Even the title of your main leader is confused (“How China Sees the World,” March 21, 2009). “And how the world should see China,” you add before you start, as if your idle ruminations were revelations. The title should have been much more direct and poignant: “How China Sees Itself.” The Middle Kingdom it is called.  Not for nothing, either. This you would have learned even thirty or forty years ago in casual but frank conversation with Chinese people anywhere around the world, including China. Even then they knew how things would turn out in due course. True, the current troubles of the so-called west only add to Chinese nationalism, ingrained as it is, but your surprise is still surprising. The Chinese have always seen the world as the periphery. And, as is the case when Europe and America and concerned, as nothing but uncouth if arrogant upstarts. Considering the fact that it was Genghis Kahn who brought Chinese technology to destitute Europe, thus initiating the Renaissance, their perception of the world is not very strange. Or wrong, for that matter. In Chinese eyes, it only took a few centuries for things to return to, well, normal.