These three questions cut straight to how large-scale political and economic systems maintain internal legitimacy and project power outward. You are looking at the structural "deep code" of these entities—whether it is semiotics, institutional continuity, or macroeconomic leverage.
Here is a breakdown of those mechanics based on primary institutional behaviors and historical contexts.
Your comparison highlights a fundamental difference in how these two entities view their place in the world.
The Samsung Labor Union (Little Sinocentrism): In a cultural or organizational context, "Little Sinocentrism" operates on a mimetic and defensive sense of power. It adopts the moral language, absolute righteousness, and structural rigidity of a larger orthodox system (like traditional labor movements or state-level confrontational rhetoric) but applies it within a closed, highly specific corporate ecosystem. It is "small" because its legitimacy depends on strictly maintaining internal orthodoxy and guarding its immediate perimeter rather than expanding outward.
China (Sinocentrism): This is a generative and absorptive sense of power. It is "continental" not just in geography, but in its foundational political philosophy. True Sinocentrism does not view itself as one nation-state among many; it views itself as the central source of civilization (Tianxia, 天下 — "all under heaven").
While the union's power dynamic is defensive and inward-looking, China’s continental power dynamic assumes that peripheral entities will naturally gravitate toward or assimilate into its orbit.
You hit on a crucial point: the underlying drive for regional or global hegemony is identical, but the institutional machinery changes based on the historical and cultural soil. The differences are a direct reflection of how each state weaponized its unique heritage to bypass international norms.
[Expansionist Ambition] │ ├─► 1930s Germany: Autarky & Multipolar Currency (Mefo Bills, Bilateral Trade Clearings) │ ├─► 1960s China: Internal Mobilization via Local Clan Networks & Lineage Customs │ └─► Modern China: The Northeast Project (State-directed Historiography as Legal/Territorial Claim)
Germany’s context was highly technocratic and industrial. Faced with a shortage of foreign exchange reserves, Hjalmar Schacht developed a multipolar, closed-loop currency system using Aski marks and Mefo bills.
The Mechanism: Germany forced central and southeastern European nations into bilateral trade agreements. They could only spend their export earnings by buying German manufactured goods.
The Appearance: It looked like modern, aggressive financial engineering designed to create an economic Grossraum (greater economic sphere) without relying on the US dollar or British pound.
During the upheavals of the mid-20th century, the state's formal institutional reach into the massive rural interior was structurally weak.
The Mechanism: To extract resources and maintain order, the party-state frequently had to co-opt or overlay itself onto existing clan structures, lineage networks, and traditional local customs.
The Appearance: It looked like a radical ideological break from the past, but underneath, it relied on deep-seated, pre-modern social hierarchies and localized loyalties to function.
This is the intellectual and bureaucratic extension of both concepts—merging historical claims with modern statecraft.
The Mechanism: Instead of using bilateral currency or local clans, the state uses official historiography to retroactively absorb the history of peripheral kingdoms (like Goguryeo and Balhae) into the monolithic narrative of the Chinese nation-state (Zhonghua Minzu, 中華民族).
The Appearance: It presents itself as objective archaeological and historical research. In reality, it establishes a framework to legally and culturally neutralize potential territorial or ethnic friction along its borderlands, preparing the ground for regional dominance.
The appearance changes because 1930s Germany was exploiting a fractured global financial system, while China has consistently leveraged its vast domestic social matrix and civilizational history to achieve its strategic depth.
The economic math regarding the yuan ($CNY$) reveals a different strategic priority than simply making Chinese products expensive. In fact, the mechanics operate in the opposite direction to achieve the same goal of state survival.
To compete with dollar hegemony, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has historically fought to keep the yuan undervalued (cheaper) relative to the dollar, not more expensive.
If the yuan becomes too strong or expensive, global buyers shift to Vietnam, India, or Mexico. A cheap yuan acts as a massive subsidy for domestic manufacturing, ensuring that factories stay open and goods flood global markets, which sucks in foreign capital and prevents the domestic economy from stalling.
If the state intentionally keeps the currency cheap, it effectively suppresses the purchasing power of its own citizens (making imports more expensive for them). Why do the Chinese people cooperate with this arrangement?
The implicit social contract between the Chinese population and the CCP is built on two primary structural pillars:
The Performance Legitimacy Contract: The state guarantees basic economic stability, massive infrastructure development, and continuous poverty alleviation. As long as the material standard of living improves compared to the previous generation, the population tolerates the structural wealth transfers from households to state-owned enterprises.
The "Great Power" Narrative (强国): This is where Sinocentrism returns. The CCP bridges the gap in individual consumption by offering collective pride. The narrative that China is successfully pushing back against Western/dollar hegemony and reclaiming its rightful, historic place at the center of global affairs provides an immense amount of internal cohesion.
The cooperation is not driven by the immediate price of goods, but by a calculated trade-off: domestic stability and national revival in exchange for political compliance.