In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

Re:In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party by cm2187 on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @02:36AM (#17651016)

It's amusing and in line with what my grand mother who grew up in the early 1900s Indochina told me about her (french) dad doing business there. The Chinese had the reputation to be super reliable and men of their word, while the Japanese had the reputation to be unreliable and ready to cross you at the first opportunity.

On a longer time scale, it is hard when you look at Italy or Greece today to think of how the same population was once Sparta, the army of Alexander the Great or the Roman Empire. Populations evolve.

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Re:In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party by Arelius on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @12:53PM (#17654779)

While I think your point rings true, trying to use your historical examples to point it out dismisses human migration among other factors that may have contributed. For instance, there is a good chance that most "Spartans" have died off as a people, since their population problems are well documented. and both the army of Alexander the Great, and the Roman Empire are armies of much larger territory then current Italy/Greece in their peak. And much of Macedonia of Alexander's early reign isn't part of what's typical Greece today.

That's just nit-picking about the complexities of history, but I do agree that the point that people and cultures can change is very true!

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Re:In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party by wozniacki on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @02:49AM (#17651058)

  The Chinese had the reputation to be super reliable and
  men of their word, while the Japanese had the reputation
  to be unreliable and ready to cross you at the first 
  opportunity.

What has been the observation off late of those very same peoples? Have the perceptions markedly changed? If so, how?

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Re:In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party by psergeant on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @04:16AM (#17651436)

I suspect if you looked for statistics on corruption perception, and in local faith in locally produced products, you’d see a situation where the Japanese trust their compatriots and the Chinese severely mistrust theirs.

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Re:In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party by barry-cotter on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @06:52AM (#17652071)

I’ve lived in China for six years. The consensus among Western businesspeople is that if you have a joint venture it’s not a matter of if you’ll be screwed but when. Once you find a good contact in a company, someone who will deliver you the goods you wanted, at the time and place you wanted, in the correct quality and at the agreed price, you hold on to that relationship. Once they leave you have to go back to fine tooth comb quality control, asking every day on the status of the delivery, and going ballistic when someone inevitably messes something up. It is very, very uncommon for a foreigner to make a great success of a business here without a Chinese business partner but that business partner is their wife a large majority of the time.

The Party is a large part of the difference in culture. Taiwanese and Singaporeans are Chinese but they didn’t have the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward to deal with. Communism does bad things to cultures. I’m sure things will get better in time but I doubt it will be the work of just one generation.

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Re:In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party by wahern on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @09:44PM (#17658972)

Taiwan was a Japanese colony for 50 years and Japan deliberately "westernized" the local political and industrial culture. Whereas elsewhere the Japanese didn't see the locals as fit for modernization and so didn't bother. The KMT were beneficiaries of this when they took over the island, even though they implemented a program of sinicization.

Lee Kuan Yew famously fashioned Singaporean culture almost out of whole cloth as he believed that without a radical transformation in the social and economic culture that Singapore would quickly disintegrate. I can't find good quotes at the moment, but he had some really harsh opinions about the local ethnic Chinese culture from which he emerged; that it was corrupt, chaotic, criminal and an existential threat to the new nation.

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Re:In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party by culot on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @08:58AM (#17652753)

Communism does bad things to cultures

I read Paul Midler's "What's Wrong With China" recently, the followup to his "Poorly Made In China", and his research seems to indicate that communism and the Great Leap Forward are not the source of those aspects of Chinese culture, that those aspects go back much further.

Definitely a fascinating read.

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Re:In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party by chrischen on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @03:33AM (#17651240)

The unreliableness of Chinese-made goods is usually due to incompetent Western firms cost-cutting and communication errors arising from cross-globe, cross-language collaborations. It's unfortunate nobody blames the CEOs for made-in-China, just the Chinese people for making it.

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Re:In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party by SmellyGeekBoy on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @05:55AM (#17651833)

I'm not sure that swapping one incorrect sweeping generalisation for another is really the answer.

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Re:In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party by barry-cotter on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @07:00AM (#17652113)

If you really believe that there are a lot of sourcing and quality control jobs here in China that would be happy to employ you if your Mandarin is as good as your English and you have manufacturing experience. All the people I’ve met in those businesses have a quality control everything attitude because if you stop checking they’ll start shipping you shit.

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