The climate crisis continues to accelerate, though countries are now committed to a net zero future. Making matters worse, the escalating geopolitical hypercompetition between the United States and China undermines meaningful global collaboration on climate especially after Trump’s election in November 2024. Nonetheless, it is clear that the world order must offer some visionary blueprint that answers the question of what it means to be living in the Climate Crisis Era. Major powers that include China, the EU, and the United States under Biden have been attempting to articulate such a vision and using their soft power to promote it. Of the three, China’s ecological civilization (EC) is the most comprehensive and developed. Launched politically in 2007, it was primarily designed and communicated as an internal and nationalist aspiration to offset the negative impacts of fast-paced industrialization, create additional space for Chinese exceptionalism, and redirect China’s growing economy toward sustainability. Yet today, Global China is adjusting this nationalist notion to formulate a new powerful global narrative and provide much needed climate leadership that includes the aspirations of the developing world. This chapter will explore how “ecological civilization” offers itself as a vehicle for ecological cooperation and global rejuvenation. It will, moreover, examine how the language, norms, and cultural values shaping narratives of China’s “ecological civilization” interact and compete with its competitors’ national and cultural ideals to recalibrate notions of progress and modernity for the Anthropocene. Finally, it will question whether EC, like its competing living well within the limits of the planet (EU) and environmental justice (United States), merely salvages what has been an industrial answer to an overwhelming problem created by industrial modernity, rather than producing deeper systemic shifts. The chapter will conclude by outlining ways by which EC, in tandem with or independently of other competing visions, may raise the bar to produce crucial climate leadership that the world desperately needs.