model research. Finally, there is market scale. A single market of 450 million people gives the EU enough leverage to compel leading global AI firms to meet European regulatory standards.
Nevertheless, the EU’s AI strategy faces structural bottlenecks that prevent the third path from becoming fully independent. The most fundamental is its heavy reliance on the United States for computing power, chips, and underlying infrastructure. Europe lacks large domestic AI cloud providers, and its supply of high-end GPUs and chips depends heavily on America. Domestic AI venture capital is far smaller than in China and the United States, and growth capital for later-stage companies is scarce. As a result, European startups struggle to grow into platform giants comparable to OpenAI or Baidu. Much of the capital that does exist comes from U.S. investors, binding Europe’s industrial ecosystem to the United States and putting full technological sovereignty out of reach.
A second bottleneck is the fragmentation of the internal market. The 27 Member States differ in language, taxation, labor law, and public procurement, so the same AI product must clear multiple approvals to roll out across borders. This fragmentation blocks the continent-wide economies of scale seen in China and the United States and raises the cost of scaling for AI companies. Member States also diverge sharply over regulatory stringency and industrial subsidies, making coordination extremely costly.
Third, regulation itself is a double-edged sword. Stringent risk classification and compliance requirements raise corporate R&D costs. While they protect citizens’ rights, they burden startups and SMEs and somewhat slow the iteration of cutting-edge domestic models. Striking the right balance between regulation and innovation is extraordinarily difficult.
Finally, the EU faces a geopolitical dilemma: it cannot easily remain neutral between China and the United States. European and American values and security architectures are deeply intertwined, and Washington continually coordinates AI export controls and chip restrictions among its allies. Yet Europe also needs to sustain economic, green, and manufacturing-digitalization cooperation with China. Caught between the two, the EU finds its AI policies constantly entangled with geopolitical security agendas.
In sum, the third path makes the EU a “rule-making third pole,” not a fully independent technological one. In governance, rule-setting, and ethics, the EU has blazed a genuine third path. It offers a paradigm of AI governance distinct from America’s laissez-faire innovation and China’s industry-first approach, and it is shaping global AI standards. This is its greatest achievement. In frontier general-purpose models and computing infrastructure, however, it is unlikely to become a technological pole on par with China and the United States. A more realistic role for the EU is that of global AI rule-setter, hub for industrial AI applications, technical intermediary, and standards arbiter, rather than a standalone large-model superpower.
The future global AI landscape, then, will most likely not be a simple three-way split. It will be two technological poles, China and the United States, plus one rule-making pole, the EU. The greatest value of the EU’s third path lies not in building top-tier large models to rival China’s and America’s. It lies in restraining unregulated AI competition, embedding human rights, security, and explainability into global AI governance, and offering the Global South an alternative paradigm.
Lighting the Lamp of AI
In the agricultural era, knowledge traveled from East to West: China’s Four Great Inventions and its imperial examination system contributed enormously to the European Renaissance and to Europe’s practice of modernization. In the industrial era, knowledge traveled from West to East, as “Mr. Democracy” and “Mr. Science” helped shape China’s New Culture Movement, while Marxist thought subsequently played a central role in China’s modernization—Western civilization’s contributions are evident. Today, as humanity enters the AI age, digital and ecological civilizations are transcending the logic of industrial civilization. Collaboration between China and the EU to usher in a new human Renaissance has become a call of the times.
The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz believed that China and Europe possessed complementary intellectual strengths: the Chinese excelled in practical observation and accumulated experience, while Europeans had developed greater strengths in theoretical reflection. In a 1692 letter to the Jesuit missionary Claudio Filippo Grimaldi, Leibniz advocated mutual intellectual exchange, urging both sides to “exchange gifts and enkindle light from light.” In Europe’s pursuit of modernization, China’s Four Great Inventions and imperial examinations undoubtedly lit the lamp of European modernity. In China’s journey of modernization, Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science, together with Marxist thought, lit the lamp of Chinese-style modernization. Today, in the shared practice of human modernity within a Global Community of Shared Future, how are we to light the lamp of AI?
Global AI has entered an era of two titans in competition. The United States has adopted a market-driven, enterprise-led framework focused on breakthroughs in frontier general-purpose models. China leverages its vast range of industrial applications and its complete manufacturing system to deploy AI at scale. The United States is undoubtedly the frontrunner. Yet its philosophy is ‘All in AI’: it channels the most advanced chips, capital, and electricity to its tech giants while wealth gaps grow severe. Left behind, many ordinary citizens see few remedies, and in hard-hit communities the opioid crisis has filled the void. Many Americans also oppose the construction of massive data centers, arguing that they seize social resources, threaten jobs, and render people redundant.
China advocates ‘AI in all’: AI that empowers every industry and serves all people, with genuine open-source development. It pursues regulation alongside development and development under regulation, balancing security and growth. This resonates with German attitudes, captured in the saying Ordnung muss sein—there must be order. China’s proposed Global AI+ Initiative actively engages Europe. China has found a middle ground between American under-regulation and European over-regulation, reflecting the ideal of “central harmony” and balance inherent in Chinese philosophy.
The story of AI evokes Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Nightingale,” in which a humble nightingale’s song proves more precious than the emperor’s jeweled imitation and, in the end, saves his life. Today, AI is that nightingale. Immanuel Kant held that humanity must always be treated as an end in itself, never merely as a means. AI today is a means, not an end. Humans define AI; AI does not define humans. The interpenetration of human and machine may, of course, create a new form of humanity. Against this background, the broader framing of China’s 2023 white paper, “A Global Community of Shared Future: China’s Proposals and Actions,” acquires fresh significance. Its terminology invites reflection on what humanity shares and how intelligent machines might reshape that common future.
This captures the core meaning of a joint China-EU effort to launch humanity’s second Renaissance: the second emancipation of humankind. Having separated humanity from theocracy, we must now distinguish humanity from AI. In the preface to his 1697 “Novissima Sinica,” Leibniz described the concentration of human cultivation and refinement at the opposite ends of Eurasia, in Europe and China, as “a singular plan of the fates.” He envisioned a future in which these two distant civilizations would extend their arms toward one another, helping to bring the peoples between them into a better way of life.
As the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun. The laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858 marked a historic step toward permanently linking distant continents into a Global Community of Shared Future. An anonymous poem celebrating the achievement began: “’Tis done! the angry sea consents, / The nations stand no more apart.” The poem went on to imagine the cable encircling the earth like a loving girdle, bringing distant peoples closer together in a spirit of human fraternity.
The world is undergoing profound changes unseen in a century. As humanity enters the AI age, true world history is unfolding, bringing generational shifts, and transformations in the logic of human civilization. Nomadic civilization followed the logic of “what is yours is mine,” viewing the present from the present. Agrarian civilization held that “what is mine is mine,” viewing the present from the past. Industrial civilization, bound together by supply chains, made yours and mine inseparable and viewed the present from the future. Digital civilization, akin to quantum entanglement, holds that I become myself through you, viewing tomorrow from yesterday. Ecological civilization, as one family under heaven, holds that I become “we” through you, viewing tomorrow from the day after tomorrow.
The AI era is forging a genuine world history. Let us embrace the new era of a Global Community of Shared Future with open arms
