We hear a lot about Chinese cheating, from sat scores to ip theft. I've long wondered - why is cheating endemic in China whereas you don't hear the same complaints about people in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore; places with large ethnic Chinese populations which should be very similar culturally to mainland China. It seems implausible that the value systems in these places would have so widely diverged in a relatively short amount of time. Or perhaps it is the legal and regulatory environment (or lack thereof) that brings out the worst in people when they know they can get away with it?

>We hear a lot about Chinese cheating, from sat scores to ip theft. I've long wondered - why is cheating endemic in China whereas you don't hear the same complaints about people in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore; places with large ethnic Chinese populations which should be very similar culturally to mainland China

You use to hear it all the time about people in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and Singapore too. Back in the day (for Singapore that's as close as the 70s), they were seedy ports, with anything goes rules, prostitution, gambling, counterfeiting, drugs, and so on. Look for old books on those places.

Those things gradually changed as those 3 places became richer and more important for trade (and Taiwan was an early "China", getting outsourced industrial production from the West).

Note that all three places are much smaller than China, don't have 600+ strong rural population still struggling to get by/to middle class by any means, and some of them had a "Delaware/Switzerland" role in the region, with multiple interests vested in that working well (which is how the law sausage gets made to benefit corporations, the rule of law is held, and the countries get "high marks" for "economic freedom": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_... ).

> why is cheating endemic in China whereas you don't hear the same complaints about people in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore;

Because cheating is a cultural rather than ethnical thing.

There are ethnical Chinese people in those regions you listed, but sure mainland China sailed a totally different cultural course over the last 70 years.

In mainland china, cheating mostly happen because of over competition. If you don't cheat, others will and will crush you in business or academic competition. Cheaters go home for chicken dinner while non-cheaters goes to jail.

Isnt there a similar level of competition in all of those places?

Also I've met a lot of mainland Chinese people who recently immigrated to the us and can say that they don't seem like unscrupulous people at a significantly greater rate than the general population.

The penalties for "losing" are much lower in rich countries.

My grandfather used to say that he left the Soviet Union because he didn't want to live in a country where you have to cheat in order to have a good life.

> “And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn't be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters — who your neighbor is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit ... or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.” Lee Kuan Yew, April 20, 1987.

Taiwan was "civilized" by 50 years of Japanese occupation that wasn't brutal or repressive as Korea. Though I think Taiwan was more of a backwater island nation when the Japanese came. Likewise for Hong Kong with Britain. Taiwan and Hong Kong sort of organically grew into and internalized the modern legal and business structures laid down by the occupiers. China is having to do what Lee Kuan Yew did, which was transform an unruly, anarchic, but otherwise sophisticated culture into one that obeys and values modern legal, rules-based norms.

How did China get its empires on and off for thousands of years of ancient history if its people are unruly and anarchic?

The same way the German "barbarians" did? Unruly doesn't imply backward; anarchic doesn't imply chaotic.

Also, China is a huge country with many cultures. Closer to Beijing the culture was historically more legalist and authoritarian. The southern coastal trading cultures were more anarchic. And I think that's still very much the same today, except because of industrialization and nationalization there's conflict where historically there was a natural symbiosis and passivity regarding the respective roles.

(Firstly, I don't accept your assumption that cheating is endemic in China, i.e. and not elsewhere. But I'm no expert at all.)

Maybe the question should be, why do you hear a lot more about it. Because China is 100 times the population of those other places? And, well, there seems a trend at least on HN lately, in stories from US papers/journals, and in the US media generally I assume (don't know, I'm not there) to favour 'China bad' stories, over 'China good' or '(Other country) bad'. It's pretty tedious, and seems to have started not long ago. It has that nauseating feeling of that regular US media obsession on the next country they'll invade/bomb. Demonization, subhumanization, whatever you want to call it.

Overly simplistic, but the cultural revolution destroyed an entire set of social norms and many of the people in power in various regions were adolescents who were at the height of their rejection of such norms due to normal human development. Unfortunately that rejection of society that seems so crucial as a teen doesn't actually play out very well in the long run.

> which should be very similar culturally to mainland China

Why though ?

Apart from looking similar they are quite different culturally from mainland China. A lot of which stems from the fact that they were former British colonies and have always taken inspiration from the West.

