China: From Marco Polo to Contemporary Geopolitics

1Marco Polo and the Mongol era 1200s–1300s

When the Venetian merchant Marco Polo set out for Asia with his father and uncle in 1271, the Mongol Empire stretched across much of Asia. The Polos reached the court of Kublai Khan, Genghis Khan’s grandson, around 1275, and Marco spent 17 years in China before arriving home in 1295, according to Britannica.¹ His book, known as Il milione or The Travels of Marco Polo, gave Europeans one of their first detailed portraits of China.¹

Kublai renamed his dynasty the Yuan in 1271 and completed the conquest of southern China by defeating the Southern Song in 1279. The Yuan governed through a Chinese-style centralized bureaucracy and tax system, made Beijing its capital, rebuilt the Grand Canal and expanded foreign trade.² Gunpowder, which most historians believe originated in China around the 10th century, had long been in use there.³

Doubts have been raised about whether Polo reached China at all. A detailed study by the sinologist Hans Ulrich Vogel, published by Brill, found that Polo’s descriptions of Yuan paper currency, salt production and revenues agree closely with Chinese sources that became available only long after his stay, and concluded that he was there.⁴

China was a major economic and technological center of the world long before the rise of modern Europe.

Peter’s World analysis

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2The Ming dynasty and Zheng He’s fleets 1368–1644

Rebellions drove the Mongols out in 1368.² The founder of the new Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang, a man of humble origins who ruled as the Hongwu emperor, built what Britannica calls one of the most stable and most autocratic of all Chinese dynasties.⁵

Between 1405 and 1433, the admiral Zheng He, a court eunuch from a Chinese Muslim family who served the Yongle emperor, commanded seven expeditions into the Indian Ocean. The first fleet sailed with 62 ships and 27,800 men. Over the seven voyages his fleets called at Southeast Asia, India and Sri Lanka, Hormuz and Arabia, and the coast of East Africa in what is now Somalia and Kenya, almost a century before the Portuguese reached India by sailing around Africa.⁶

After the Yongle emperor died in 1424, his successor suspended the expeditions. One last voyage left in 1431; Zheng He died in Calicut in 1433, and the fleet returned home that summer.⁶

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3The Qing dynasty and its territorial inheritance 1644–1912

Manchu armies from the northeast founded the Qing dynasty in 1644, China’s last imperial house.⁷ In the decades that followed, the Qing defeated the Dzungar Mongols and extended the empire to include Outer Mongolia, Tibet, Dzungaria and Turkistan; Tibet and the last two regions, now Xinjiang, lie within today’s People’s Republic. Under the Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors, who reigned from 1722 to 1796, commerce and handicraft industries prospered.⁷

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4The Opium Wars 1839–1860

Western merchants wanted Chinese tea, silk and furniture but found few Western goods that China wanted in return. British traders, and later American ones, filled the gap with opium smuggled into southern China, and for the first time China imported more than it exported, according to the State Department’s Office of the Historian. When the Qing tried to stop the trade, Britain went to war and won a series of naval engagements in the First Opium War (1839–42).⁹

The Treaty of Nanjing, signed Aug. 29, 1842, was the first of the “unequal treaties” between China and the imperial powers. China paid Britain an indemnity, ceded Hong Kong and agreed to a “fair and reasonable” tariff.¹⁰ It also opened five treaty ports: Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai. In 1844 the United States won similar terms in the Treaty of Wangxia.⁹ In the Second Opium War (1856–60), British and French troops captured Beijing and plundered and burned the Yuanming Garden, the imperial summer palace.¹¹

Chinese political culture dates the “Century of Humiliation” from 1839 to 1949, a period when China’s government lost control of large parts of its territory to foreigners. The concept is a key element of modern China’s founding narrative, Alison Kaufman of the research organization CNA told a U.S. congressional commission in 2011.¹²

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5Foreign imperialism and internal collapse 1850–1901

Revolt at home compounded pressure from abroad. The Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), led by Hong Xiuquan, a failed civil-service candidate who believed he was the brother of Jesus Christ, ravaged 17 provinces and took an estimated 20 million lives. To defeat it, the Qing relied on regional armies financed by local gentry, which weakened the central government.¹³

