La Chine à toute vitesse

A meeting with Dan Wang, Pierre Haski, and Arancha Gonzalez, at a time when geopolitical balances are being recomposed at an unprecedented speed, and when the industrial, technological, and political choices of a power like China are already shaping our future.

From a French perspective, China's industrial and technological ascent is no longer a distant novelty. Energy transition, electric vehicles, semiconductors, textiles: it now forms the backdrop to some of our most urgent debates. How can a power build so quickly, and at what cost?

In La Chine à toute vitesse, Dan Wang offers an original framework for understanding China's trajectory. He contrasts the American 'lawyer society', prone to regulating and contesting, with an 'engineer state' that conceives of China as a permanent construction site.

Faced with these two 21st-century giants, Europe sometimes struggles to define its own model.

A New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year, and named best book of the year by The New Yorker, La Chine à toute vitesse was hailed upon its release as one of the most significant essays of its time.

Its author, Dan Wang, an analyst who lived in China for over ten years and is now a research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, will debate this thesis with Arancha González Laya, former Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs and Dean of the Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA) at Sciences Po, as well as with Pierre Haski, former Beijing correspondent, geopolitical columnist for Le Nouvel Obs and France Inter, and president of Reporters Without Borders.

Together, they will examine the growing rivalry between Beijing and Washington, the new economic and technological wars, the reconfiguration of global supply chains, and the room for manoeuvre Europe still has to defend its model, its interests, and its values.

Moderated by François Reynaert, journalist and essayist for Le Nouvel Obs, this event, organised in partnership with Le Nouvel Obs, the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, and Éditions Arpa, invites us to gauge the power dynamics that are already reshaping the world of the 21st century.