It may be that the Chinese see this incident as one of many in its long history of humiliation at the hands of the West. Recalling all the times when China's sovereignty was trampled on, they want to make sure it doesn't happen again. Tony Lang views the U.S.-China confrontation as a textbook case of how apology works on the collective, versus personal, level. The media fuss over the Oriental mystique of apology is misplaced. How sweeping that new norm is depends on the content of the apology.
Norms are important because they constrain future behavior.
Negotiations over norms are protracted because a lot is at stake. Andrew J. Nathan is one of America's most prominent China scholars and professor of politics at Columbia University. He was co-editor of the recently published Tiananmen Papers , a set of secret Politburo documents concerning the 1989 massacre. The simple fact that international relations are not like interpersonal relations provides an important clue for understanding the recent imbroglio between China and the United States. As Andy Nathan implied, both China's demand for an apology and the American resistance to providing one are better explained by the nature of political communities than by appeals to cultural differences.