The trouble is that the presence of a state doesn't prove anything. There is no such thing as a stateless society. Every society is governed, even if the governing isn't formalized in some way that is identifiable to a particular understanding. Families, tribes, etc. are societies that, too, are governed. You just have to define "govern" accordingly, and the Chinese state is very keen to understand "the state" as overbearing, master of initiative, controlling, intrusive, etc. But when you look at societies in the past, something also reflected in the writings of Thomas Aquinas in which he discusses the duties of the state and its citizens, the role of the state was and was seen in rather restrained terms (the total sum of concrete things a given state does is partly dependent on circumstances, of course). It functioned more like a referee. And that makes sense. Citizens live their lives in time and place and so on, and the state responds when something concerning the common good requires its attention. It is bottom up, in this sense (though we cannot reduce society to the sum of its individuals). But the state isn't "running" things as if it were some godlike puppet master that animates the universe.

The trouble with the present Chinese state is the manner in which it governs and the deeply flawed presuppositions about society, the state, and the individual that it is founded on. And so in this sense, it is clear why they would want to emphasize centralization to argue in favor of their particular vision of statehood, a kind of Tsarist, or as Koneczny would say, Turanian domination.

Societies do need a state, but it does not follow that they need something like the crushing behemoth that bears down on China.