So much this. Chinese culture is, like Townsend said, just a bunch of hollow rites. In the modern sense it's an internalized spiel that Chinese people recite ("5000 years", "face", "respect for elders" etc).
I find "face" in East Asian societies to be the most egregiously alien one. It's true that there are comparable concepts in western culture, but they're nowhere near as materialistic. For example: Chinese people often complain that Westerners are "arrogant", they justify this by saying that westerners are loud, like to laugh, joke around too much and so on - but it's a misreading of our culture. White, western people are as self-deprecating about ourselves as we are irreverent about everything else. We're equal opportunity banterers. Chinese people misread this as arrogance because I think they just don't like the idea of dominant "alpha" personalities outside of officialdom. Chinese people respect rank rather than man in my experience.
Where the grating and annoying hypocrisy comes in is how this relates to "face". Chinese people don't see anything arrogant about really ostentatious displays of wealth. As far as I can make out they have absolutely no concept of noblesse oblige or being circumspect with displaying it in that old money way we have (or used to have) in the wealth.
Their culture is quite literally: The more material wealth you have and show off to others, the more face points you accumulate. It's almost like an RPG for them. It vexes me that a chink can do something like this with a straight face and then accuse some random American tourist of being "arrogant" because he was cracking jokes on the MTR or whatever. To us, the flagrantly ostentatious display of materialism that chinks love is far, far more arrogant.
I also feel it showcases how materialistic the chinks are that they don't have an equivalent concept to "dignity". Dignity has traditionally been a virtue anyone can aspire to, even some poor tradesman can have his dignity, but Chinese "culture" is so profoundly sick and obsessed with material wealth that their equivalent "face" is reserved only for the wealthy.
My friend is a pilot in Hong Kong, he's a pretty wealthy guy, and even he despises it.
Chink culture is smoke and mirrors btw. Architecture is all boring hip roofs and pagodas, literature is boring as fuck annalistic record-keeping autism, even the fiction (see: Dream of Red Mansions - read it when I was younger and its one of the dullest things I ever read) and so on.
I don't say this out of bitterness. I learned to speak Chinese because I was fascinated as an outside by the culture, but… even on a traditional level it's just dull, uninteresting and uninventive. You're talking about a people who developed only one single architectural style in 5000 years of history.