Massive famines, "cultural revolution", decades of civil war, genocides.. in general the demented social programs of Mao and his henchment. This was China from the 1910s to 1970s. Not to mention a century of colonization and forced concession. Chinese culture overseas was not ruptured in such a way, and preserves a lot of aspects of it from before that bloody century.

It sounds very similar to Russia. I suspect it has something to do with their communist past.

Rule of law vs rule by law

First, this is a sweeping, borderline racist, statement to state that "Chinese cheat". China is no more into IP theft or cheating than others. I think people should really be careful and refrain from "drinking the kool-aid" handed to them by some media.

Now, Taiwan and Hongkong are China. But China that continued on more traditional values. The communist regime has worked hard to change the fabric of society (like it did in e.g. Russia) and that has had negative consequences on culture and manners, and brought distrust in most institutions.

It is also down to the legal and regulatory environment. Just look for stories from Europe and the Us in the 19th century and you'll find many, many stories like you could hear from China today. And those stories from China today are what happens in many countries around the world outside of the Western 'bubble'.

You don't seem to understand, social credit is the direct outcome of "legal and regulatory environment".

What has that to do with the question or my reply?

I'm certainly no expert but isn't it only cheating by western standards? Wouldn't it be interesting to have a culture that doesn't conform to that standard and see how it fares? Imho it's like a society where everything is GPL-ed, is it really so wrong? Sure social credit etc are horrible imo but I fail to see that the copying of smart ideas without punishment is inherently wrong. It's non-capitalistic, but inherently wrong? I dont agree with that.

Sure, one (sentient individual) should never be forced to share ideas (or anything for that matter, unless one chooses to deny others that right), but to battle that with government granted monopolies... hmm, idk... I feel like we should be a bit more open-minded.

This soft bigotry against Chinese culture is really tiring already. Chinese culture and people are all over the world: America, southeast Asia, singapore, and so many other places... To think that cheating and IP theft and scams is somehow part of Chinese culture or that these are virtues unqiue to these exotic orientals and we should drop our Western preconceptions is so unbelievably condescending... And how offensive to Chinese people, both in China and overseas, who earn their achievements though their honest and diligent labor, the kind of work we value here too.

A Thai person once told me they were raising a generation of copiers, when 1 person would start a karaoke bar, the street would be filled with them soon. I also heard stories of Chinese copying entire machines for manufacturers in the west and expecting support on them. I don't understand your reply I'm saying western culture may have strange standards, Or, different at least.

I would say, IP theft and cheating is a communist thing. I was born in Soviet Union. Since the ruling class were the simple workers and not engineers there is no motivation for these to do world class things. The don’t get fame, credits and wealth. So the government must get all advanced technology by stealing. I case of Eastern Germany everything was copied from the West: stolen,reverse engineered and released as domestic product couple years later. Whole industry was 1-2 generations behind free world.

The out-of-print book East Minus West Equals Zero makes a case for exactly this.

Exactly, that's why Chinese culture in places like US, Canada, Singapore, Taiwan,HK, etc etc is generally associated with upper middle class professionalism and honorable success. It was decades communism and the associated violence and very intentional destruction of interpersonal trust that breeds a lot of what we see in mainland China today.

>I'm certainly no expert but isn't it only cheating by western standards? Wouldn't it be interesting to have a culture that doesn't conform to that standard and see how it fares?

That is a question most don't ask. They assume the laws they have and the way they go about such laws are what fits every culture -- and every people at every circumstances.

And they don't just believe that those laws would be good for those people: they also believe that they can readily and without problems adopt them too, as if it's just a matter of will.

Truth is, those laws are not some universal constants, but a result of both inheriting the Greco-Roman culture and Roman legal conceptions, and 2 millennia of iterating on them (and of course Europe itself was divided into islands of elites and peasant chaos up to the times of Hugo and Dickens, and the US of course had the "wild west" frontiers where the rule of law wasn't exactly what is today).

Maybe I'm reading "cheating" too literally but I can't imagine any scenario where I would want someone's expertise who copied other's work instead of creating the work themselves. At best I temporarily have a small lead, at worst I'll get sued or kill someone through hiring incompetence.

Cheating is ingrained into the culture. Two examples: if you visit an ancient building, it will have been rebuilt identically 7-8 times on the same spot (but still be considered the same building). When you were an apprentice craftsman in China, your goal was to make work indistinguishable from the master, at which point you would graduate and start making your own furniture/whatever it was.

IP theft is not just copying the idea, its stealing of non public documents/prototypes that helps you implement the same product without as much research.