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Disclaimer: I've lived and worked in SZ, GZ, and HK for several years. I don't profess to know everything/anything. I'm just trying to get a better understanding by kickstarting a debate where I hope people who know more than I do will contribute their knowledge. If you want to start a flame war or turn this topic into something about race, then kindly f*** off.
The Role of Religion
I had a pretty smart professor in college who liked to say that we all eventually become British Protestant (we, of course, referring to Americans). He himself was a Jewish immigrant who was married to a Buddhist (also an immigrant) who's two kids grew up, more or less, British Protestant. It's no secret that the religion plays a huge role in American culture, regardless of whether we believe or not. But the way we interact with one another each day...and the way we feel and emote can really all be whittled down to British Protestant values that affect us all in some way at a subconscious level.
We feel pity for the weak. We believe that being born privileged means you owe something to society. We feel a sense of pride in purchasing from socially-conscious companies and, even while battling our enemies, we feel a sense of responsibility for the people we take as prisoners and patch up enemy combatants who are injured. These are all British Protestant values, and I only belabor this point in order to hold it up in stark contrast to the Chinese people.
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OP, I couldn't read any further than this. These are absurd generalizations. Only a few of the wealthy believe that being born privileged means you owe something to society. A few are raised that way (the older generation of Kennedy's, notably). If what you say were true, the US wouldn't be in the economic mess it's in today, with growing income inequality, the well-to-do refusing to pay their fair share of taxes and demanding that retirees (some of society's most vulnerable people) take a cut in Social Security, rather than the wealthy stepping up to the plate to pay their share, corporate CEO's taking their companies off-shore to avoid paying any taxes, etc. etc. Your post is total pie-in-the-sky.
And btw, your sweeping generalizations about "the Chinese" tend not to apply to the Chinese on Taiwan. Another grand theory bites the dust. Oh well.
There are plenty of wealthy people in the US (and more broadly, the West) who donate to worthy causes and engage in philanthropy for largely alturistic reasons. But, there are also plenty who engage in them for the massive tax breaks, good PR, and political/social influence it can garner. Look at how many of the largest and most well-known charities and NPO's have CEO's who earn money in line with the private sector, and how with many charities, only pennies of the dollars you donate end up actually getting to the people you are intending to help out. A lot of the "foundations" that people create spend more money on marketing and management than anything else.
As far as the absence of religion as a driving force in China, I think that for the most part you can replace "religion" with "culture," and they serve the same purpose. You can talk to the average Chinese person and they will tell you they are atheist, but they still believe in a variety of spiritual superstitions... they'll tell you things like they need to make sure that they get back to the family tomb in Henan for this tomb sweeping day because their wife is gonna have a baby and they don't want their ancestral spirits to take offense to their lack of presence and fail to bless their newborn child, or even worse, to curse the pregnancy. Or, that because of their recent sinus problems, they need to rearrange the furniture in their apartment because the feng shui is off... never mind, you know, checking the filters on your air conditioner, because "Chinese people don't have allergies." No, it's the feng shui. Bad energy can make you sneeze. You have a rabbit zodiac sign and she is a rooster? Run away now; you two will never work out. None of this is thought of as a religious or spiritual belief to most Chinese; it's part of their "5,000 year culture."
Religion in the West encourages people to adhere to certain social mores, all the same that "cultural" beliefs in China do. In a Christian nation, for example, being sexually promiscuous is looked upon as a sin against god; in China, it's looked upon as a sin against society. Excessive drinking or drug abuse is looked upon as an anti-social, self-degrading act in both. "Shame" and "loss of face" are basically the same thing. There are, of course, plenty of finer points that are extremely different, but at their core, I think that religion and culture are almost analogous between the cultures.
China-bashing is the mainstream in the US, Japan, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
The people need a common enemy to unite against, that is how propaganda works, I think the level of Japan bashing in China is by far the most virulent in Asia.
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I have your answer. It's the difference between guilt based cultures and shame based cultures. I'm not a scholar so I will refrain from going too much into it but as an example. A Chinese software developer copies someone else's work. There is no guilt involved the only problem is if they get caught and therefore bring negative scrutiny to themselves. Which there is no concept of self so basically your whole family. Basically there is no underlying belief that copying is wrong but they believe if you aren't savy enough to get away with it ,you are responsible for bringing shame upon the family.
