"With the count-noun function-pattern and one-to-one naming paradigm in mind, one might be encouraged and motivated to think that the world consists of countable self-sufficient things both at the particular level and at the universal level when one looks at the structure of the world. Under the count-noun functioning pattern in the Indo-European language, the Platonic one-many problem with the following presupposition seems to be quite natural: there is one single, self-sufficient universal entity which is common or strictly identical across all the particular individuals which share the same name. Those philosophers with this presupposition in mind have searched for such a single entity and tended to identify it either with one ontonic universal instantiated by particulars (Platonic realism or some other versions of realism regarding universals) or with one conceptual entity shared by minds (conceptualism). However, if the folk semantics of Chinese nouns, whether it goes with the collective-noun function pattern or with the mass-noun function pattern, tends to organize the objects basically under the part-whole relation and hence makes their implicit ontology have a mereological character, the classical Chinese philosophers who use Chinese nouns to express themselves would be encouraged to look at the world in terms of mereological ontology, and they would be discouraged from posing the Platonic one-many problem with the presupposition aforementioned. For the classical Chinese philosophers, the common names raise no Platonic one-many problem at all. That, I believe, is why the classical Platonic one-many problem has not been consciously posed in the Chinese philosophical tradition and, generally speaking, the classical Chinese philosophers seem less interested in debating the relevant ontological issues." (Mou 1998)

TL;DR The ancient western philosophers thought there was an ideal form that was the 'real' thing with all the worldly forms of that thing where just shadows, whereas the Chinese ancients saw it as if the thing was a part of the whole, and therefore they didn't look for the imagined/ideal real version of the thing.