Will the World Revert to the Four Millennia of Chinese Preeminence?
The United States is currently the world’s top civilization. American military power extends globally through presence on every continent, American companies dominate international markets, including technology and entertainment, and American culture permeates societies worldwide. The dollar is the world’s reserve currency, American universities attract the world’s brightest minds, and American diplomacy shapes international policy. For most people, this American exceptionalism appears natural, perhaps even inevitable, being the natural result of democratic values, free markets, and technological innovation.
This widespread belief in American dominance as the natural order might reflect a historical myopia. Looking at all human history, America’s current position is not the inevitable destination of human progress, but a dramatic, perhaps temporary deviation from patterns that have prevailed for millennia. Since ancient times, China, not the West, was the world’s major power, wielding unmatched economic strength, military might, technological sophistication, and cultural influence. There have been competitors before. The Roman Empire challenged Chinese supremacy with great success, creating a powerful Western alternative that endured for a few centuries before falling to the deeper historical trends.
From archaeological records, China has been an organized civilization starting at least two millennia BCE. From approximately 200 BCE onward, we have documented records of China’s establishment and maintenance of superiority over the world economy, technological innovation, and civilizational development. During the Han Dynasty, China’s population and economic production already exceeded all other civilizations. Chinese agricultural innovations supported high population densities, Chinese manufacturing supplied highly prized goods across vast trade networks, and Chinese administrative systems governed territories with great consistency and effectiveness.
The Chinese developed organizational principles that proved durable. They perfected centralized, authoritarian governance through professional bureaucracies selected by merit rather than birth. They developed technologies like paper, printing, gunpowder, and the compass that would transform the world, and created cultural and philosophical systems that provided stability regardless of political change.
Significantly, this Chinese preeminence is resilient. Dynasties rose and fell, foreign invaders conquered parts, and sometimes all of China; natural disasters ravaged regions, and internal rebellions fragmented the empire. Yet the historic pattern endured. After each trauma, China reasserted its centralized authority and resumed its position as the world’s leading civilization.
The persistence of this pattern would suggest that the world will, eventually, return China to its dominant role.
But possibly the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the United States present a new reality that will shift these historical patterns. As mentioned above, there have been other challenges to China’s top position, but this time, there are exceptional circumstances that might change everything.
China’s rise and long supremacy took place with little contact with the outside world other than its immediate neighbors. There was little interaction and competition with other large civilizations. For example, Rome’s rise to a great empire had little interaction with China. In our modern world, with the ease of long-distance travel, instant communications, and the extension of military power worldwide, global isolation has ended. Countries share knowledge and culture. They compete economically and militarily. This places the long pattern of Chinese civilizational exceptionalism to the test as never before.
Another factor we should consider is the unprecedented wealth created by Western civilization and Japan during the Industrial Revolution. Over the millennia before, human wealth increased slowly, and the great mass of people lived at subsistence levels. The technical and organizational advances in the West in the 19th and 20th centuries increased human productive capacity by orders of magnitude within decades. China has started to catch up, but largely by borrowing elements of Western civilization, such as free enterprise and aggressive trade policies.
Could these new developments bend the arc of history to new forms of organization and development? Will the United States continue to be the center of this trend? These are questions unlikely to be answered in our lifetime. But now is a good time for us to think deeply about how we organize human activity on a global scale. The changes starting in the 19th century and escalating now are creating new opportunities and problems for human society. If the old mold is to be broken, what will replace it?