Another interesting tidbit I've learned about is why so many Asian people in general go around wearing those mask. I'd always assumed it was self protection against viruses and pollution. Nope it's their concern that they may be somehow contributing to spreading anything they might have. It's not to protect them it's a social symbol that they care about protecting others. I found that very interesting. When people say the East is opposite of the West in everything,there is quite a bit of truth behind it.
I have your answer. It's the difference between guilt based cultures and shame based cultures. I'm not a scholar so I will refrain from going too much into it but as an example. A Chinese software developer copies someone else's work. There is no guilt involved the only problem is if they get caught and therefore bring negative scrutiny to themselves. Which there is no concept of self so basically your whole family. Basically there is no underlying belief that copying is wrong but they believe if you aren't savy enough to get away with it ,you are responsible for bringing shame upon the family.
Another interesting tidbit I've learned about is why so many Asian people in general go around wearing those mask. I'd always assumed it was self protection against viruses and pollution. Nope it's their concern that they may be somehow contributing to spreading anything they might have. It's not to protect them it's a social symbol that they care about protecting others. I found that very interesting. When people say the East is opposite of the West in everything,there is quite a bit of truth behind it.
This is too extreme.
The vast majority of Chinese do find guilty if they steal, not just shame if being caught. The culture and education install that sense of guilty too.
Copying others' code "may" be considered less than stealing by some people, and it is true in the US too.
However, Chinese society is less individualist and one has to rely on others to survive, so it might be true that people care about face more.
OP, if you are able to concede that your religion may just be a point of view and not the ultimate truth, perhaps you may get an intelligent response. Otherwise your quest to understand anything outside what your bible allows you to will fail.
Yes, OP, you got a lot of things wrong here. If you dig deeper, HK has a lot of differences compared to China. So does Taiwan... Hong Kong and Taiwan have much lower rates of crime in almost all levels compared to the US, so the role of religion is not exactly a nice gauge of how moral or righteous everyone in the society is. Another mostly irreligious country (compared to the US) is Japan, and you can pretty much leave or even drop your wallet anywhere there and if you got an ID inside, the chances of getting your wallet back is much, much higher compared to any Christian country.
As others also pointed out, the US allies with Saudi Arabia and other countries even if they are against its Christian principles. Moreover, slavery actually flourished during the period when the US was an extremely religious society. The fear of going to hell does not exactly deter a lot of people from greed or other sins.
Let me ask you this... would you dare to leave your cell phone on a bar, or at a table in a restaurant and walk away for a minute?
I know that back home, I would never have done such a thing. Even in a fairly middle or upper-class establishment, chances would have been good that it would have disappeared within fifteen or twenty seconds.
Here in China, go into a bar, restaurant, shop, etc, and you will see people leave their phones, wallets, etc out on the table when they walk away, and it rarely happens that it is taken. It was quite surprising to me.
When I was teaching kids here, if I left candy, toys, etc out where kids could see them and turned my back or left the room, I'd come back and none of it would be missing. Some of the kids may have generally been poorly-behaved by Western standards, but they never, ever stole things. Western kids are generally much better behaved, but they seem to have fewer scruples about taking stuff.
Here, you'll see things every day that you'd never or rarely see in the West, and it's not a big deal. These things can run the gamut from perplexing to annoying to maddening for a Westerner... people will walk straight in front of you and then stop to look around like a doofus even though they have an entire empty sidewalk with which to do such a thing. Pushing and shoving on the Metro is par for the course. People tend not to intervene when they see something like a fight between a man and a woman on the street, because it's "not their business." These are things that can definitely rub someone the wrong way, and lead to the conclusion that people here are uncouth, boorish, uncaring or cowardly.
But at the same time, theft, robbery, assault, etc are much less common here than they were back home. The paranoia and oversensitive nature of life in the States is absent here; if you're a single guy walking alone, a kid looks at you, so you look at them and smile back, no mama bear is gonna grab them defensively because they think you're a child molester... they just think, "oh, what a nice guy. He likes my kid." Behind some of the frustrating little day-to-day things, there's a certain level of civility that is actually quite nice.
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