Weird Chinese supremacist stuff about how superior China is.
As a civilization, China's not superior today. But it was superior then. Whenever a Chinese person gives you any guff about how they've got 5000 years of recorded history behind them, and you're not feeling polite, you can respond with the rejoinder that this is like a Rockefeller shaking a tin cup on a street corner boasting about how his forebears were big cheeses back in the day. It's kinda pathetic. Sic transit gloria mundi.
What is undeniable, however, is that the Chinese have higher IQ's. They do better in schools for the same reason Jews do - more innate processing power.
Why, then, is China so backward today, if the hardware is superior, or at least not inferior? Lousy software (i.e. Marxism-Leninism), combined with lousy nutrition through decades of famine and near-famine. Think North Korea vs South Korea. West Germany vs East Germany.