I’m not fond of this whole “Eastern mysticism”/100-year-horizon crap; that sort of thinking is just soft-soled racism—along the same lines as the Noble Savage trope.
Back in reality, you can find countless examples of China behaving with rather absurd short-term obsession and making foolish mistakes due to that short-term thinking. They're doing it right now with Hong Kong. Or for example, in the way they've been willing to become the most leveraged nation in world history at record speed merely in order to buy a few more minutes of faster short-term 'growth' before they have to accept slower real growth in the system. That's long-term destruction in exchange for a short-term prop-up, something that is counter to the fantasy projection about China's long-term magical behavior. It also happens to be exactly what Japan did, exchanging long-term damage (resulting in long-term stagnation as the extreme debt robbed their economy of all of its dynamism) for a short-term propping up of the economy.