By the 1890s Britain, France, Russia, Germany and Japan held spheres of influence and trading privileges in China. In 1899–1900, Secretary of State John Hay’s “Open Door” notes urged equal commercial access for all the powers.¹⁴ In 1900 the anti-foreign Boxer movement besieged foreigners in northern China. An eight-nation force, including U.S. troops, captured Beijing that August, and the Boxer Protocol of Sept. 7, 1901, formally ended the uprising.¹⁵

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6The First Sino-Japanese War 1894–1895

Rivalry over Korea led to war in 1894, and Japan, confident after its successful modernization program, defeated China.¹⁶ Under the Treaty of Shimonoseki, signed April 17, 1895, China recognized Korea’s independence, ending its traditional suzerainty there; ceded Taiwan, the Pescadores (Penghu) Islands and the Liaodong Peninsula; and paid an indemnity of 200 million taels. Russia, France and Germany then forced Japan to hand Liaodong back.¹⁷ Taiwan remained a Japanese colony for the next half century.¹⁸

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7The 1911 Revolution and the Republic of China 1911–1927

A mutiny in Wuchang on Oct. 10, 1911, spread from city to city. Sun Yat-sen returned from abroad to become provisional president, and on Feb. 12, 1912, the boy emperor Puyi abdicated, ending the Qing dynasty. Sun soon gave way to Yuan Shikai, a former Qing viceroy.¹⁹

The new Republic of China never established a strong central government. Regional warlords held real power, and the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party, founded in Shanghai in 1921, joined forces in the Northern Expedition of 1926–27 to defeat them. The alliance collapsed in 1927, when the Nationalists turned on the Communists, killing them or purging them from the party.²⁰ The KMT, led by Chiang Kai-shek, and the CCP, in which Mao Zedong rose to the top, would fight for control of China for the next two decades.²⁰

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8Japanese invasion and war 1931–1945

On Sept. 18, 1931, an explosion destroyed a section of Japanese-owned railway near Mukden, now Shenyang. Japan blamed Chinese nationalists and used the incident to invade Manchuria.²¹ On July 7, 1937, Chinese and Japanese forces clashed at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing, and the two countries were thrown into full-scale war.²² Japanese troops captured Shanghai and the capital, Nanjing, where they carried out mass killings and rapes from December 1937 to January 1938.²³

Chiang’s Nationalist government fought Japan with a poorly armed and poorly trained army, while the Communists, based in Yan’an in the northwest, proved particularly effective at guerrilla warfare behind Japanese lines.²⁴²³ Estimates of Chinese deaths range from 15 million to 20 million, and more than 90 million Chinese became refugees in their own country, according to a Guardian review of Oxford historian Rana Mitter’s history of the war.²⁴ The conflict merged into World War II and ended with Japan’s surrender in 1945.²³

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9Civil war, the People’s Republic and Taiwan 1945–1949

Full-scale civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists broke out soon after Japan’s defeat. On Oct. 1, 1949, Mao declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).²⁰ Many soldiers and officials of the defeated Republic of China evacuated to Taiwan, and for the next 30 years the United States continued to recognize the ROC as the legitimate government of China.²⁵

That split still defines the region. Beijing says Taiwan is part of China. Taiwan, which still calls itself the Republic of China, is a self-governing democracy whose popularly elected leaders govern 23.3 million people; it held its first direct presidential election in 1996, the Congressional Research Service notes.¹⁸ U.S. policy is described in section 12 and section 19.

