I keep the claim that the explanation is even more simpler: whomever becomes a big man in a country like China eventually goes down, and that's the whole story.
There can only be one "big man" in such system, and he tolerates no competition.
This consistently held true through the whole 40 years of modern China: whomever attains too much of the social, political, economical, cultural, moral, or even genealogical prominence consistently gets taken down. This is why most mainland Chinese have that fear of publicity, and standing out almost bordering on panic disorder. And this is why people attaining any level of prominence there keep leaving the country for the West.