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Zhongguo also has .中国 and .中國 as top-level domains which would presumably be more intelligible to Chinese speakers.

That is true, but non-ascii TLDs are also relatively recent.

I didn't realize there even were non-ascii TLDs. I thought non-ascii domain name components were restricted to everything but the TLD.

Domain names are ascii; there's just an encoding for unicode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode

Right, but those weren't originally allowed for TLDs. It looks like internationalized ccTLDs were finally approved in 2009.