Alessandro Aresu | Partner or Rival? | Festivalfilosofia 2025

Imagine an American team winning the International Mathematical Olympiad, but when you look at the photo, you realize that almost all the faces are Chinese. It sounds like a joke, but it's the most honest snapshot of how the global competition for talent and knowledge works today. The widely held view is that the rivalry between the United States and China is a modern-day Cold War, waged through tariffs, sanctions, and threats related to artificial intelligence. But the reality is more nuanced: partnership and competition go hand in hand, and the two powers often exchange talent, technology, and even dreams for the future as if they were currency. The argument here is simple but uncomfortable: today, the strength of a civilization is measured not only by how many ships or smartphones it produces, but by how many minds it manages to attract and retain. The real battle is not just industrial, but educational. Alessandro Aresu, an expert in geopolitics and a scholar of the transformations of capitalism, recounts this through stories that seem taken from novels but are, in fact, true portraits of an era in which education is worth more than raw materials. Take Jensen Huang, the founder of Nvidia: born in Taiwan, he was sent to the United States by his parents at the age of nine because there, and only there, one could dream big. He ended up in a juvenile detention center in Kentucky, studied engineering while working in fast-food restaurants, went to Stanford, and founded the company that today supplies the digital brains of the entire world. And this is not an isolated case: at artificial intelligence conferences in Nashville, the most widely spoken language is not English but Chinese. University professors in California praise groups of Chinese doctoral students who then end up working for OpenAI, Amazon, or Adobe. And when it comes to generative AI patents, Chinese universities are beginning to outpace American ones, with the state-owned power grid giant patenting software for infrastructure maintenance. Something similar is also happening in Taiwan, where elementary school children wait outside restaurants to meet high-tech entrepreneurs, dreaming of becoming like them. The story of supremacy plays out on two levels: on the one hand, there is the industrial scale—China produces ships, smartphones, and energy at a pace unthinkable for anyone else. On the other hand, there is the race for education: from the imperial civil service exams that were abolished and then reinstated, to universities bursting with students, to the talent diaspora that fuels American laboratories. The United States remains a global magnet: today, its universities are home to nearly 330,000 Indian students and 277,000 Chinese students. And even Donald Trump, after signing orders to restrict visas, let slip: “Without them, our universities would go to hell.” However, this dynamic creates a structural tension. Scientific cooperation drives innovation, but mutual suspicion—fear that research is also used for military or propaganda purposes—threatens to stifle it all. Just consider the use of mathematics as a symbol of military power, both in American propaganda in the 1950s, with Donald Duck explaining geometry on TV, and today in Chinese parades, where a Harvard mathematician who has returned to his homeland is celebrated as a national hero. In this context, Europe appears to be the great absentee. From Nokia to the present day, Europe has almost completely lost its ability to produce mass-market technology: no European smartphones, few digital platforms, and talent fleeing to the United States. Niche industries remain, but Europe’s budget is stuck at 1% of GDP—far too little to compete. And without a strong response, Europe risks remaining merely a consumer of others' ideas. Here is the perspective that is often overlooked: the true global challenge is not to decide who produces the most or who imposes the toughest tariffs, but where the world's brightest young people will want to live, learn, and build the future. Will it be America, with its universities and its salaries? Will it be China, which is reinventing its millennia-old tradition and investing in industrial and educational scale? Or will there be a third hub capable of retaining and nurturing talent? The answer to this question will determine who leads the world, more than any trade agreement or military parade. In today's global competition, the winners are those who know how to attract and nurture talent. On Lara Notes, if you believe that the real power today lies in the ability to attract talent, you can declare that this idea has become part of your worldview with I'm In. And if this story inspires you to discuss it with someone over dinner, on Lara Notes you can mark the conversation with Shared Offline—so there's a record of those conversations that truly change the way we think. This talk by Alessandro Aresu is from Festivalfilosofia: you have just saved yourself over an hour of listening.