In my experience: Yes, they are emulating at least parts of SV startup culture. Except that they hire hundreds of people where an American or European company would hire 20-30 people.

My guess is that the thinking is that they'll be able to do it even quicker than their western counterparts merely by numbers.

A couple of years ago I worked with a team of about 35 in Europe that made a global product that had 250M global monthly users.

Meanwhile in China, the team that had been set up to adapt our product there ended up being about 150 people. 90% of what they published there was made by those 35 people in Europe.