Corruption, the catalytic grievance of many of the pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen, remains as powerful and suffocating a force as ever. The party cannot deal with a restive mass of 150 million rural unemployed and millions more jobless industrial workers. To deflect attention from domestic problems, China blames the West for its plight. Chinese schoolchildren are taught about the humiliation that China suffered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries at the hands of the Western countries and Japan. China's leaders and politicians remind the young that their country is a great power and that hostile Western forces prevent it from claiming its rightful world status.
China perceives itself as a victim of Japan and the Western powers.
The dominant factions in in China conservatives, nationalists, and reformers and their septuagenarian leaders are suspicious of the West in varying degrees. This perception colors their attitudes and behavior. The consistent anti-Western feeling of the Chinese has been obvious to me during several visits to China since the 1950s. No nation in the world fears U.S. hegemony more than China does. One possible reason for the flaws in U.S. policy toward China in particular and Asia in general is that our top foreign policy decision makers and advisers are Eurocentric.