In the Medieval World, China led. Chinese innovation shaped global development back then with inventions such as the magnetic compass, paper, paper currency, movable type and block printing, mechanical clocks, canal locks, wheelbarrows, seed drills and gunpowder. A thousand years passed before European civilization adopted all of these.
Chinese science led in geology and astronomy. Chinese observatories created the technology and scientific observations that inspired Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and others in Europe to make subsequent breakthrough hypotheses.
Between 1405 and 1433, China launched maritime expeditions involving hundreds of ships that travelled across the Indian Ocean to East Africa, Southeast Asia, and Arabia. It was 1488 before Portuguese explorers rounded Africa’s southern Cape of Good Hope and another decade before four small ships from Portugal reached India.
The late Medieval China, turning in on itself, saw its technological and scientific advantages disappear. European nation-states that adopted Chinese technologies and discoveries, while seeking competitive advantage, subsequently launched banking and scientific revolutions that spurred rapid growth, wealth accumulation, significant discoveries and new technologies.
Today, the Medieval mindset that stifled China is gone. The culture, dominated by Confucian thinking and resistance to external influences and change, has been replaced by a modern state led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a political institution that was inspired by the Russian Revolution in 1917 but has adopted a native tone.
The CCP bears little resemblance to the party of Soviet Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Although it remains centralist, it has integrated market-based ideas borrowed from Western democracies, embraced private enterprise and capitalism, and created a distinctive ideological synthesis that even Mao Zedong, the CCP’s founder, would find unrecognizable.
The result is an emerging China that is reasserting itself as the Middle Kingdom or Zhōngguó. This term suggests a China that sees its civilization as the centre of the world. Zhōngguó dates back to 1,000 BCE and, until the mid-15th century, was how China saw itself. Now, five hundred years later, the Middle Kingdom is back with the latest conference on climate change, COP30, an apt example of this move to the global centre.
The absence of the federal government of the United States at COP30, put the spotlight on China and the country took advantage, announcing ambitious goals to reduce greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions by up to 10% by 2035, to increase wind and solar power by 600%, raise non-fossil fuel energy production to 30% of the country’s total, show off its advances in solar panels and electric vehicles (EVs) and more. China at COP30 pledged significant reforestation projects, increasing natural carbon sinks, expanding ecologically protected areas, reducing methane emissions from agriculture, and reducing hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) by 30% from the atmosphere to protect the ozone layer. It was China, not the United States, that offered Global South countries financial help and technology sharing as part of a multilateral climate diplomacy initiative.
The European Union and 193 other countries attended. Joining them were NGOs, charities, and energy producers, including oil, gas and nuclear. The EU attempted to match the Chinese, with the bloc pledging to reduce GHG emissions by 72.5% by 2035, 90% by 2040, and 100% by 2050. It also announced climate finance efforts to support 80 countries transitioning from fossil fuels, a tropical forest conservation fund, and a Just Transition Action Plan to address nations most vulnerable to global warming and rising ocean sea levels.
Where was the U.S. at COP30? With Donald Trump pulling America out of the Paris Climate Agreement and referring to climate change as a Chinese hoax, there was no federal presence. The Americans who showed up were former diplomats, some state governors, city mayors, businesses and advocacy groups. America joined Afghanistan, Myanmar and San Marino as the only countries not in attendance.
At COP30, China didn’t steal the show, but it did move itself further on the path to restoring the Middle Kingdom. Whether the style of government that China represents is not to Western tastes, the model of multilateralism demonstrated by Belt and Road, and the Global Governance Initiative recently unveiled at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, the country sees itself as the present and future centre of the global community with a responsibility to establish a common future for humanity.
Indeed, the Middle Kingdom is back.
