Bringing democracy to places without individualistic cultures, on their view, short-circuits an organic development process. The West slogged through centuries of difficult, blood-soaked history to arrive at the idea of an unmediated relationship between man and God—supreme over the relationship of man to all other men. China and many other countries have not gone through a similar process but are expected to mimic its outcome: liberal, rights-based democracy.
The trouble with this view is that ethnic Chinese beyond mainland China—for example, Taiwanese—have managed to move into democracy without disaster. So it may not be right to say that Chinese culture is incompatible with democracy.