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10Mao’s China: the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution 1949–1976

In 1958 Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, a campaign for rapid industrialization that moved farm labor into small-scale industry such as backyard steel furnaces. It seriously disrupted agriculture, and three consecutive years of natural disasters turned the disruption into a national famine. Britannica puts the toll at about 20 million deaths from starvation between 1959 and 1962.²⁶

Other scholars estimate far more. The demographer Judith Banister calculated some 30 million excess deaths, the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng about 36 million and the historian Frank Dikötter at least 45 million, as the historian Roderick MacFarquhar summarized. Because so few reliable statistics were kept, a final count may never be possible.²⁷

In August 1966 Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to renew the spirit of the Chinese Revolution. Red Guard youth attacked party officials, intellectuals and elderly people; many were physically abused and many died, and the army eventually forced millions of urban Red Guards to move to the countryside. The upheaval lasted until autumn 1976 and was officially ended in August 1977.²⁸ Mao died in September 1976.²⁹

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11Deng Xiaoping and reform 1978–1990s

After Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping, purged and rehabilitated several times, assumed paramount power, and the party adopted the “Four Modernizations” of industry, agriculture, science and technology, and defense.³⁰ Farmers were given individual control over their production and profits, which greatly increased agricultural output within a few years of the policy’s start in 1981. Deng also decentralized economic management, strengthened trade ties with the West and allowed foreign investment in Chinese enterprises.²⁹ The party calls its system “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”³¹

Shenzhen, then a small border city immediately north of Hong Kong, was declared a special economic zone in 1979 and opened to foreign investment, technology and management. From 1980 it grew at a pace known in China as “Shenzhen speed.”³² Since reform and opening began in 1978, China’s growth has averaged more than 9 percent a year, lifting almost 800 million people out of extreme poverty and turning a low-income country into an upper-middle-income one, according to the World Bank.³³

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12The opening to the United States 1972–1979

President Richard Nixon visited China Feb. 21–28, 1972, the first sitting U.S. president to travel to the mainland, and met Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai.²⁵ Washington hoped rapprochement would increase its leverage against the Soviet Union, and Sino-Soviet tension contributed to Beijing’s desire for rapprochement.²⁵

In the Shanghai Communiqué issued at the end of the visit, the PRC affirmed that Taiwan was part of China. The United States said it “acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain that there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China,” and did not challenge that position.²⁵

The two countries established diplomatic relations on Jan. 1, 1979. Washington ended formal ties with the ROC but said it would keep cultural, commercial and other unofficial relations with the people of Taiwan. The Taiwan Relations Act, which became law on April 10, 1979, made it U.S. policy “to provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive character.”³⁴

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13Tiananmen Square 1989

After the death of former party chief Hu Yaobang in April 1989, student-led demonstrations calling for political and economic reform grew in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and spread to other cities. Party hard-liners, backed by Deng, insisted on suppression. Martial law was declared, and on June 3–4 the army forced its way to the square, killing hundreds and wounding thousands. The government’s official death toll was 241; other estimates are significantly higher. Public commemoration remains banned in China.³⁵

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14Joining the world economy 1990s–2010s

China became a member of the World Trade Organization on Dec. 11, 2001.³⁶

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15Military transformation 1990s–present

For decades the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has marshaled resources, technology and political will toward what it calls a “world-class” military, and its main focus is the First Island Chain, running from the Japanese archipelago to the Malay Peninsula, according to the Department of War’s 2025 China Military Power Report.⁸ China’s navy is the world’s largest by number of ships, with a battle force of more than 370, the Pentagon has said.³⁷ Its third aircraft carrier, the Fujian, China’s first domestically designed carrier and its first with a flat deck, completed its first sea trials in May 2024.⁸

China’s stockpile of nuclear warheads remained in the low 600s through 2024, and the PLA is on track to have more than 1,000 by 2030, the report says.⁸ Congressional analysts note that China wants its navy to act as part of an anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) force able to deter U.S. intervention near China’s coast or delay and weaken it.³⁷

In April 2024 the PLA dissolved its Strategic Support Force, which had formed the core of China’s information-warfare force since 2016.⁸ China’s Defense Ministry said the PLA now has four services (the Army, Navy, Air Force and Rocket Force) and four arms (the Aerospace Force, the Cyberspace Force, the new Information Support Force and the Joint Logistic Support Force).³⁸ The Aerospace, Cyberspace and Information Support Forces now report directly to the Central Military Commission, China’s top military body, the Pentagon says.⁸

