As is the case in China today, the innovation ecosystem was often integrated into governance, with governments sponsoring astronomical observatories, standardizing measurement, developing flood control systems, advancing calendrical science, and advancing metallurgy.

Beyond intellectual and technological inventions, China's tradition of innovation also manifested in civilizational-scale engineering feats, on a scale and with a continuity rare elsewhere before the modern era. The 1,800-kilometer Grand Canal, with origins dating back to the 5th century BCE, stitched together the Yellow and Yangtze River basins, creating the backbone of China's north–south integration.

To build it, imperial engineers mobilized vast labor forces not only to dig and dredge but also to literally cut through hills and flatten mountains to maintain a navigable gradient. These undertakings, alongside the 21,000 km Great Wall, demonstrated a mastery of hydraulic and civil engineering that reshaped landscapes to connect and protect the empire. These are examples of innovation not only in devices but in mobilization and scale.

Importing foreign techniques was never foreign to this system; China historically absorbed, adapted, improved, and then 'exported' innovations. More recently, China has borrowed-heavily-from Western modern innovation ecosystems, encompassing venture capital, intellectual property law and academic–industrial partnerships. These have been absolutely critical accelerators in China's reemergence. Similarly, a popular East Asian paradigm of state-led capitalism was picked up from the Four Tigers.

The reverse, of course, also happened. European nations borrowed substantially from Chinese craftsmanship, from Dutch Delft Blue imitating Chinese porcelain to actual industrial espionage. In the 1840s, the British East India Company commissioned Robert Fortune to travel deep into China -disguised, in many cases-to smuggle out live tea plants, seeds, and processing knowledge.

His mission effectively broke China's long-standing primacy in tea cultivation and processing knowledge, helping to birth India's modern tea industry. These were not isolated cases; silk and metallurgical techniques were also systematically copied or imitated in Europe.

China's creative disruption only began in the mid-19th century, with the arrival of Western gunboats, the Opium Wars, colonial treaties, internal rebellions, and political fragmentation. The institutions and capital flows that supported innovation were destroyed or severely weakened.

China's creative momentum was displaced by the urgencies of national survival. Not all blame can be attributed to Western powers: a stagnant Qing China had grown complacent and was hindered by Confucian bureaucratic rigidity, institutional inertia and a refusal to adapt to industrial capitalism and the new world.

Today's creative China is returning to creative capacity through new technological models and economic paradigms. The evidence is compelling. , China entered the Global Innovation Index's Top 10 for the first time, unusual for a middle-income economy.

The scale of today's patent activity is staggering. China accounted for roughly a quarter of all global patent submissions in 2024. Several Chinese firms and research institutions published thousands of patent families in a single year. Citation impact has risen sharply in several fields such as AI, materials, fintech and green energy, even as quality remains uneven overall.

Moreover, China is not merely active domestically: it increasingly seeks foreign patent protection, especially in domains where advanced economies also file. This pattern signals not imitation, but innovation in the highest-value fields.

It is particularly noteworthy that China has filed more patents in the field of generative AI than any other country over the past decade. Between 2014 and 2023, China filed over 38,000 patents related to generative AI, compared to“just” over 6,000 from the US. Patents do not automatically translate to products or services, but the focus on the technological frontier is clear.

Such scale demands that we change how we frame China's innovation story. Too often, China's technological advance is portrayed as catch-up, technology transfer, IP theft or reverse engineering. However, the data tells a different story: China's innovation and inventiveness are reaching new heights. The country is positioned to outcompete in nearly all next-generation fields.

Yet why does surprise persist? Multiple biases are at play. First, the dominant narrative of modernization privileges the West as the origin point of progress. Non-West innovation is often framed as derivative or reactive.

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As Tonio Andrade has shown in“The Gunpowder Age”, China was at the forefront of military innovation for centuries before Europe's rise. Second, many analysts operate with 20–30-year windows, treating disruption as the norm rather than the exception. The last 150 years are interpreted as the“baseline” in this limited analysis. Third, intellectual property regimes and global norms have imposed Western definitions of innovation, which skew perceptions of what constitutes innovation and invention.

Recognizing China's innovativeness as a restored global norm, not an aberration, has implications across multiple dimensions. Innovation always reflects its technological frontier-bronze metallurgy then, AI now. Both transformed economies and geopolitics.

Strategically, underestimating China's creative capacity is perilous. Policies predicated on China's status as a follower risk being outrun. In trade, tech and alliance frameworks, actors must assume China is no longer a perpetual aspirant.

In fact, we should become increasingly accustomed to China being a world-class innovator again, on a scale otherwise seen mainly in the US, and, in different ways, in Europe and Japan.

If China has always been a contributor, then global standards and norms must accommodate alternative intellectual traditions, industrial models and paths of development. The world must stop the interpretive bias that tends to center Western originality.

The question is not whether China is innovative, but how others respond. Innovations, rarely confined within borders, tend to benefit not just the few but the many. A more innovative China can contribute to the expansion of global public goods.

Surprising?The greater surprise should have been that one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations ever came to a brief innovative halt. The world should prepare for China not as a latecomer, but as a civilizational innovator returning to form.

Richard Ghiasy is the director of GeoStrat, a geopolitics consultancy and academy in the Netherlands

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