we are all individualists, each of them is a collectivist

Oh, lordy, Asian values:

The philosophy of education in many East Asian countries is fundamentally different from the western model. Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian cultures prioritise harmony and hierarchy over discursive analysis and informed debate. Not only is it taboo to question the views of the teacher; I have friends who never dared to ask a factual question in all their time at Asian universities. To do so would be to suggest that a teacher had missed something out, thus raising doubts about professorial authority. Even in many postgraduate courses, there is a meek acceptance of top-down, test-fuelled teaching that makes even Britain's exam-obsessed education policy look like a model of free thinking.

Forget the harmony guff for a minute, and the philosophy of education for that matter. If you’re learning a character-based, rather than alphabetical language, as you would be in China or Japan, there’s a hell of a lot more rote learning and memorization involved: it’s unavoidable. So are the tests that go with it. And that’s before you get into tone grammars, which require pitch perfect tonal expressions. On top of that, the teaching style is just more authoritarian, as it used to be generally and as it used to be here. None of my teachers would have welcomed a question that raised doubts about their authority over their subject. I suspect none would now, either.

This ties in somewhat with arguments you hear about the Chinese political system, expressed in terms of people being more accepting of dictatorship because they haven’t been exposed to individualism. What you hear in China is that Chinese people are so naturally individualistic – “a million grains of sand” - that they need strong government to keep everything together. The natural collectivists of the West, on the other hand, need a constitution of liberty to get them out of bed in the morning.

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[ajay]

What you hear in China is that Chinese people are so naturally individualistic – “a million grains of sand” - that they need strong government to keep everything together.

Yes. A combination of "democracy won't work because China is too big" and "democracy won't work because it will mean that bits of China will want to split off" (why the latter is a bad thing is left unsaid).