It would be easy to say that Chinese, or at least many of them, are ethnocentric and look down on other peoples and cultures. To some extent I think that this is missing the point, although not by much.
The introduction of the “foreigner” into Chinese society is a relatively new phenomenon. Fifty years ago, few foreigners were in China and those that were, were most likely missionaries. The Chinese do not have a sense of internationalism nor do they have much experience with accepting “deviant” behavior from the Chinese norm such as alien cultures and peoples might introduce.
For this reason, Chinese do not have a sense of competing with other peoples; rather, they feel that other peoples simply don’t matter because they are not Chinese.
How many times have you heard a variation of these? “You don’t understand because you are not Chinese?” “This is the Chinese way of doing things.”
It isn’t necessarily that the foreign way of doing something is wrong or inferior, but it is irrelevant – it has no bearing on established protocol and procedures. It doesn’t matter that a certain situation has been encountered and dealt with in 100 other cultures; for the Chinese it is a unique situation to be dealt with in the Chinese way.
Chinese don’t readily learn from other cultures because they deny that anything other than Chinese is relevant to them.
The effect of this is a projection of cultural superiority. This is what can drive foreign workers mad when they see Chinese management doing what to them are exactly the wrong things. The same Chinese management does not come out and say directly that the foreigners’ ideas are incorrect, they will simply ignore them and do what they think is right for them – even though the situation has been routinely addressed successfully in a Western country many times over, for example.
The Chinese love to try and reinvent the wheel since it wasn’t invented in China and, therefore, the Chinese version of the wheel must be unique from all others in the world. If the wheel has square edges, so be it.