I think it's worth pointing out that this appears to be mainly Chinese culture from the mainland. Chinese from other areas like Hong Kong and Taiwan seem to be completely different. When I visited Taipei I was pleasantly surprised to see how polite these people were, they lined up in queues to board their subway!

Taiwanese people love queueing. Queueing for the train, queueing waiting for the bus, and - of course - queueing around the block to wait to eat at a 'famous' restaurant (:

My Taiwanese parents were the sort to enter a large queue without knowing what it was for, because whatever was at the end of it was bound to be good.

oh, then they should visit the mainland and start queuing for a licence plate in Shanghai - 18 months waiting time on average, $15k cost. crazy? They can also renounce their ROC citizenship and start queuing for an apartment in Beijing or Shanghai, 60 months to become eligible and $1m to get a 2bedroom one next to a noisy main road in an area traditionally considered as poor neighbourhood.

Are you sure they weren't English? :)

There's still a huge amount of 差不多 in Taiwan, unfortunately.

It's not so much culture as regulatory environment. Chinese labor laws are more lax, or at least more laxly enforced. Things are done pretty differently in the American Midwest, with its history of labor organizing.