For example, I watched this big budget Chinese movie with my friend some weeks back and it had these themes of the humble Chinese man standing up to the taller, mean American.
Chinese films and TV do sometimes give off this impression, but it's not how ordinary people, or the education system, or even the state perceive themselves or their history. In America (and a lot of Europe), people's sense of national identity is fleshed out primarily from mass media and education. This isn't the case in China (and in the lot of the non-liberal-democratic world). China has been a mostly unified state for millennia, and the Han ethnic group is more like an ancient form of civic nationalism containing a bunch of other ethnic groups. The idea of Chinese supremacy is passed down from the grass roots.
China no 1. Everyone in every village knows this, it's not a national myth to them, it's just inherently, non-falsifiably true. China is da best. 1839-1949 was just a temporary embarrassment in a long list of insanely powerful empires that quite literally dominated the world.
Interestingly enough the state has been trying to crack down on jingoistic WW2 drama films like this which it mainly views as ahistorical trash aimed at illiterate boomers.
The theme of the physically imposing but morally unrighteous AmeriKKKan is present across all East Asian media, but it's not necessarily because they secretly think Americans are world-conquering superhumans or have giant penises or whatever (American WW2 propaganda did try to play this up and it was kind of successful in Japan). It's that Chinese culture simply mapped the white foreigner onto their ancient idea of a demon, which other countries in the region adopted as well. Chinese media is extremely traditional and mostly refuses to use western tropes the way Japanese media does, so this idea of the gigantic white demonic foreigner is still around.
Funnily enough, the Chinese slur for a white person is just "demon" [鬼佬], while the slur for a black person is "black demon" [黑鬼].
Chinese people really do believe that China is the centre of the world, and who can blame them. Europe has only been globally relevant for about 300 years, America and Russia for about 250 years, Japan for 150 years. Of all the currently rising Civilisation-States, China is the one that fits that title the best by far, and is probably the reason we are using that term in the first place.
To me it sounds more like it's objectively unsusual (why else write a story about it?), which would make the story underline that black people are in fact not incapable of achieving those things.
It's not objectively unusual though. It's just perceived that way. Black students in the UK underperforming is an issue, but it's not so universal that you need a patronising highlight reel of the negroes who beat the system.
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