One of them is that truth is subservient to honor.
Another is that there's a trade to be made: it is okay to do some dishonorable things, provided that they are not called dishonorable or that the honor obtained is greater than what's lost.
That's the problem with public honor systems. Honor is attributed, not necessarily earned. It's kept as long as people say you have it. This is opposed to the typical post-Enlightenment system of honor that views honor as resulting from abiding by a set of internal principles even under duress and when confronted with temptation (with the stipulation that these are generally accepted good values; Hitler might have abided by his set of internal values, but he fails the stipulation).
There are numerous instances where the two systems produce the same result. That makes it easy for people to assume that everybody has the same system of values. "We are the world."
Each system views the other with contempt. I have kids who think it's the height of foolishness to not steal something if nobody'll know you did it, whether it's a cookie, a wallet, or rape. I have kids who think this is just plain immoral and wrong and will leave a forgotten wallet on the desk or make sure to turn it in, not even opening it because that would be too great an invasion of privacy.
It's a damn-fool mistake to treat bearers of public honor the same way you treat bearers of personal honor, idiocy of the highest caliber. If we do so, "we are the whirled." Pureed, even if self-declared pure.
Personal honor says to protect the weak. Attributed honor often says that if somebody's such an idiot as to let himself easily be taken advantage of, that's on the idiot.
Diversity. It's a good thing.
Oh, note that a year or two ago some sociologist claimed to identify a third necessarily distinct honor system, one that was based not on observance and adherence to a personal set of generally accepted moral values, nor on attributed honor. Instead, this was based on grievance, with proclaimed aggrieved status resulting in higher honor and asking for others to defend your weakness against oppression a positive value. (In public honor systems, this is a nuclear option for honor, self-abasement and public proclamation of being shamed are strictly punished. In a personal honor system, this is deemed petty unless the grievance is large enough. Otherwise the honorable thing to do is to keep on keeping on in the face of adversity, because in that lies honor. Public honor systems have ways to restore honor and deal with grievances. Personal honor systems tend to value forgiveness or for larger "crimes" have some way of dealing with the moral breech. In a "grievance culture" you find things to claim as grievances, and no grievance is too slight or to subjective for this, and the only way out is abject humiliation of your foe. I don't like the name "grievance culture"; I call it a "winner-take-all culture" or a "victory culture", a very polarized culture with abject always victims and exuberant always victors.)
Anyway, I doubt that China would consider what they're doing dishonorable. It serves the needs of their honor, and when it comes to getting them to change their mind there are few options: you can convince them that they're acting in a way that will result in shame; you can convince them they're acting in a way that will affect their self-interest in impressively large ways that make accepting a course of action been honorable or worth it; you can substitute this honor for some other honor, reduce the honor in this course of action, or impose a smaller penalty coupled with a way to save face. Nations go to war to preserve their honor, and for the Chinese, with government control of industry, a militarized society, and a strong sense of nationalism wrapped up with traditional views of honor (gee, did I just apply a common definition of fascism, one that also applied to the USSR and is therefore useless?) to do so would be easy.
Don't know what to make of the demographic angle for China. Societies with large numbers of surplus young males tend to find themselves in war or revolution. China has a surplus of males. On the other hand, many of those males are sole heirs of nuclear families, and those tend to be valued disproportionately.
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