Working Like the Chinese—or for Them
The Objective, October 26, 2025
The West is obsessed with China’s rise but usually draws the wrong lesson. The key is not the state planning admired by some enlightened Europeans—starting with Mario Draghi—but the fact that China, unlike Europe, prioritizes production over consumption. Relative to its GDP, its state is smaller than Europe’s and finances a larger share of its spending through consumption taxes. Its welfare state is about one-third the size of Europe’s and half that of the United States: social spending stands around 10 percent of GDP, compared with 30 percent in Europe. Its investment rate is twice Sweden’s, which in turn doubles Spain’s.
It is true that China lacks political freedom. But Europeans fail to see how far we have already dismantled the very freedoms that once made us prosperous: the freedoms to produce, take risks, and compete. We have replaced the negative liberty of being free from state coercion—which includes the right to decide what to produce and what risks to take—with a pseudo-positive liberty that, in the futile attempt to plan “the common good,” strangles all initiative.
Progress is born of spontaneous order and creative destruction, not of the bureaucratic order that dominates the European project. Such spontaneous order requires laws that limit power and make its exercise predictable, not an arsenal of Byzantine directives and moral creeds crafted to please small yet strident elites.
Meanwhile, China plays a different game. Its taxes fall more on consumers than on producers, preserving individual incentives to work hard, save, and invest. The state directs resources across sectors, reserving a large share for collective projects—from science to highways and defense. Yet in many industries it allows fierce competition among firms, so that today its economy offers greater real room to create wealth.
In contrast, Europe boasts of rights but regulates to the point of suffocation, punishing those who compete, innovate, and produce. Spain is the most exaggerated negative of China: we heavily tax labor, even at modest income levels, while taxing consumption little—and even stimulating it through ever-rising public spending financed by credit from our more frugal neighbors.
In many respects, we are a low-cost caricature of a Europe in free fall. Driven by voters, our rulers confine themselves to buying votes through subsidies, pensions, and public salaries. As a result, we have neglected all kinds of infrastructure and collective effort. This is already evident in railways, highways, and defense, where investment has nearly vanished.
It is subtler—and more perverse—in education. We spend lavishly to provide mass schooling with little added value. Much of our education has ceased to be a long-term investment and become mere consumption. In this paradigm of trivialized freedom, Spaniards are free to pursue abundant education, but it no longer opens real opportunities.
From the left, we once believed that those without means could not be free—and there is much truth in that. Yet permanent subsidized dependency enslaves even more, turning citizens into moral pensioners. Much of Europe has lost its ethical and economic nerve because it has normalized state tutelage and relegated personal responsibility to the realm of the eccentric.
The alternative is not to copy Chinese authoritarianism, nor to multiply the futile waste of the Next Generation EU plan, but to recover a liberty grounded in law, sustained by responsibility, and inspired by effort. Without it, there can be neither prosperity nor a sustainable democracy.
If we are not free again to produce, innovate, and compete, we will not need to lose political freedom; losing economic freedom will suffice. It will be a voluntary and painful surrender—because if we refuse to work like the Chinese, we will end up working for them.
English version prepared with ChatGPT-5.0