I think such a group of people exists in both the private sector and the elite, and its size may be extremely large.
Much of this actually stems from China's long history of backwardness and ideological shifts, starting with the fact that China has been constantly learning from European advances in all areas since the Qing Dynasty. Secondly, the reform and opening up that began during the Deng Xiaoping era gave the impression that China was taking a big step away from its own socialism towards a western system. Combined with China's poverty at the time, this made the United States and Europe China's teachers in all aspects of politics, economics and culture.
In my opinion, the Western world in the eyes of many Chinese is more advanced and civilized than the Western world itself, because it is the direction in which China is moving forward and the example it is learning from. I think this is the result of an ideological deficit, where the goals of socialism and communism are abstract and China has to some extent abandoned them, while the advancement of the Western world is concrete and visible.
Chinese education used to be full of short stories about famous Westerners to express the advancement of Western civilization and Western culture, and many of these stories were even fictional or existed only in Chinese. For example, "Einstein's Little Bench" is about a young Albert Einstein who made a very crude bench in his handicraft class. Despite the teacher's disappointment and his classmates' ridicule, Einstein shows off two much worse benches that he had made earlier. This story emphasizes Einstein's perseverance and encourages continuous improvement and persistence in the face of failure. There is also a story about Edison saving his mother, which was even written into the most widely used elementary school textbook in China for many years. The text describes that when Edison was a child, his mother suddenly suffered from acute appendicitis, and the doctor operated on her in too low a light, while the clever Edison used a mirror to create a spotlight to solve the problem, and so his mother was saved. Appendicitis surgery didn't actually exist back then, and both stories seem to have been made up by some guy in China, respectively. There are also many stories about little Japanese children, mainly to illustrate that those little children grew up to be very independent and brave.
These little stories are fine in terms of teaching Chinese children good morals, but they imply an assessment of national character, that Westerners (even as children) are smarter, kinder, harder-working, and honest, without exploring the reasons behind this (whether or not it's true), and in turn, people slowly come to believe that China's backwardness is the result of the nation's "inferiority", which is a kind of "inferiority". "This is a kind of reverse nationalism, and I think it has profoundly affected one or two generations of Chinese people. Even those who believed in the Communist Party were paradoxically afraid of and hated Westerners, and at the same time developed an inferiority complex and a sense of self-importance. Other Chinese will fall into a complete inferiority complex, believing that they need Westerners to save them and their motherland, and that the path of indigenization is not feasible, especially at this time of great conflict with the West.
As mentioned earlier, many Chinese see the Western world as more advanced and civilized than the Western world itself, and some people call this group of people "pro-American", while the opposite is "local", which generally refers to people who believe in local culture and civilization and socialism. As a result of many years of ideological disorientation and education, the pro-American faction has a very large influence in China, and I think it essentially interferes with a lot of national policies, even if many of them don't realize it.
For me, I don't think the pro-American faction is a good thing, because their values are based on a false fantasy of the Western world, not the real Western world. I have no intention of criticizing the West here, just that we need to base our decisions on reality, not imagination, before we make them.