China will not adopt a modern western system for the same reason Russia is incapable. It’s the tsar-Boyar dynamic, and it’s similar in China. It’s totalitarian, and peasants are not trusted to make these decisions.

Technically Russia does have an NCO Corp though. But those sergeants and petty officers have nowhere the same responsibilities as their western counterparts. As you wrote, this is the job of Ltees and captains. Nor do they have any freedom to adapt to battlefield conditions. They are taught to obey orders to the letter.

One anecdote of this war is good for this point. A company stopped in their tracks once they reached their objective. A local Ukrainian asked the Russian officer,and was told those were his orders. Never mind these troops were pretty exploded to enemy infantry.

It makes no sense, but we have people who are taught to think independently. They are not.

Moreover, they forgot the Russian doctrine that let Zhukov advance. Walk in artillery, follow with mass infantry and armor. This war, they cannot do this at the company level. So tanks are picked out by enemy infantry, and infantry comes under overlapping fields of fire.

It is ugly.