In the context of today, it's important to remember who the teachers and adults in China are: people who grew up under the Communist government. And with more respect towards the older generation, historically China has had a hard time rebelling against social norms ingrained in their culture. Trying to do away with Confucianism isn't a question of how many people are involved when the elders were all indoctrinated in those ideas by a Communist regime. Even if half the young population of China had independently stumbled upon papers describing these Western cultural values, spreading the idea is impossible when it goes against the CPC's core values, defies the ideas of the older generation, and is completely foreign from what was taught in school.
The fundamental difference between the West and China here is that China has always been under a strong, conservative leadership that these ideas have not been able to permeate. To think that China could simply pick up ideas from Western philosophy misses the point.
Younger red guards denouncing their elders, the attempt to get rid of the four 'olds' doesn't seem like a particularly conservative or Confucian agenda to me.
If it were impossible for this kind of thought to take root in China, I doubt that this movement could have gotten off the ground.
The right time to judge whether the Chinese people really value social harmony more than the west does is when economic growth stalls or even reverses for a decade or so.
Interestingly this also partly explains why totalitarian Communism spread easily in China... Chinese culture was conducive to that philosophy.
Asia is about a lot more than social harmony and the mandate of heaven. There is an incredible diversity of opinion on almost any subject there, just as in the West.
[1] Citation needed.