From the seventh through the thirteenth century, China was, by essentially every measure that mattered at the time, the most advanced civilization on earth. The Tang dynasty (618–907) presided over a cosmopolitan Chang'an of perhaps two million people — the largest city in the world — with markets full of Persian silver, Korean monks, Sogdian traders, and Indian astronomers, and a Nestorian church and Zoroastrian temples within its walls. The Song (960–1279) followed it with what the historian Mark Elvin called the world's first industrial revolution — eight hundred years before the European one — and with a technological lead that took Europe nearly that long to close.
The list of Song achievements is almost too long to credit. Movable-type printing, devised by Bi Sheng around 1040 — four centuries before Gutenberg. Government-issued paper money, the jiaozi, first printed in Sichuan and made the empire's legal tender by the 1020s — six centuries before Sweden tried it. Gunpowder weapons fired from bamboo and then iron barrels, the magnetic compass adapted for navigation, coal-fired blast furnaces producing perhaps 125,000 tonnes of iron a year — more than all of Europe would manage in 1700 — water-powered textile machinery, early smallpox inoculation, and ocean-going junks with watertight bulkheads and sternpost rudders. The Song economy was monetized, urbanized, and commercialized in ways Europe would not match until the eighteenth century: rice strains newly imported from Champa allowed double-cropping and fed a population that passed 100 million, and the civil-service examinations, expanded under emperors like Taizong, had become the dominant route into an elite of scholar-officials chosen, in principle, by merit rather than birth. Hangzhou, the Southern Song capital, held over a million residents and astonished Marco Polo when London had perhaps 40,000. Why this did not lead to a sustained industrial takeoff — the so-called Needham Question — is one of the central debates of comparative economic history: the Mongol conquest of 1279, the Ming policy reversals that scrapped Zheng He's treasure fleets and turned inward after 1433, the absence of competing states to spur innovation that European fragmentation supplied, and a stable agrarian-bureaucratic elite with no stake in disruption all figure in rival explanations.
The current Chinese state's narrative of a return to historical normalcy — that China being the world's largest economy is the default condition of human civilization, and the last 200 years of Western dominance were a humiliating aberration — leans heavily on the Tang–Song memory. It frames the century of humiliation from the Opium Wars onward as a deviation now being corrected. It is a narrative with substantial empirical support, which is exactly what makes it so politically potent at home and abroad.