Political systems were deeply integrated with philosophical and religious streams, all braided together for at least several thousand years.
As I mentioned elsewhere, this system is not new or novel in concept. Confucian ideals see people as animals on their way to being human. The cultivation of the "superior person" requires education and much socialization. This isn't what people in America should be concerned about.
China was at several point, a dominant power. I think a lot of people forget this. It was in the middle of the Ming dynasty, for various reasons, started turning inwards -- making major extensions of the Great Wall, recalling expedition fleets ... much like America is doing today.
The West may remember China as a third-world country or a target too weak to resist colonization, but the Chinese remember when various regions such as modern-day Vietnam, Okinawa and Korea were vassal states (have you ever seen any Korean historical drama? So much resentment related to that). Chinese as a whole don't feel themselves to be culturally inferior, yet the Western views of China seem to subconsciously think of the Chinese culture that way.
This blind spot seems to miss something that China is doing right now: the Chinese are making a bid to be the next superpower, either as America's peer, or supplanting America in that role. This includes things anywhere from adding Chinese-flavored events to the Olympics; Extending funds and industrialization to Africa; building a rail net that not only ties China internally together, but also extend reach and influence across the Asian and European continents; heavy investment into technologies such as AI, quantum tunneling, in-house chip designs, life sciences, much through luring back Western-educated people with advanced degrees whose student visas have expired; developing military capabilities -- traditional force multipliers such as refurbishing an old Soviet-era aircraft carrier to increasing asymmetric capabilities such as developing drone carriers (the Chinese produced a Sun-Tzu, after all); attempts to break American influence on oil by creating a new reserve currency for trading crude. Much of this is being funded by the money being spent by American consumers. (And the Chinese had already learned the lesson of becoming insular).
The Chinese don't come across as complacent, though I often get that sense of complacency from the Western perspective.
It is this culture that is making a bid as a superpower to influence the rest of the world into doing things the "Chinese Way".