“Foreigners don’t understand China,” said torch bearer Fu Shenfeng before the relay started. “They still think we’re stuck in the past. They still think we’re poor. This is our chance to show them the real China.”

And herein lies the disconnect. The Western world does not see China as poor, or economics as the main issue in the debate. Yet inside China there are still heavy residual effects from the past.

In China there was a popular slogan that Mao Zedong used as a tool to encourage strong work ethic during the Great Leap Forward:

超英赶美

Literally it means “surpass England, overtake America.” He was referring to steel production, and it turned out to be a poor target area for Chinese economic growth. People melted pots and pans, and there was starvation as a result of misallotcated resources. The scars from failed experiments like this run deep, and the slogans still echo in the psyches of many.

China has long had a chip on its shoulder when it comes to the economy. The slogan was not “live long and prosper.” Instead, it specifically targeted countries as competitors by which to measure success. It was not only that China was a poor country, but also that the outside world saw it as such.

Many Chinese still seem their country through the same lens as they did a few decades ago. Or at least they see the world through the same paradigm. But the West doesn’t see China through the same lens as it did in the 1960s, 70s, or even 80s. The stories coming out of China tend to be focuses more on how people are becoming rich, rather than how the country is poor. In fact, the fear in the US isn’t that China is too poor, it’s that it owns American debt.

And perhaps the West misunderstands the importance of the emergence of wealth to many Chinese. For Chinese people in their 30s and 40s (and certainly anyone older than that), wealth is new, and potentially fleeting. While China is hardly universally rich, the West seems to have come to grips with the country’s emergence faster than its own populace has. Americans think of China as an emerging economic and military power. They hardly need the Olympics to come to that conclusion (after all, no one thinks of Greece as the world’s great modern economy).

It is almost as if Americans have already accepted Chinese wealth and is asking, “now what?” Meanwhile, many Chinese are still insecure with a wealth that is very recent. They are looking to their remarkable economic accomplishments and want more praise, but are disappointed to see that the endpoint that had always been the focus has now moved. No longer is a robust economy, good education and innovation enough. Now people focus on international soft power, the environment, human rights and freedom of speech.

This provides a non-sequitur for many in China. If the lives of the overwhelming majority could improve so dramatically without a focus on democracy, why should that be the overarching consideration now?

And so this partially explains how we’ve ended up here, with China looking for the world’s love, only to find that it can never earn the affection it so desires. Mr. Fu is right that most foreigners don’t understand China. However, it is not because they think the country is poor, but rather because they don’t understand the struggle that required for it to get rich.

Today China’s steel production is greater than England’s, decades after Mao gave up on that dream. Yet while China may have surpassed England, it shot past so quickly, the two people’s were never able to see eye-to-eye.