There was literal starvation in the US in the Great Depression too (which was 1929 all the way to the late 30s, pretty close to WWII). The US got over it after a couple of decades.
Similarly the EU of 2025, has nothing to do with WW2-era starvation, that has been over half a century in the past.
And of course there was literal starvation in China as well after WWII, and much more poverty there than in the EU 30 years ago (even including Eastern Europe).
And you think China, which had started for a very poor place after their civil wars, and had been ravaged by the Japanese invasion and occupation (including the only mass scale biological warfare in modern times), weathered WWII better than Europe?
EU taxes exorbitantly and does not reinvest in people. Instead wastes money on expanding bureaucracy and making the Government fatter. Passes asinine laws that stifle companies from innovating. If a company is wasting more time trying to be compliant with crazy regulations and avoiding ridiculous fines, it won't have time to focus on innovation.
First, the EU (well, governments of EU member countries, not the EU itself, which anyway doesn't tax citizens) invests far more into people than China does; civil services, from sanitation to healthcare to schools to social security, are all much better in the EU countries than in China.
Secondly, China also has extremely high bureaucracy, and extreme levels of government regulation - a classic problem for dictatorial regimes, especially ones spanning huge spaces (where direct control is physically impossible, even in the information age).
The big difference is that EU governments have drunk the coolaid on modern economical theories, and don't generally pick winners and losers in the market (beyond few key companies with deep ties to the ruling elites, mostly in banking), don't invest massive amounts to prop up companies doing price dumping, and generally play within the rules of world trade.
Of course, those rules are made up specifically to prevent any state from using its power to out-compete incumbent companies, many of which are US owned, but also German, French, Spanish etc owned.
Also, there is little appetite for EU level strategic decisions, EU member countries are far too divided. For example, Finland probably didn't have the power to prop up Nokia's phone division when Apple and Samsung started eating its lunch with smartphones, and France or Germany wouldn't have wanted to invest EU resources into doing it either. France is likely not going to be ok with propping up a German rival to BYD using massive funds, or vice versa for a French company.
So, while collectively the EU easily rivals China on money antld the USA on population, it is far too divided to pool those powers together, and the EU population mirrors this sentiment - there is not a strong EU identity that would see a Belgian person deeply proud of a major tech company based in Slovenia, or a Czech person cheering for a massive new investment in Portugal.
