Really not. Spend some time in China. It won't take long (hours to days) before you notice the utter callousness with which people habitually treat strangers and the environment around them.
Is there any place with comparable population density with a substantially better social environment? If so, have you any theories that could explain the difference?
The modern Chinese psyche has been sculpted in large part due to the Cultural Revolution.
People who have grown up in comfort do not fully comprehend the effect of widespread hunger on a large population. Natural selection rewarded those that put their families above everything. The families that did not died. Parents that did not do everything in their power to feed their children watched them starve to death in their hands.
Many things about modern China can be directly linked to this shared national pain.
The absolute, obsessive drive of Chinese parents to have their children study and reach a higher station of life is a direct result of the culture of hustle instilled by their parents and grandparents. Devotion to families, incredible work ethic, creativity and innovation can all be traced back to the skills necessary to survive the Cultural Revolution.
However, many of the problems in modern China can be linked to this phenomenon. Bribery, open piracy, corruption are common in every walk of Chinese life. Chinese people put themselves, and their families, first and they've never had a compelling argument against it. People in the West believe in their institutions in a way that doesn't exist in China.
But, time will change this. There is clear precedent in the West that each successive generation that grows up outside of poverty will be less and less cutthroat compared to the generation prior.
This hypothesis is falsified by the fact that the Chinese who live in Taiwan and Hong Kong are by and large perfectly civilised people, rather unlike mainland China.
Why, I don’t have a clue. Maybe it is the last 200 years in China, civil wars, then Communists and Mao. It is weird because there is not much violent crime at all. You won’t get kidnapped or mugged outside your hotel or anything like that.
Everything is provided, decided, controlled, influenced, reviewed, rethought by and via the state (in some representation, the party, the government, the local government, some group or other, an official, someone with connections, the police, or even just a faceless automated system/website/machine). This reminds people that everything is temporary, effort is futile, etc. This makes people simply not care much about common stuff. (Environment, roads, streets, houses, etc.)
Source, I'm from a post-soviet country, and we're dealing with huge swaths of the population who are still very much thinking like this.
This is actually something Hank Paulson comments on in his book "Dealing with China": the Chinese have a huge government, but they actually have something like a half to a third as many government workers per capita. And their comms infrastructure, despite the Huewai bruhaha, is severely lacking in comparison, so those additional people don't stretch as far.
What about their comms infrastructure is lacking? I got full high-speed cellular internet reception even in the deep countryside when I visited there last year.
> America has the same business culture; what's saving (most of) us is our better-functioning regulatory culture.
The difference in America is it's not good business practice to hurt your own customers. i.e. reputation matters. You mess up just once, and it takes years for your brand to recover (this includes non-brand brands, like store brands or generics).
In China it seems like there's a never ending supply of new names constantly.
Usually if something is made in America it is a product of very high quality (except for food). This must be a deeper cultural thing and not just regulatory culture.
Nope. Definitely not just regulation. China has regulation in spades but the culture breaks it.
Culture plays a huge role. Source: first hand experience living in China (highly broken culture), Taiwan (pretty mature and functional culture, but with some problems like “the boss knows best even if he doesn’t”), India (seriously broken with the caste system but also a strong sense of propriety) and the US (mixed bag, comparable to Taiwan in a lot of ways).
