If you read Barbara Tuchman's "Stilwell and the American Experience in China" or Owen Lattimore's "Inner Asian Frontiers of China" for example, you'll see that people here understand the Chinese quite well and have more experience with them than you think. In fact, it's often the Chinese that have a tendency to vastly underestimate Europeans and North Americans much to their detriment.  Historically, every confrontation between the West and China has not gone all that well for the Chinese.