Many Western observers view China’s rapid advancement in high-tech domains such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, electric vehicles and green energy as a surprise. Long dismissed as a copycat, China is only now being grudgingly acknowledged as an innovator throughout parts of the collective West.
Yet this framing misunderstands history. For millennia, stretching back to the Zhou and Qin and flourishing particularly under the Han, Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties, China stood at or near the global pinnacle of innovation.
What we are witnessing today is not an anomalous creative awakening enabled by global capitalism, but rather the reassertion of a Chinese tradition interrupted by gunboats, opium and colonialism.
China’s legacy of innovation, i.e., the creation and diffusion of new knowledge, technologies or systems that transform societies, is deeply woven into global civilization. In pre-industrial contexts, Chinese innovation and invention blurred more, as many advances were both new and applied, taking various forms.
