@alidan
I can tell you with certainty that sociopathy in Chinese fiction has nothing to do with Communism. 100% sure. And I won't even have to discuss your understanding of communism.
How can I be so sure? Because I'm reading the first of the Four Great Classical Novels,
Water Margin, written 600 years ago, long before anything like Communism had been theorised.
In this novel, a band of bandits described as "heroes" go through adventures in Song China, facing government forces (normally described as hopelessly corrupt) and other dangers. I haven't finished it yet, am only on the middle of the second volume out of five, but here are some episodes:
i. A certain character is a military man who's betrayed by his general. He enters the general's palace in a disguise to kill him and his partners in betrayal. In the process, he kills several servants, one of the general's concubines and her two little daughters, and goes on killing until he feels "his rage is sated".
ii. A usual interrogation procedure is to promise the person will live if they spout the truth. The person, normally a servant or a minor soldier, obeys and is immediately killed after supplying the information.
iii. A certain character subdues a road innkeeper who's a cannibal and bakes clients into pies to sell. He then lets her go and befriends her just because he finds out she's allied with the bandits.
iv. Another character, a military man who wants to remain loyal to the government and refuses to join the "heroes", is released by them to go back to the provincial capital, only to find the place severely damaged by an attack, with lots of civilians dead and wholesale destruction. He is then accused by the provincial governor of having led his troops in the attack on the city, and is immediately set upon by other soldiers, barely managing to escape. Having no other choice of refuge, he goes back to the bandits' place - only for them to unashamedly admit to him that they had disguised themselves as his troops and used his banner to perpetrate the attack and have it blamed on him so that he would have no choice but to join them. HE ACCEPTS.
v. It's perfectly fine to kill your wife for infidelity or just being annoying.
Anyone who doesn't exert some detachment in analysing fiction will become a Sinophobe after reading that novel. The above are just a few of the examples so far and I have three more volumes to go.
As for me, I'm pretty sure that novel doesn't reflect societal values at large, neither back then and much less nowadays. It's just wish-fulfilment porn. I'm not a specialist so I wouldn't know what motivated the authors, but if I were to hazard a guess, it would have to do with the type of "know-your-place" society Ming China (when the novel was written) was. Social mobility seems to have been generally low. The literate classes who would consume this kind of literature would be mainly civil servants. If you are a civil servant who lives in a rigid code of social and ceremonial conduct, must bow your head to undeserving superiors your whole day and can become the fall guy for a corruption scheme at any moment, I'd not be surprised if you relished reading a book about men who live by their sword, grab what they want, kill whom they want (especially government officials), and answer to no authority. The characters are just doing what you'd like to do to your boss, the local politician or even your wife(!)
I never said I consider manhua fundamentally different from manga and manhwa. We find pretty good examples of sociopaths in these, too. They are probably an outlet and nothing more, nowadays just as in the past. My only objection to manhua is that their narrative technique is crude and lacks subtlety, probably because it hasn't been perfected over decades like manga, or actively copied and adapted its techniques like manhwa. As Chinese cartoonists practise more, they'll improve.
(Then again, I know you're addressing Narf and not me.)
The real Chinese people are just as capable of compassion, solidarity and working for the common good as anyone else. How could they not be, given that their society hasn't collapsed as it would if it had sociopathic tendencies? Indifference to suffering in big cities is no news anywhere. There are even chronicles in my country narrating just that. You try dressing in poor clothes and faking a heart attack in the middle of a busy street in any big Western city and see how lucky you'll be.