This is a country with its own written language, writing system, calendar, the internet, and so on; a country with the world’s largest single ethnic population; a country whose cultural traditions were established two thousand years ago; a country with an independent ideology. Are you saying that Western societies would rather believe this is a country of large-scale surveillance, that its people live under a social credit system with no individuality or freedom, than believe that its people possess a distinct and stronger sense of collective consciousness?
I think you are writing your comments conditioned on not just what you are responding to but also a lot of internal assumptions about their intentions. The person you are responding to said or implied nothing about surveillance or Western assumptions about China. They are making the claim (apologies to them if I am misrepresenting) that societies or governments achieve extraordinary goals (i.e. goals that they were not expected to achieve within a certain time-frame) because of the physical, economic and social conditions and not because of cultural elements. Cultural explanations are post-hoc i.e. they are used after the fact to boost morale or give a sense of unity. More concretely, if China, the US, the EU, Japan, India, Russia can launch spacecrafts to the moon, so can Nigeria and Kenya given enough time, resources and the right incentive structure even if they are culturally very different from the countries above.