@thor The writing system is a very important part of Chinese culture, but it's not the only one.
There's the alternative view that communism found a receptive audience in China because its traditional philosophies were all fundamentally collectivist, and therefore made more sense to people than liberal individualism, which only took hold in trading hubs like HK.
I think if you want to get a sense of traditional precommunist Chinese values, it might be better to look at Japan than HK or Taiwan.
