1. The Illusion of Catching Up
For several years now, European leaders have been repeating the same promise:
- invest more;
- produce more;
- innovate more;
- build more factories;
- develop more AI.
The diagnosis is simple:
"We have fallen behind China. We must accelerate."
This diagnosis even has its founding text. In September 2024, Mario Draghi delivered his report on the future of European competitiveness to the European Commission. His prescription: 800 billion euros in additional investment per year, nearly 5% of the Union's GDP, to "close the gap". Failing which, he warned, Europe would face a "slow agony".
One year later, barely more than 10% of his recommendations had begun to be implemented.
But this strategy assumes one thing:
that China will wait for us.
And it will not.
While Europe debates, China invests.
While Europe regulates, China builds.
While Europe hesitates, China is already planning the next decade.
This is not a figure of speech: in March 2026, Beijing launched its fifteenth five-year plan. Its stated objective — to become the world's leading technological superpower.
But the real question may not be how to catch up with China. It is whether this race is still worth winning.
This is no longer merely a question of competitiveness. It is a question of purpose.
Let us be fair: Draghi is probably right… within the current paradigm.
And that is precisely the problem.
In other words: the Draghi report may be the best possible diagnosis… of a paradigm that is coming to an end.
2. Why China Is Probably Beyond Catching
It is not a question of intelligence. It is not a question of more efficient workers.
It is a question of structure.
China has:
- a long-term industrial vision;
- a monetary policy serving its strategy;
- planning spanning several decades;
- an immense domestic market;
- considerable public investment capacity;
- a productive apparatus that has now moved up the value chain.
The figures give the measure of the gap. China now accounts for roughly 30% of global manufacturing output — its sixteenth consecutive year in first place. The United States accounts for 17%, Germany for 5%.
And in so-called "clean" technologies — solar panels, batteries, wind turbines, heat pumps, electrolysers — the dominance is even more crushing: China concentrates between 60% and 85% of global production capacity. The International Energy Agency now compares this grip to OPEC's hold on oil. Without China, the rest of the world can meet only a quarter of global demand.
Six years of American tariffs, sanctions and export controls have not slowed this trajectory.
China is no longer merely seeking to produce more cheaply. It now seeks to become the world's leading technological power.
In other words:
it is already playing the next game.
The real trap, then, is not being outpaced by China. It is believing that victory still consists in resembling it.
3. The Real Problem: We Are Still Playing the 20th-Century Game
The entire global competition remains organised around the same obsession:
- produce more;
- export more;
- grow faster;
- win market share.
But this logic belongs to the century of energy abundance.
We are now entering a world of limits:
- climate limits;
- mineral limits;
- energy limits;
- water limits;
- biological limits.
And this race has a cost that no one enters on the balance sheets.
Every point of GDP won in this competition is a withdrawal from stocks that do not replenish themselves: minerals, energy, soils, water, living systems. The two competitors face off by spending a capital that belongs to neither of them.
The irony is complete: even the "green transition", conducted as a race, is an acceleration of extraction. European demand for lithium could be up to 21 times higher by 2050. The OECD projects a 150% increase in global metal use by 2060. And Europe depends 100% on China for its refined heavy rare earths: the faster it accelerates on China's terrain, the deeper it sinks into the very dependence it claims to be fighting.
The winner itself gets burned by this game. Chinese overinvestment — 42% of GDP, against an OECD average of 23% — generates serial overproduction crises: solar panels, steel, aluminium, automobiles. Mountains of matter and energy dissipated for products sold at a loss or destroyed. Chinese solar industrialists themselves speak of a "death cycle", with prices barely covering production costs.
We speak endlessly of competitiveness. But competitiveness with respect to what? To a planet that does not negotiate? To resources that do not vote? To physical limits that ignore GDP rankings?
We continue to reason as if wealth consisted solely in producing more, when the real limiting factor is becoming the capacity of ecosystems to absorb that production.
China is not winning this race. It is winning it on the books. The real cost is transferred to the only actor that sits at no negotiating table.
Neither Brussels nor Beijing pays the price of the game.
The planet is the payer of first resort.
And this externalisation is not a moral accident. It is inscribed in the monetary architecture itself. Credit money demands repayment in monetary flows, never in biospheric flows. Financial debt is enforceable; ecological debt is not. The measurement system that referees the competition — GDP, market share, trade balance — counts only extraction as wealth, and never regeneration.
Europe is not losing because it plays badly. It is losing because it is trying to win a competition whose victory accelerates precisely what threatens its future prosperity.
The question is therefore no longer:
Who will produce the most?
The question becomes:
Who will be able to sustain the best level of prosperity over time with the fewest resources?
4. The Zero-Sum Game Everyone Wants to Win
We must pause for a moment on the measuring instrument of this competition: the trade balance.
