I completely agree. Foreign culture analyses like this are always tinged with bias and an incurable desire to find little small-picture justifications. I'm sick and tired of seeing every random quirk of Japanese people being explained as "Shinto this, Buddhism that"; it's such an oversimplification. The interior lives of human beings are built upon perhaps 1,000,000 variables, not just 3 variables.

The writing is in English, published by someone who spent an entire life growing up in the West. And, as you mentioned, this "returning item phenomenon" seems not to be the case in modern China, even in the cities.

If you want to even begin to describe Eastern culture in English, maybe take a look at how hard it was, and still is, to articulate the internal world of the Russians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_soul