The Chinese state of mind

It is a Chinese state of mind, and one that outsiders - and all who are non-Chinese are very much outsiders here - may occasionally find infuriating and insufferable, but that certainly exists, and at no great depth beneath the Chinese skin ... It is an attitude of ineluctable and self-knowing Chinese superiority, and it results from the antiquity and the longevity of the Chinese people's endeavours ...  

The very fact that Chinese achieved so much and so quickly (fifteen major inventions a century, as [Joseph] Needham once calculated) appears to have created a sense of self-satisfaction and superiority - a king of national smugness that led Emperor Qianlong to remark so famously to Lord Macartney, "we possess all things ... I have no use for your country's manufactures.' And this self-congratulatory complacency, this hubris, inevitably contributed to the problems that caused the empire in time to flounder and fall, and that led to the poverty and backwardness that characterised China for so long. 

But China is neither poor nor backward any more; and it is one of the ironies of history that the success of modern China derives in large measure from this very same sense - which aggrieved westerners like Lord Macartney might say was a peculiarly and infuriatingly Chinese sense - of self-certainty, of an unshakeable confidence about its position at the centre of the world. And all this certainty derives from the sturdy foundation of civilisation that China built for itself so very long ago ... 

For silk, tea, bureaucracy, and the early inention of the compass as such do not make China what it is. What makes China different is the case-hardened sense of inner certitude that this vast array of invention has given to it.

- Simon Winchester, The Man who Loved China - the life of Joseph Needham (title of the UK edition: Bomb, Book and Compass)