My counterpoint is that Taiwan has hardly always been this economically successful. 40 years ago you were wealthy if you could afford a TV. I don’t think the amount of time we’re talking about is sufficient to make some kind of huge cultural reversal, especially since the urban and relatively well-off Chinese you’ve discussed appear to have this same callousness problem as the extremely impoverished.
I appreciate your citation, but it’s hardly a statistical analysis. It assumes the conclusion “Chinese people are being more callous than other people” and then dredges up individual cases without bothering to confirm the validity of the initial assumption.
Furthermore, your citation makes some of the same arguments I made WRT to culture and economic background. To me, it feels patently unfair to blame these people for callousness when they’re a product of culture and economic circumstance.
Regarding differences between Taiwan and China, I’m sure there are many. I’ve only been to China once, but obviously the two countries are now quite different. What I doubt is that the individuals are very different. From meeting a great number of people from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, I feel quite strongly that we are not that different in terms of culture. Of course, that’s a highly subjective judgment.
They will try. But they won’t do it day after day if they get nothing. For one thing, they will soon starve to death.
That’s because the US and UK essentially turned Taiwan over to China at the end of World War II. The Chinese debased the currency and generally ruined Taiwan’s economy. Then, in 1947, Taiwanese rebelled against the Chinese and, unfortunately, lost. (Compare and contrast to the Palestinian Jewish victory over invading Arab armies the next year. The Jews were much better prepared for war.)
What happened, in Taiwan, between 1948 and 1988, is that the losers co-opted the invaders, to the point where a closeted Taiwanese nationalist*, Lee Teng-hui, could be elected President – after which he promptly joined the pro-independence opposition. Now, Lee’s career would have been impossible if the Taiwanese and Chinese were as different as the Jews and Arabs. But it could happen if the Chinese and Taiwanese were roughly as culturally different as the Chinese and Japanese, which is close to the case.
I was hoping that Taiwan would serve as the “control” for the question in this thread, the place where Chinese culture unaffected by Communism is preserved and can be observed. But apparently it was never similar enough to serve that function.
China generally endured about 100 years of anarchy (Boxer Rebellion any one?), invasion (British, Japanese) or civil war prior to the revolution in 1949. After the revolution and few year honeymoon and a Chinese renaissance, you had the 100 Flowers Movement where all the academics, elite, educated Chinese that were invited to provide open and honest feedback on the Party were seriously bitch slapped. Then the mass starvation across great swathes of the country as a result of the Great Leap Forward. Relative stability for a few years and then the Great Proletariatian Cultural Revolution that was hardcore for at least 5 years and generally citied as a decade long decent into madness. Add in Mao’s “one mouth has two hands” and the massive birth rate he drove that took an already over populated country and *really *made it crowded. Followed by the one child policy started in the late 70’s, now relaxed because the cost of raising a kid in China has increased massively. And, as short as 30 years ago, China was dirt poor to having a middle class equivalent to the US population. The economic change over the past 30 years caused an incredible change in the social fabric as the “iron rice bowl” cradle to the grave socialist system gave way to a hybrid that in some ways is the most free for all capitalistic society in the world married to a legacy planned economy where old school communist societal controls have largely disappeared.
The above absolutely had a major effect on how Chinese in/from China act today.
Taiwan has it’s own story but it’s a very different one since 1949, and a better yardstick since 1945. And is a small nation state versus the worlds third largest country by land mass and largest country by population. And of course the “native” Taiwanese of Fukien or Hakka origin were ahem not exactly the cultural elite or bastion of Chinese culture ahem. And the real natives of Taiwan are Polynesians with third class status. Apples and oranges to China even with the flood of mainlanders that came over in the run up to 1949.
Note: I had the privilege of first living in Taiwan in 1982 and the Chinese countryside in 1985 (and add 5 years total in Hong Kong split between the late 80’s and straddling the handover in 1997). I go to both Taiwan and China for business every 1-2 months.
That is incorrect. You’re at least a decade or two off. I first lived in Taiwan in 1982, and everyone had a TV, fridge and often an air conditioner. Most people had motor cycles and while car ownership was low, the streets were clogged.