I am in Shenzhen during Donald Trump’s visit to China. In the room, the television is on in the background. At one point I catch a glimpse of his speech. The American president speaks with extraordinary emphasis that America is full of Chinese restaurants, and that this would be a very important fact, almost tangible proof of America’s great openness to the world.

In the audience before him sit the highest representatives of the US big tech companies, displayed like trophies, perhaps to exert some form of pressure on their Chinese counterparts. The full storytelling of Western innovation, wrapped up and delivered to the international stage.

On the other side, Xi Jinping listens impassively, with the usual imperial mandarin posture that the Western media often reduce to coldness or authoritarian opacity.

While the images of the ceremony scroll on the TV, outside the window Shenzhen pulses. In just a few decades, it has gone from being a village on the Pearl River Delta to a futuristic metropolis: skyscrapers, underground hubs, hyper-digitalised shopping malls, corporate campuses that have nothing to envy Silicon Valley, streets jammed with electric cars and silent scooters delivering food, packages, services to every corner of the city.

From here, Trump’s speech on Chinese restaurants sounds almost surreal

It is as if America, in order to talk to China, can still rely on the reassuring image of an ‘other’ that exists only as an exotic decoration within its own world. While, in the meantime, that ‘other’ has become an autonomous universe, a complete system, a social, technological and political laboratory of gigantic proportions.

The Chinese reality, the everyday one, the one you breathe in cities like Shenzhen, continues to remain largely unknown to Western public opinion. It is not just a matter of censorship or propaganda – which do exist, and it would be naive to deny it. It is also the sum of laziness, cultural filters, and media habits: in our news reports, China appears as a blurry silhouette, a mixture of polluting factories, exterminated shopping malls, surveillance cameras, and some quaint stereotypes about the Lunar New Year.

What is almost completely missing, however, is the perception of the depth of the change taking place: the rise of an urban middle class that lives, consumes, aspires; the digital transformation of everyday life; the efficiency – often brutal, sometimes impressive – with which political decisions and investments are translated into infrastructure, railway lines, entire neighbourhoods.

When you visit or even stay a while in cities like Shenzhen, Shanghai, Chengdu, you realise that you are not simply ‘in another country’: you are on another planet within a planet . The way you pay, the way you move, the way you talk to the government, the way you shop, the way you treat yourself, the way you study, it’s different. Not necessarily better in every aspect – it would be naive to idealise it – but radically different. And above all, it is a world that no longer demands to be validated by the Western gaze.

For a long time we cultivated the illusion that the path was linear and unique: economic development, market liberalisation, Western-style democratisation, convergence of values. China, in this narrative, was a kind of rebellious teenager that would, sooner or later, rejoin the ranks of the ‘right story’. Today, looking at Shenzhen at night from a taxi window, that story looks more and more like a fairy tale we tell ourselves in order not to admit that the world has now definitely taken other paths.

Because behind the statistics, behind the geopolitical analyses, there is a simple and powerful fact: a system that, with all its limitations and shadows, is producing for hundreds of millions of people unprecedented levels of material well-being. Better living conditions, access to consumption, social mobility, widespread digital services, functioning infrastructure. And this is happening without adhering to the Western ‘playbook’, indeed often claiming an autonomous trajectory.

As long as this reality remains blurred to Western public opinion, it can continue to be dismissed as a temporary anomaly, a ‘miracle’ destined to deflate, or worse, as something hopelessly flawed and therefore not worthy of being taken seriously. But this dismissal cannot last long.

The turning point will come when it becomes undeniably clear that China is not just the world’s factory, a big market to conquer or an object of fear in the news. When it will become clear that it really is another world within the world: a coherent ecosystem, a block of civilisations with its own economic, technological and cultural centre of gravity. And that, in the meantime, its system – albeit with all its human and political costs – is producing levels of widespread prosperity that many Western societies struggle to even imagine being able to guarantee for their citizens in the future.

That moment – which has already begun, but has not yet been internalised – will produce in the West a powerful blow to collective, almost existential self-esteem. Because it will undermine a deep-rooted conviction: the idea that development, freedom, well-being and justice follow a single model – ours – and that others, sooner or later, must necessarily converge towards it.

Faced with a China that functions, at least on some levels, much better than we do, the question will be: what if they are right?

This question is frightening not only for geopolitical reasons, but for reasons of identity. Because it forces Western societies to look in the mirror and question how much of their certainties are the result of universal values and how much, instead, of a long historical dominance that is now inexorably eroding. When one is no longer the centre of the world, it suddenly becomes less obvious to consider one’s own history as the final destination of all others.

The combination of political control, state capitalism and technological innovation actually works and has produced more tangible results than a fragmented, slow, and internally conflict-ridden model like ours.

What is coming is not just a new phase of global competition between powers. It is, more profoundly, the end of the possibility of ignoring what China represents. We will no longer be able to reduce it to a handful of television images, a few export figures, a bogeyman to be conjured up according to the political expediency of the moment. We will have to deal with it, as with a mirror that returns a picture of the world in which we are no longer protagonists but mere secondary actors.

The feeling here is of being on another world

It is as if aliens landed from another planet are building their own future without our knowledge. Sooner or later this reality will emerge in an overwhelming way.

At that moment, when reality becomes clear to Western public opinion, the backlash will be very strong. Perhaps it will be from there, from this impending earthquake of Western self-confidence, that a new awareness may arise: less arrogance, more curiosity, less desire to export models, more ability to understand. And perhaps, paradoxically, a more adult and less fragile form of self-confidence.