2020-ish - China has built its small space station, everyone congratulates them and moves on. China continues with manned launches to the station over the next few years.
A few years later, China launches a rocket with a large "orbit maintenance booster" as its payload and docks with their small station in LEO. Two days later the entire station performs a TLI and heads to the moon.
The major powers are in an uproar, the press calls it "the Space Pearl harbor" and the US congress demands answers from everyone from NASA to the CIA.
A week later the second nation flag is planted on the moon, a Chinese one. A week after that a small habitat is deorbited from the Chinese station in lunar orbit.
At this point Space funding goes through the roof in all major countries, minor countries offer what ever they can to support their favorite major power. Technology leaps ahead at an astounding pace, new propolusion technologies, new materials, more computing power. By 2050 every nation in the world has at least one commercial space port offering trips to the moon or LEO hotels. By 2100 trips to Mars are just like going to the beach for a long weekend.
Who really knows what will happen, but as my Dad likes to say "no one will care about the moon until China puts a big old honking space laser up there!"
I have a feeling that china will collapse and there will be another Chinese civil war far before they ever have a solid date of when they will make a moon mission...