China plays the long game, while U.S. has the attention span of an insect.
One of the most famous and humorous stories in the history of diplomacy involves a secret meeting in 1971 between President Nixon’s National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, and Premier Zhou Enlai, the number two Chinese Communist Party official after Mao Zedong. Kissinger asked Zhou to assess the impact of the 1789 French Revolution. Zhou replied,