For it rests on an arithmetical absurdity that no one questions.
The sum of the world's trade balances is zero, by construction. Every surplus is someone else's deficit. A world in which every country aims for a surplus is a world pursuing an accounting impossibility.
It is the queue contest: everyone stands on tiptoe. No one sees better. Everyone's calves hurt.
And even when "won", the game never ends. A surplus is not an achievement: it is a position to be defended permanently — through wage compression, currency undervaluation, subsidised overproduction. China is the textbook case: household consumption limited to 40% of GDP, forced savings compensating for inadequate pensions, an export apparatus fed at the expense of living standards. Germany tells the same story in its European version.
Competition through the trade balance is a machine for transferring household income to the export apparatus — in the "winner" as much as in the loser.
And its lasting equilibrium is an illusion. The surplus country accumulates financial claims on the deficit countries. These claims can only be honoured if the deficit countries export in turn — that is, if the surplus country gives up its surplus. The system only "repays itself" by endlessly accelerating physical flows: more freight, more extraction, more dissipation.
Most remarkably, orthodoxy itself knew this.
At Bretton Woods, in 1944, John Maynard Keynes proposed an international clearing house — the International Clearing Union and its currency, the bancor — which penalised excessive surpluses and deficits symmetrically. Keynes had understood that the race for surpluses was destabilising by construction. His proposal was rejected by the United States, then in surplus.
In other words: the current rules of the game were not chosen because they were rational. They were imposed by the winner of the moment.
This is precisely the project that the NES (NEMO Exchange Standard) takes up: an architecture for balancing international trade that penalises imbalances symmetrically — as Keynes intended — and integrates what 1944 did not know: the biospheric cost of flows. The bancor corrected accounting imbalances. The NES corrects accounting and ecological imbalances.
For the real paradigm shift does not consist in playing the same game better. It consists in changing the objective function itself. For two centuries, economies have optimised for growth. The 21st century will demand that we optimise for robustness.
This idea is not new in the history of science. As Thomas Kuhn showed, paradigms do not disappear because they become slightly less effective. They are replaced when the anomalies they produce become too numerous to ignore.
Economics seems to be approaching that moment. The climate, energy, geopolitical and social crises may not be successive accidents. They could be the symptoms of a paradigm that has become incapable of integrating the physical limits of the biosphere.
Changing paradigms is therefore not an ideological choice. It may simply be the next step in the evolution of economic thought.
5. True Innovation Means Changing Paradigms
Throughout history, great powers have not always won by playing better.
They have often won by completely changing the rules.
Europe possesses precisely a unique advantage.
It is the first region in the world to face simultaneously:
- demographic ageing;
- the climate constraint;
- energy scarcity;
- a strong democratic demand.
In other words:
it is the natural laboratory of a new economic model.
Let us be clear, for the objection will come: changing paradigms does not mean giving up industry. It means an industry oriented differently — material sobriety, repairability, circularity, relocalisation of vital functions. It is not producing less out of defeat; it is producing what is right, out of lucidity.
Instead of trying to beat China on the terrain of industrial growth, Europe could become the world's leading power in robustness.
Robustness is not the capacity to grow faster than others. It is the capacity to keep prospering when conditions turn unfavourable.
6. The True Competitive Advantage of the 21st Century
In a world subject to planetary limits, wealth will no longer be merely the capacity to produce.
It will be the capacity to endure.
The most prosperous nations will be those able to:
- preserve their ecosystems;
- reduce their dependence on scarce resources;
- maintain strong social cohesion;
- orient money towards regeneration rather than extraction.
In other words, tomorrow's real competition will no longer be a competition of power.
It will be a competition of robustness.
And this is precisely the paradigm shift that NEMO IMS proposes, on two complementary levels:
Internally: making money no longer an accelerator of material growth, but an instrument of ecological, social and economic resilience — a currency whose creation rewards regeneration rather than extraction.
Externally: the NES, an international exchange standard that replaces the absurd race for surpluses with a balancing of flows that integrates their biospheric cost.
Changing the rules of the game means, first of all, changing what money counts.
Conclusion
The 20th century rewarded economies capable of producing ever more.
The 21st century will reward those able to prosper sustainably in a finite world.
If China has become impossible to catch within the old paradigm, the answer may not be to run faster. Running faster means extracting faster, dissipating faster, and presenting the bill to the only payer who cannot refuse.
The answer may be far more ambitious: inventing the next economic paradigm.
For two centuries, power has been measured by the capacity to extract more than others.
The 21st century will measure power by the capacity to preserve what everyone's prosperity depends on.
Civilisations do not become dominant because they win every competition. They become dominant when they invent the rules of the next one.
Jean-Christophe Duval