Concessions are seen as national humiliations. The China-U.S. standoff over the downed American intelligence aircraft was treated in this way in much of the press, and in the Washington political debate. Conservatives in both Washington and Beijing insisted that compromise would produce a humiliating loss of national prestige. This reflects a classical conception of power and state relations, as old as the European dynastic state. Power comes from territorial conquests.
Glory comes from victories in battle and from the material magnificence of the monarch's court.
The classical idea of war for national aggrandizement was supposed to have been ended by the World War I. War for traditional purposes had a bad name after that. What followed was ideological war. The United States thrived in the ideological age because it believes that it is the product of great progressive ideas, which it can and should transmit to others, including the Chinese. Much subsequent bitterness in American-Chinese relations arose from the fact that the Chinese rejected Chiang, accepted Mao and spurned Washington's patronage. Classical power rivalry is not the only way to look at international relations.