Interestingly, modern China seems to have come about as a result of the destruction of Chinese culture during the Cultural Revolution. During that period, from 1966 to 1976, everybody suffered, and the country seems to have generally been reduced to a subsistence level. The good thing the Cultural Revolution did was remove many of the outmoded social structures that lingered on after the end of Imperial China in the early twentieth century.
One thing the Cultural Revolution did not remove was the top down nature of Chinese society.
Top down is the opposite of Web 2.0 which is characterized by user contribution. Sure, those contributions may be aggregated and monetized by large web conglomerates, but they still represent individual contributions, not contributions programmed by a higher authority. In the US, we seem mesmerized by this people-powered phenomenon, but I wonder about the extent to which the admiration is universal. Even within the US, people find bottom-up contributions disruptive, and they really only seem to flourish in domains where hierarchical structure does not exist to moderate them.
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