IIRC About 200 BC the first chinese emperor united the seven chinese kingdoms into one singular empire. He replaced the feuding aristocrats with an all-encompassing bureaucracy.
China has been governed by a monolithic bureaucratic empire for 2000 years now. (First the imperial bureaucracy, then the appointed local politicians of Communism.) Europe has had hundreds of wars in that time, it had massive ethnic migrations and has dozens of countries. Conflict and change are part of european culture, but China meant political stability, it meant harmony, it meant peace.
This very preference for harmony, for stability, for unity, is a pillar of chinese culture. It's not simple complacency and certainly older than the PRC.
I once had a colleague from the PRC, a proud communist. He said, he would prefer if all of the world were united into one big nation. He said, he also wouldn't mind if the official world-language were english, as long as the world were united.
The problem with the PRC is how they handle those who don't fit into the perfect picture of harmony. Strife-plagued Europe has developed tolerance as a tool to facilitate peace in the face of conflict. But China hasn't seen that wild mixture of cultural and military conflicts that Europe has been through. China has never had to make peace between factions that are anathema to each other. China has never learned to treat attacks on harmony with tolerance. It's simply not part of their culture.
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