To answer this, we need to go back to around the time of the Opium Wars. For the very first time, the incompetence of a traditional Confucian system (remember, Confucianism is a philosophy, not a religion like the others) that everyone had presumed to be pre-eminent for so long. Also, once the Treaty Ports opened, it was the first time China’s literate classes (who were numerous) had any real connection with Western literature and ideas.

In around the 1850-60’s in both China and Japan, there were movements to adopt the (in their own words) clearly superior Western technology, without fundamentally changing the societies in which they lived. This was called the ‘self-strengthening’ movement in China and ‘Japanese spirit, Western technology’ in Japan. However, after the Meiji Restoration the paths of these two nations diverged. While Japan adopted a form of bureaucratic absolutism they got wholesale from Prussia (which can be seen today, it is no coincidence the name of the Japanese parliament is the Diet) China stuck to their ‘self-strengthening’ ideals and bought brand new guns and ships, but appointed the same old mandarins to run everything. These two systems clashed in the First Sino-Japanese War, where the Japanese basically cleaned up.

It is here that the fatal breach with traditional Chinese customs and Chinese nationalism came. The idea that was in vogue among intellectual circles in China was that their entire culture basically had to go down the drain to forge a new stronger China. It is under these auspices that the first major figures of Chinese nationalism pop up- Sun Yat-Sen, the Western educated man who looked and dressed European, and the first leaders of the CCP, who said and did everything that Lenin and Stalin did. Western ideas were seen as a way out of the quagmire that China was stuck in, and these ideas stuck around for a very long while, finally dying off after the disastrous Cultural Revolution.