China has a civilisational arrogance that is both warranted to some extent whilst also having blown up in their faces more than once. They are the Celestial Empire and everyone outside of that empire are mere barbarians in their mind.
Millennia of utter supremacy have an effect on a people's psyche. It's why the century of humiliation is such a traumatic event for the Han Chinese.
The Chinese were once one of the most advanced civilizations on Earth... thousands of years ago, along with Rome and Ancient Egypt (the latter in its heyday, I mean).
But their cultural mindset is that they're
still in that time-period/age; meanwhile the rest of the world not only passed them by but greatly
surpassed them still to this very day.
When the Boxer Rebellion kicked off and the Eight Nations came'a'knocking, the Dowager Empress Cixi was still on the fence because she knew things would get messy, but she still ultimately believed that China would prevail one way or another (arrogance), and so she sided with the Boxers.
And then half of the provincial governors of her country basically told her to fuck off, and they broke deals with the Eight Nations to not get involved with the ongoing clusterfuck (and indeed began killing the Boxers that Cixi told them to support), while also supporting them by having control of key areas of infrastructure (like the telegraph networks).
Hell, many of them and the non-retarded military leadership were considering setting up the National Government early when the Imperial Court inevitably fell.
The teeth-kicking China received basically killed off Imperial China and resulted in the clusterfuck that'd have Nationalists, Communists, and an Imperial Restoration Movement at each others' throats for half a century.
Their own arrogance, and that went right down to the peasant level (the Boxers), fucked them over. And they still hadn't learned.
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