Even before the Mongol Empire under Kublai Khan fully defeated the Southern Song which was the last remaining holdout, the Chinese people resisted the Mongol invaders. The native Chinese, which included the Han people of the North and the Song people of the South, kept their own culture, language and traditions and did not assimilate the nomadic Mongolian culture. The Mongols, too, refused to assimilate to Chinese ways even though the Khan settled down in a capital city, Beijing, and tried a sedentary lifestyle. Kublai Khan's ill-fated attempts to conquer Japan, economic problems, and bad relations with the local Muslim merchants only made the local populace hate the Mongol government more. Cultural differences only heightened the tensions between the Mongols and the Chinese, and the failure of both groups to mix together made it easier for the Chinese to view the Mongols as a foreign "other" to be hated. After Kublai Khan's death, the Chinese revolted against the Mongol invaders. Expulsion of the Mongols was easy after their failure to assimilate, and the peasant who led the revolt founded the Ming Dynasty.
The Mongols conquered China and instituted the Yuan Dynasty. This would have been a very traumatic moment in Chinese history, and it did seem to have inspired a lot of resentment within China against these foreign rulers. We see this in the example of China's traditional bureaucratic class of government scholars, which became largely detached from politics. Indeed, as Mongol rule stretched forwards, the Mongols had to wrestle with rebellions and uprisings, and within less than a century after the Mongols had deposed the last of the Song Emperors, the Mongols were themselves overthrown and driven from China by the ascendant Ming. The Ming Dynasty quickly acted to restore and strengthen the traditional cornerstones of Chinese politics and administration, most notably the Civil Service Exams, which were reinstated to be more intense than ever before.
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