Artificial Intelligence Between East and West: While Beijing Teaches Children to Use It, Europe Still Debates Rules

When Xi Jinping, roughly a year and a half ago, directed Beijing's primary schools to introduce artificial intelligence teaching into their curricula, he was not signing a bureaucratic circular. He was sketching the profile of a nation that intends to arrive first. Beijing, like every self-respecting capital, functions as a laboratory and a showcase: what it experiments with within its borders becomes, within a few years, the norm for the rest of China's cities. This is not speculation — it is a mechanism tested over decades of centralised policy.

Children of seven, eight, nine years old learning to interact with artificial intelligence systems, to understand their logic, to use them as tools rather than mysteries. A generation that, by the time it reaches university, will already have years of practice behind it. This is not science fiction: it is the plan China made explicit, in black and white, in its national AI strategy published in 2017 and updated with increasingly ambitious targets through to 2030. China's Ministry of Education has integrated artificial intelligence content into national school curricula, backed by massive investment and partnerships between public institutions and technology giants such as Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. Source: Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, 2024 curricular plan.

Then one arrives in Europe. The shift in atmosphere is immediate, almost physical. The continental debate on artificial intelligence has taken a clear direction: rules, limits, restrictions. The European AI Act, which entered into force in August 2024 and is being applied in progressive phases through 2026, is the most articulated regulatory text any government has ever produced on the subject. Source: Official Journal of the European Union, Regulation 2024/1689. There is nothing wrong with wanting to govern a powerful technology. The problem arises when governing becomes the end, rather than the means. When the public conversation stops asking "how do we use it better" and gets stuck on "how do we restrict it more."

The paradox is that these restrictions do not stop the technology. They only slow it down at home. The algorithms keep running, American and Chinese startups keep growing, and Italy's brightest researchers, engineers and data scientists keep leaving. Despite increasingly restrictive visa policies introduced by the Trump administration from 2025 onward, the brain drain from Italy to the United States has not stopped. OECD data confirms that Italy remains one of the European countries with the highest rate of qualified emigration, with a significant concentration in the technology and research sectors. Source: OECD, Education at a Glance 2025.

There is something deeply contradictory in this picture. Regulatory walls are being built to protect citizens from a technology that, in the meantime, their children are not learning in school, and their most capable colleagues are going elsewhere to develop. The global competition over artificial intelligence is not a metaphor: it is a real race, with real timelines, with real consequences for a country's ability to generate wealth, innovation and influence in the world.

The question Europe should be asking itself, with the same urgency that Beijing has already answered, is not only how to regulate AI. It is how to educate those who will use it, build it and lead it. Because in the long run, the real industrial policy on a technology is called education. And on this front, the gap is already open. Every year that passes without a structural response is a year handed as a gift to those who have already given their answer.