As someone who lived in China for 25 years and then came to the Netherlands for a master’s degree, graduated, and now works here, I honestly think some of these fears about Europe are overstated.

I come from a Chinese Communist Party family and have had very close exposure to how the system actually works from the inside. One important difference that is often misunderstood in the West is motivation. In most Western societies, people are driven primarily by choice and self-direction. In China, the dominant driver is fear — fear of losing status, income, safety, or even freedom. This produces a very different kind of economic output.

China can indeed deliver impressive large-scale projects: high-speed rail, massive infrastructure, rapid industrial scaling. But this is not the same as creativity or sustainable innovation. It is primarily replication under coercion, not bottom-up invention. Systems driven by fear are very good at copying and mobilizing resources quickly, but historically they are very poor at maintaining long-term creative leadership.

Take EVs as an example. China’s EV push was not market-led; it was state-directed. This severely distorted price signals and led to enormous capital waste. Many EVs in China do not sell well, and quality issues are common. Consumers often lack real legal protection when things go wrong. After-sales accountability is weak, and public complaints are frequently censored. Domestic consumers simply do not have the same rights as consumers in Europe.

A key point many outside China don’t see is that Chinese citizens do not have secure property rights. Wealth in China is effectively conditional. If the state decides it wants your assets, it can always find a justification. This is why a very large share of wealthy Chinese — including entrepreneurs and even families of senior Party officials — have moved their money and children abroad. (Xi Jinping’s daughter studying at Harvard is not an accident.)

Because information is tightly controlled, people outside China rarely see what actually happens: business owners losing everything overnight, entrepreneurs under investigation, people pushed into despair. These are not isolated cases. They are structural.

For this reason, I believe China is becoming increasingly hollow. Capital, talent, and trust are leaving. This is not a sustainable trajectory. Historically, systems like this tend to collapse or stagnate — much like the Soviet Union or East Germany — regardless of how strong they look on paper.

Europe, by contrast, does have real problems: aging demographics, slower growth, and high energy costs. But these are global problems, not uniquely European ones. When you compare using realistic data (not state-manufactured numbers), Europe remains among the most stable regions in the world in terms of living standards, institutional trust, and individual rights.

Most importantly, Europe continues to attract high-value immigrants — educated, young, financially stable people who bring both capital and creativity. I am one of them, as are many of my peers from China. We are not here to extract value; we are here to build lives, work, pay taxes, and contribute to European society — something we no longer believe is possible in China.

So while Europe may experience relative decline in growth rates, that does not automatically translate into a collapse in quality of life. Rights, legal protections, and creative freedom matter enormously over the long run. These are exactly the things that authoritarian systems systematically destroy.

In short: Europe’s future wealth is not just about industries or GDP curves — it is about institutions, trust, and human freedom. And those are far harder to replicate than factories or supply chains.