The U.S.-China relationship will be in focus as China’s president Xi Jinping comes to the United States for his first state visit this week. The relationship has shown some worrisome signs in recent years – with tensions over the South China Sea, cyber attacks, and other old and new issues.

At his 2013 meeting with President Obama in California, President Xi Jinping called for a “new kind of major-power relationship,” meaning that the rising power and the established power can cooperate to create a new international order rather than engaging in a dangerous rivalry.

This is a promising concept and the right path for the U.S.-China relationship. However, the two countries’ significant differences in ideologies and worldviews prevent them from seeing eye-to-eye.

To understand these differences, Orville Schell’s and John Delury’s book Wealth and Power sheds light on what drives Chinese leaders. The book covers the period from the Opium Wars in the 1840s to modern times under Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms. Although a history book, it cannot be more pertinent to the current thinking in China.

One central theme permeates the book. Over the last 150 years, generations of Chinese have relentlessly pursued one goal: to restore China’s greatness – Fu Qiang, or “wealth and power” (a more accurate translation of Fu Qiang should be “prosperity and strength”). As the authors argue, such undertakings were motivated by a profound sense of shame and humiliation.

In the early nineteenth century, China was under the illusion that other nations were barbarians, and too remote from the center of the civilized world. But China was soon shaken by much more powerful Western nations. For much of the second half of the nineteenth century, it suffered humiliating defeats in the First and Second Opium Wars with the British, wars with the French, Portuguese, and even the Japanese, whom Chinese considered inferior “dwarf people.”