Thanks a lot for your praise. However, I’m not a math genius although I have some sense and strong desire of appreciating great minds and I recognize the importance of following the steps of the real giants rather than monsters.
    
However, I’d be glad to share with you some of my understanding about your question based on my interactions with the people who have professional expertise on this type of questions. I do not claim any originality here for I just repeat, or at most, recombine, some conclusions of great thinkers.

In short:

Good ideas and giants take time to grow, which can only be possible when the society is free. China is not a free place, so best ideas are forbidden, or suppressed, or ignored, or forgotten, so you don’t have giants. All great minds of China die young and die miserably, so you don’t have real heroes to follow and you only have generations and generations of super-rogues to worship. A rigid system cannot have sustainable stability always ends up with catastrophe. There are a lot of arguments and there are a lot of good numerical simulations to support this conslusion.
Why has China been a rigid society rather than a free one? My guess is that the ultimate answer lies in the emergent character of culture, i.e., God’s will.

The following are some details. You may ignore them entirely, but you’re welcome to comment them.

First, I’d say, capitalism and socialism are old terms, very ambiguous, confusing and probably misleading. In today’s world, you see far more socialist features in typical ‘capitalist’ countries than in those ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ countries. Therefore, I prefer to use free countries with respect to rigid countries. The essential difference between advanced countries and the rest of the world is not how money is distributed among the people, nor how much money each citizen earns a year, but instead, the degree of free expression—the free expression of ideas and abilities. The freedom of expression is the essence of a modern, civilized and sustainable country. It is a simple fact and even a cliche that you might have heard about for many times, but you’d acknowledge that it takes some serious thinking to fully understand the reason behind this simple truth. It’s no wonder to see why so many students of mainland China origin choose to deny it.

The world, therefore, consists of two types of countries: free and rigid. Freedom means vigor, dynamics, flexibility, sustainability. Rigidity means stagnancy, conservation, corruption, incapacity, unsustainability and indeed, catastrophe.

China has never been stable or sustainable . A system maintained by force, lies, totalitarianism and isolation can be stable for a while (could be hundreds of years), but it cannot be stable for too long. Exactly the opposite is true: this kind of stability inevitably generates corruption, incapability, unsustainability and eventual collapse—the collapse is invariably catastrophic. It’s an obvious fact that today’s China has not jumped out of the cycle yet.

My short checklist of a modern, sustainable and civilized country: (1) plurality, diversity, multiplicity and individualism are a common sense of the mainstream of the people and the daily practice of the government. (2) the private sectors account for at least 75% of national economy so that the government is largely irrelevant to the economical fundamentals. (3) localized or bottom-up politics—all levels of government are elected and monitored with an efficient mechanism and the interest of people is the ultimately highest, i.e., the country should serve the individual people not the other way around, or simply put, human rights are prior to sovereignty. Amazingly but not surprisingly, these three great items of goods can be delivered by a single salesman named Mr. Freedom of Expression. Needless to say, these three criteria almost automatically lead to good quality of life, health, education, and overall dignity.

This checklist is short but it’s sufficient to conclude that China is far below the minimal standard of a modern country.

China is a giant in terms of population and territory, but a dwarf in terms of mental power and civilization. The reason is plain: Chinese are impatient to learn from real giants and eager to worship fake ones. Best ideas need time to germinate, bud and grow, which can only be guaranteed by freedom of expression. In a place where freedom of expression is not respected and practiced, all good ideas are killed before growing, fakes of all kinds being always at upper hand. Why do Chinese behave like that? I’m afraid the answer lies in the emergent character of culture, i.e., we could have evolved into a free society but we haven’t yet. Let us pray.