Like I said, everybody has their own agendas and they are pursuing them rationally with the exception of North Korea.
China is a power house as Beastmaster has said. But it still acts like it is fighting it way up like it was an underdog. I know how it looks out at the rest of the world. It looks in such a way as if it just has to be hostile towards it so it is not a surprise that it always finds justification for that view. Looking at its past two hundred years it is not unreasonable to see why they do. Part of the problem however is their distorted evaluation of their own history. Remember that all the history which is currently allowed to be taught within China must serve the purpose of justifying the current governments hold on power. In a very real sence the Chinese are strangers to themselves. Why?
Though the current government uses the totally alien non-Chinese philosophy of Communism as its center premise, its power to rule lays upon a much larger and older foundation of Confucianism. There is a vast difference between the Philosophies of the East and West but the most fundamental and the most irreconcilable are the final goals of the two approaches to human civilization wish to attain and not in their methods. The Confucian goal is the achievement of an eternal stable social order and harmony while the Western is dynamic chaotic progress and expansion (the barbarians in the classical Chinese view). The Confucian society tends to look mostly inward attempting to avoid troubling contradictions and the Western looks outward seeking knowledge and opportunity.
Today the current paradigm of Chinese thought as to its interpretation of its history is one that sees China being destroyed by advance western powers and treated badly, which to some extent is true but the real reason for the disintegration of the Chinese state and the devastating pain that followed to its people, was primarily caused by a profound universal rot from within. In the modern sence, we would call it a failed state, for the center could not hold. In the pursuit of harmony, the Chinese society lost its ability to change and adapt to an ever changing world. It eventually became so weak internally that all it took was the touch of a feather to bring it tumbling down. In this case the touch of the English Empire that was one tenth its size, which had only half of its history, and was in fact far less materially wealthy at the time. Curse those evil white devils. But is in fact a pattern that has been repeated several times in Chinese history.
Even today Chinese scholars, their best and their brightest, believe that the collapse of the Chinese state was brought about mainly because of the use of advanced technology (the guns were more important!) and not as a symptom of their social organization. While the historical Chinese attitude is easy to understand within its past context the current one is not. Obliviously they have pursued technology with a vengeance and their current society is full of dramatic change of all kinds but this too is part of their historical pattern. After the fall of one dynasty the next one is full of change for a time and then the old goals reassert themselves. Will this time be any different?
