Edited sentence: As such, China saw itself as the center of civilization.China had been a regional superpower for thousands of years before the emergence of Japan in the late 19th and early 20th century, and many now-independent countries were tributary states to China.Chinese philosophy and Confucianism figured prominently in the development of East Asia.Modern Chinese nationalism is to a considerable extent a reaction against the violent intrusion of the West in the 19th century, as typified by the Opium Wars, which shattered China's self-perception and forced it to accept an economically and developmentally inferior position in a Western-dominated multipolar world.Much of Japanese culture and society was heavily influenced by Imperial Chinese models.One theory is that China's perceptions of Japan are influenced by the historical concept of Sinocentrism, as well as the nature of the historical relationship between the two countries.Other explanations have been offered for the extraordinary persistence of virulent anti-Japanese sentiment in China