By Angelo Giuliano
I came to China in 1995 because I wanted to see Deng Xiaoping's reforms with my own eyes. I stayed thirty years. But the longer I stay, the clearer it becomes: this story is not about me, and it is not even primarily about China. It is about the end of one era and the beginning of another.
In 1995, the world was unipolar. One country wrote the rules, policed the planet, and told everyone else there was no alternative. China, still poor, still rebuilding, kept saying the same quiet sentence: "We do not seek hegemony. We seek development." The West laughed. Thirty years later, almost nobody is laughing.
China never wanted to be the new sheriff. It is a reluctant superpower. It does not export revolution, does not station troops in 800 foreign bases, and does not demand that other countries rewrite their constitutions or change their religions. What it wants is far more modest and, for the old order, far more dangerous: to be left alone to develop in peace, to trade fairly, and to be treated as an equal participant, not a subordinate.
Yet simply by succeeding on its own terms—lifting the last 98.99 million rural citizens out of extreme poverty (every person tracked by name), building infrastructure at a speed and scale the rest of the planet combined cannot match, and offering cooperation without political strings—China has become the living proof that another model is possible. That is all it took to shatter the myth that there is only one acceptable way to organise a society.
The numbers are now beyond dispute: more than 70 % of all poverty reduction on Earth since 1981 happened here. Roads, schools, hospitals, high-speed rail, 5G, renewable energy, electric vehicles—China leads in almost every field that actually improves daily life. And it did it while repeating, again and again, "We are still a developing country. We do not lead the world; we participate in it."
That reluctance to dominate is precisely what terrifies the old hegemon. A country that becomes the largest economy, the largest manufacturer, the largest trading partner of most nations, yet keeps saying "win-win cooperation" instead of "you're either with us or against us," is far more subversive than any overt empire could ever be.
The shift from unipolar to multipolar is already complete for most of humanity. BRICS now represents a larger share of global GDP than the G7. The Belt and Road reaches 150 countries. Dedollarisation is no longer a theory; it is daily practice in Moscow, Tehran, Riyadh, Jakarta, and Brasília. Countries that were told they had no choice are choosing differently, not because China ordered them to, but because China offered them an option that does not come with lectures, regime-change operations, or aircraft carriers off the coast.
Meanwhile, the human reality remains unchanged and universal. A parent in a newly built village in Guizhou worries about the same things as a parent in Detroit or Damascus: children's education, medical bills, and a safe neighbourhood. The laughter of grandparents dancing in public squares at night is the same in Xi'an as it is in Palermo or Havana.
The 1% need us to miss that simple truth. Their power depends on the 99 % seeing monsters across every border. Their profits require perpetual enemies.
China's real gift to humanity is not its intention to rule the world—it has none—but the quiet demonstration that a civilisation can rise, lift its people, and still refuse to play the imperial game.
The unipolar era is over.
Poverty at the Chinese scale is no longer inevitable.
And the world does not need a new boss; it only needed one great power to prove that being a responsible participant is enough.
That proof is now in front of everyone.
All that remains is for the rest of us to stop letting the old order scare us into fighting each other over illusions.
—Angelo
Thirty years watching the future arrive, one ordinary day at a time.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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