China keeps head high facing unprecedented challenges in its global rise Wang Wen Published: Mar 01, 2021 05:48 PM Illustration: Tang Tengfei/GTChina is facing a more complicated, difficult and diversified external environment for its rise than any other emerging powers in history since the modernization of humanity. International society today witnesses world historical seismic shifts: climate change and ecology, fierce competition between major powers and fragile national security in the digital era. Combined with external moral restraints on China's willingness for peaceful development, all are resonating with each other, setting a chain of obstacles for the nation's rise. To begin with, China is the only global emerging power that has to care about the ecological variables since modern industrialization. Be it the era of colonial expansion or the industrial age, the West didn't have to pay extra development costs for destroying the ecology of other countries, nor for polluting the climate environment in the process of industrialization. Since the 1990s, human beings have begun to attach unprecedented importance to climate change.