Interesting I had not heard of that before. In my opinion, the underpinning of Western individualistic philosophies seems more like mind-over-matter/mind body dualism described by René Descartes. In this case the metaphysics is very different from that of Chinese thought, or at least Daoism in particular, if one thinks for example of the story where "Zhuangzi dreamt of being a butterfly. Or was it that the butterfly dreamt of being Zhuangzi?"

I'm no sociologist, but certainly it's true that the ideas in these philosophies are very different from Descartes' mind/matter dualism or other such Western metaphysical ideas which support the individualistic beliefs in the West. However not demonstrating the same individualistic values does not mean therefore adhering to some other vaguely defined set of collectivist values. If anything, most of the philosophical thought over this time (which we group together despite the fact it ranges over centuries) reflected the political disunity of China and therefore spoke more to the need for structure and order. Obviously one way such order can be realized is in a more collectivist way of thinking, and there are such ideas in classical writing (famously, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Foolish_Old_Man_Removes_the_Mountains). Overall, however I am not convinced that Chinese culture is as uniquely collectivist as the China watchers like to say, it is merely not individualist. A parallel question would be, why is the West not as collectivist despite such values being so strong in the Bible/New Testament (love thy neighbor as thyself, give up everything to follow me, etc.). These questions are not clear cut.

As someone who has studied classical Chinese philosophy (i.e., I took a class on it given in Chinese), I think the author's summary of things is pretty good. I do not like the vaguely orientalist turn at the end where the upshot of all this is that "Western individualism bad. Asian collectivism oooh exotic." It seems the rest of the comment section is also stuck in this mode.

I'm reminded of the excerpt from Zhuangzi, quoted in the preface of Bertrand Russell's book on China, which says something to the effect of (apologies to any scholars of classical Chinese thought for the following tenuous English paraphrase) "Us humans have orifices for speaking, hearing, seeing, etc. Let us dig some such orifices into Chaos, so they may also have such functions. And so, Chaos died." Differentiation, categorization, stratification (the preferred term of Deleuze) is difficult not only from a hermeneutic perspective but in some sense may be intrinsically damaging. This I think is what the interesting idea of "co-action" is that the author is going for, and is a sentiment that really sticks out when reading these works in the original Chinese, as Chinese (and particularly classical Chinese) lacks a lot of the definite noun/verb/adjective/preposition/etc. delineations that you find in Western grammars. (EDIT: another such observation which is purely linguistic is the lack of articles in the Chinese language, which means references to nouns are inherently generic and not specific.)

To read this as some sort of "and this is why China is communist" hot take or similar hot takes on Asian collectivism is just boring and anachronistic. Also doesn't make much sense even from the purely sociohistorical lens: Confucianism created an extremely rigid social hierarchy. So much for social collectivism.