Something is off in a background scenery painting at an exhibit promoting China’s new lunar rover. The painting of planet Earth depicts a mushroom cloud—apparently the result of a nuclear bomb detonation—hovering over someplace in Eastern Europe. (We have circled the cloud in the image above).

Some have written the cloud off as a mistake or a coincidence, but this is not a Chinese teenager’s unauthorized blog. The lunar rover exhibit is a high-profile national project that Beijing designed for the world to view. The painting would have required the approval of dozens of high-level officials before becoming a facet of the exhibit.

“That’s not a small cloud either,” a Reddit user who goes by forte2 said of the painting. “[T]hat would have to be bigger than the Tsar Bomba by an order of magnitude.”

If the tables were turned and nasa or the esa had created artwork depicting nuclear weapons being detonated in China, firings and apologies would inevitably ensue. But it would be naive to expect such a reaction from Beijing. In fact, China’s state-run media recently reported on Beijing’s nuclear war plans, including missile strikes on U.S. cities that would kill upwards of 12 million Americans.

Why is China so unapologetically belligerent? In his book Mao’s China and the Cold War, Cornell University Prof. Jian Chen pointed to China’s self-given nickname as a clue of the country’s ultimate ambitions:

I believe that “Central Kingdom” is a more accurate translation for “Zhong Guo” (China) than “Middle Kingdom.” The term “Middle Kingdom” does not imply that China is superior to other peoples and nations around it—China just happens to be located in the middle geographically; the term “Central Kingdom,” however, implies that China is superior to any other people and nation “under the heaven” and that it thus occupies a “central” position in the known universe.

As the Chinese work toward positioning their nation as the “Central Kingdom” above all others, we can expect acts of belligerence from Beijing to become more and more routine. To understand the significance of this trend, read our article “Czars and Emperors” from the latest edition of the Trumpet magazine.