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16Xi Jinping and “national rejuvenation” 2012–present

Xi Jinping became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012 and president in 2013. He has run a sweeping anti-corruption campaign and centralized party authority. In 2018 China abolished presidential term limits, and “Xi Jinping Thought” was written into the party and state constitutions.³¹

China’s national strategy is to achieve “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” by 2049, a vision that includes a “world-class” military that can “fight and win.” The Department of War assesses that the PLA is a key component of China’s ambition to displace the United States as the world’s most powerful nation.⁸

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17The Belt and Road Initiative 2013–present

In September 2013, on a visit to Kazakhstan, Xi announced the Silk Road Economic Belt, an overland infrastructure plan; weeks later he announced a Maritime Silk Road linking Asia and East Africa by sea. Together they became the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Its projects include ports, railways, roads, bridges, power plants and telecommunications networks. More than 140 countries have signed on, and China has become one of the largest creditors to developing countries.³⁹

Critics point to unsustainable debt. Sri Lanka, struggling to repay Chinese loans for a port project, agreed in 2017 to lease the port and 15,000 acres around it to China for 99 years.³⁹

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18The South China Sea 1990s–present

The South China Sea is bordered by Brunei, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam. The PRC claims all of its island groups, each of which is also claimed by at least one of the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Vietnam and Taiwan. The State Department concluded in 2022 that the PRC unlawfully claims sovereignty or some form of exclusive jurisdiction over most of the sea.⁴⁰

On July 12, 2016, an arbitral tribunal in a case the Philippines brought under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea found no legal basis for China to claim historic rights to resources within its “nine-dash line.” It ruled that China had violated the Philippines’ sovereign rights, including by building artificial islands, and that land reclamation at seven Spratly features had severely harmed coral reefs. The tribunal called its award final and binding; China did not take part in the proceedings.⁴¹

U.S. warships sail through the area in what Washington calls freedom-of-navigation operations, such as a February 2021 transit near the Paracel Islands that challenged restrictions imposed by China, Taiwan and Vietnam.⁴²

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19Taiwan: the central flashpoint Today

The PLA is refining several military options to force unification, including, most dangerously, an amphibious invasion, a firepower strike and possibly a maritime blockade, according to the 2025 China Military Power Report. A large-scale amphibious invasion “would be one of the most complicated and difficult military operations for the PLA,” requiring it to win and hold air and maritime superiority, the report says.⁸

The PLA has steadily increased its air and naval presence around Taiwan and crosses the Taiwan Strait centerline with increasing frequency. China honored that unofficial line, drawn in the late 1950s, until 2019, the Pentagon reports.⁸ Taiwan’s Defense Ministry publishes daily counts of PLA aircraft and ships near the island.⁴³ The strait is about 130 km (81 miles) wide at its narrowest, according to Taiwan’s government.⁴⁴

The Taiwan Relations Act creates so-called strategic ambiguity by not specifying whether the United States would defend Taiwan, CRS notes. In January 2026 the State Department said Washington “opposes unilateral changes to the status quo, including by force or coercion.”¹⁸

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20U.S.–China strategic competition 2018–present

In June 2018, after a Section 301 investigation of Chinese practices on forced technology transfer and intellectual property, the U.S. Trade Representative imposed a 25 percent tariff on about $50 billion of Chinese imports, including goods tied to the “Made in China 2025” industrial policy.⁴⁵ In October 2022 the Commerce Department restricted exports to China of advanced chips used for supercomputing and artificial intelligence.⁴⁶

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21China’s military geography Today

Geography. China is a continental power with land borders running from Russia, Mongolia and North Korea to Central Asia, India and Southeast Asia, which gives it strategic depth but many neighbors to manage. Its coast faces the Yellow, East China and South China seas, behind the First Island Chain that the Pentagon calls Beijing’s strategic center of gravity.⁸

Military. The PLA’s missile forces, naval expansion and the 2024 restructuring described in section 15 are built for operations along that chain.

