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Why would China want their people spend a month's salary to buy a foreign product (assembly doesn't count)? Or why would the most popular sites be non-Chinese? Block the non-Chinese ones and local ones, totally controlled by China's gov, would pop up. If they could get away with it, a lot of other countries would do the same, they just don't have the 1.x billion people, trillions in Forex and audacity to try it.Indeed, it makes sense.
Americans often take offense to this logic, but then again, almost all the "public internet" we use is American. From the domain registries, to Google, Facebook, Apple, MS, Yahoo, Amazon, etc. So it's easy for them to play the tolerant, and allow for the occasional foreign success story.
But they would be singing a totally different tune if the most popular sites and services were to be, say, British. Much more if they were Chinese, German, etc.
They would be all over for protectionism and enforcing their local alternatives if that happened.
It's easy to ask for "openness" if it just means others opening to YOUR stuff (and getting a trade deficit to use it, give your government information control over their citizens, and get washed in a US point-of-view --political, historical, cultural etc).
As far as being culturally closed, the US is at the top of the list. Just an example: even in Mongolia, people watch American movies. How many foreign, non anglophone, movies make it into the US theaters? Even in France people listen to American music (as well as music from all over the world). How many non-American (and non anglophone, e.g British) bands ever make into the top 10?
It pretty much only happens with two things: novelties and anime (which are comics and animation, so not that far from the respective american forms anyway, and of course cross-breed with them).