> to his concept of China’s honor and global standing.

Or his sinocentricity and even racism (as in superiority of chinese people). There's been a long standing view in China about their own superiority of others, including all the way into the way they view their national pride as extending back further than any other civilization, even though external historians might view it more like several disjoint civilizations in a similar region... Kinda like how we don't call American history as starting when previous groups from contemporary russian crossed ice bridges to the Americas... We say it started in 1776 because it was a new major iteration of the regime.