Alliances. China has one formal mutual-defense treaty, signed with North Korea in 1961, which obliges each side to “immediately render military and other assistance by all means at its disposal” if the other is attacked.⁴⁷ Relations with Pyongyang were “notably cool” in 2024, according to the Pentagon.⁸ Russia and China say their relationship is “superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era.”⁴⁸ The United States, by contrast, has mutual-defense treaties with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia, and with Thailand through the 1954 Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty.⁴⁹

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22Economic power and industrial capacity Today

China produced 960.8 million metric tons of crude steel in 2025, about 52 percent of world output, according to the World Steel Association.⁵⁰ It is responsible for more than 70 percent of global electric-vehicle production, the International Energy Agency says.⁵¹ U.S. officials have expressed alarm at the capacity of China’s shipbuilding industry compared with America’s, CRS reports.³⁷

Industrial capacity is military power in waiting.

Peter’s World analysis

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23The semiconductor problem Today

Almost 90 percent of global high-volume, leading-edge chip production is concentrated in Taiwan. The United States relies mainly on Taiwan for leading-edge logic chips and on South Korea for leading-edge memory chips, while Japan holds about 35 percent of the world market for chipmaking equipment and about 50 percent for materials such as wafers and photoresists.⁴⁶

China has set a goal of meeting 80 percent of its domestic chip demand with domestic production by 2030. CRS says China is likely to fall short of that target but is catching up to leading nations in production capacity and capability. Washington has agreed with the Netherlands and Japan to coordinate controls on exports of some chipmaking equipment to China.⁴⁶

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24China and Russia Today

In a joint statement on Feb. 4, 2022, the Russian and Chinese governments declared that their friendship “has no limits” and that there are no “forbidden” areas of cooperation.⁴⁸ The two deepened their strategic partnership in 2024, “almost certainly driven by a shared interest in countering the United States,” and flew their first combined bomber patrol into the U.S. Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone, according to the Pentagon. It also reports that Chinese state-owned defense firms supplied dual-use components, including semiconductors, radars and sensors, to support Russia’s weapons production during its war against Ukraine.⁸

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25China and the Global South Today

Beyond the BRI, China’s diplomatic missions grew to 274 in 2024, and it accredited its first PLA defense attachés to the Dominican Republic, Niger and Rwanda. Beijing also donates or sells military equipment to African countries, from armored personnel carriers to drones and patrol boats, according to the Pentagon.⁸

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26China’s strategic objectives Today

Beijing names three “core interests” whose official position it says is not subject to negotiation: the Chinese Communist Party’s control, the promotion of China’s economic development, and the defense and expansion of China’s sovereignty and territorial claims. It has extended the term to Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Senkaku Islands and India’s Arunachal Pradesh, according to the Pentagon.⁸

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27Timeline: the big historical arc 1270s–2020s

Each entry links to the section that tells the story; tap a milestone to jump to it.

1. 1270sMarco Polo reaches Yuan China
2. 1368Ming dynasty founded
3. 1405–33Zheng He’s voyages
4. 1644Qing dynasty founded
5. 1839First Opium War begins
6. 1850–64Taiping Rebellion
7. 1894–95First Sino-Japanese War; Taiwan ceded
8. 1900Boxer Rebellion
9. 1911–12Qing collapses; Republic of China
10. 1921Chinese Communist Party founded
11. 1931Japan invades Manchuria
12. 1937Full-scale Japanese invasion
13. 1949Mao proclaims the People’s Republic; ROC retreats to Taiwan
14. 1958–62Great Leap Forward and famine
15. 1966–76Cultural Revolution
16. 1972Nixon visits China
17. 1978Deng’s reform era begins
18. 1979U.S.–China diplomatic relations; Taiwan Relations Act
19. 1989Tiananmen crackdown
20. 2001China joins the WTO
21. 2012Xi Jinping becomes party leader
22. 2013Belt and Road announced
23. 2016South China Sea arbitral ruling
24. 2018U.S.–China tariff war begins; strategic competition accelerates
25. 2024PLA restructures its services and arms
26. 2020sTaiwan, technology, the South China Sea, supply chains and AI become central strategic issues

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