Certainly can’t argue with success, but what an inefficient way to achieve a goal. Rube Goldberg would have been proud.
Perhaps not.
Had HMS simply swapped with his horny neighbor the woman would have immediately seen through the ploy as soon as horndog started his moves.
By having everyone swap (dare I call it a “Japanese fire drill”?) the actual intent is lost in the noise. IOW, it’s simply the distraction move in a sleight of hand trick writ large on barstools.
Said another way, each culture is interested in the things that stand out to them, as weird / different enough to mention. There will be other differences that are equally real, but don’t stand out to them.
And oddly enough, many of those “weird” ones will be less good than how we do it. Whichever we is doing the talking.
I’d be very curious to read a list of “strange and boorish things westerners do as seen by native Chinese”. It’ll probably need a bunch of explanation, thereby “killing the joke” just for us to notice the beam in our own eye.
Bottom line: The situation is reflexive.
This whole thread reeks of bias / non scientific hypotheses.
It’s like astrology. If you ask “Do Leo’s have grand egos” or “Are Pisces kinky” …
You will have a bunch of people confirming the statements and some denying it. It’s like gamblers seeing patterns where they don’t exist.
Late add to my post two above:
I can’t come up with the title, but 10-15 years ago I read a book by an American who was fascinated by all things Chinese and lived there for many years, say 1980s-2000s. He worked as some manner of university professor; IIRC he wasn’t just an ESL teacher.
In his telling, the standard Chinese term for “Westerner” really translates as “barbarian” and he used that term throughout the book. And rather relished his role as a scallawag among the Good People; doubly so because he was a large man with long red hair & beard.
It was a very human book that sensitively looked at the very different world the identically human Chinese people live in. And how thoroughly challenging it was for both sides to understand across cultures even as we all are good at eating, drinking, and laughing late into the night. He was also a damn good storyteller.
I hope somebody can recognize the book I’m describing so we can all read it.
His way is the right way to talk about cultural differences. As @am77494 points out just above, there’s also the bumper-sticker TwitPost approach which is little more than an excuse to pick a fight. Don’t do that. Although the book / article the OP cites sure seems to be an example of the latter, not the former.
HMS_Irruncible presented the scenario in the context of hiding one’s personal interests from the group, so I missed the idea that they might be acting as a group so as to hide the horndog’s intentions from the lady.
Makes me think of the parachute swap scene in Point Break - which results in Keanu ending up with the same parachute he had at the outset. 
I agree that idea may or may not have been there at all. As HMS said, he didn’t really follow the explanation of why his companions chose this particular tactic.
I should have mentioned… I don’t know if the chair-swapping maneuver I described is universal or regional or just something my buddy cooked up. I was made to understand that it’s a fairly normal and natural feature of drinking parties; i.e. someone says “let’s mix things up” and everybody knows to do that little cocktail-napkin exercise. But I’m not sure and Google isn’t helping me out.
We can guess someone wants to get closer or farther away from someone else, but the point of the thing is to conceal your personal intent by submitting it to the group, in a way that might benefit the group and frustrate your own goals.
I speculate that with that kind of strategy, it doesn’t really improve or decrease your odds of getting your way, but it 100% avoids the appearance of selfishness, which is like the #2 most important thing in Japan after keeping the wa (as I mentioned upthread). I’m married to a Japanese, and in my experience, the most common way people denigrate other people is to call them selfish.
My family:
- Boxing them as ‘Chinese’. That’s like saying all Mexicans are the same. Context of course. Proudly Chinese, yes. All main-landers, or all indirect, or all pushy – naive and boorish.
- Wearing shoes inside. Going barefoot outside.
- Eating rice at a banquet.
- “Leaving money on the table” in a negotiation.
- “Hands off” management.
- Office banter. In my native UK, the humor is not just about abstract things, but also about each other and colleagues tease each other a little. This is typical across Europe IME. I’d actually say the US is less like this this, but if Europe is level 10, and the US is level 5, then China is not even level 1.
Huh??? Please give the term used.
In Mandarin, foreigners are informally lao wai (old outsider/foreigner). Formally it’s wai gou ren (foreign person)
Lao wai is similar to the Japanese gaijin (outside man/person). Neither is meant to be derogative.
Now, the Cantonese gwai lo (literally ghost, old/old ghost) while still not meant to be insulting, can he taken as an insult one depending on how it’s pronounced.
I can’t remember the term for barbarian, but historically the term for barbarian was reserved from the Mongols who continually attacked and eventually conquered China in the 13th century.
Never heard or seen it. Way easier ways to change seats. Too hot, too cold, sun/glare in the eyes, don’t want next to/across a smoker or non-smoker, both of you go to bathroom or car, then “accidently” exchange seats, etc.
How do they react when a foreigner can speak their language fluently?
The consensus, from what I can tell, is that it feels extremely odd, unnerving even - especially if the foreigner has no foreign accent.
And it can be hard not to reply to them in English. I once worked with an American teacher in Taiwan (who’d been born in China.) She spoke Mandarin superbly, but it took a while for me to condition myself to reply to her in Mandarin, because it was simply so ingrained in me that “white face = reply in English.” I couldn’t recall conversing with a white person in Mandarin before that.
My experience has been that when your Chinese sucks, you get complimented a lot.
As you improve, fewer people compliment your Chinese; they just communicate and interact with you naturally.
-but-
I was talking to a girl who is American-born but Asian ethnicity. She is at the same study level of Mandarin learning, and I was commenting to her that although I learn many chengyu (phrases / idioms) in class, I never hear them in spoken Chinese. She remarked that people use chengyu with her all the time. So now I think that even if people are speaking to me relatively fluently, I am still getting a slightly different version of Mandarin, a kind of formal or simplified Mandarin.
In Japan it depends on whether you’re in a major city or not. There’s always some novelty to it wherever you are, but Tokyo folks have seen it before. In the countryside it tends to make people really astonished because they don’t get many foreign visitors of any stripe.
I can’t recall the book, so I can’t answer your question. I have no personal experience in China.
Nevertheless if you go to (USA) Google and search for [book China barbarians] you’ll come up with some foreign affairs / politics books whose title is using “barbarian” as a figurative term referring not to ancient Mongols but to modern Westerners.
So whatever the word is, my author was/is not the only one interpretting it that way.
IIRC it’s related to the idea of the Middle Kingdom. Which, contrary to many Westerner’s assumptions is not about China being the hub or center of everything. In the Chinese telling (as explained to me), there’s the Upper Kingdom of Heaven, and below that is the Middle Kingdom of China, and below that is the Lower Kingdom of all the rest of the world and humanity and all creation.
Much as American exceptionalism holds that not only is America inherently superior by birthright, all Americans are superior as humans too.
I’m in no position to defend or attack this interpretation; I’m merely reporting it.
I’m not Chinese, (Okinawan/Japanese) so hopefully someone more familiar with Chinese thought will jump in, but I took a few Chinese history courses and have been fascinated with Chinese culture for decades.
I did a Google search as you suggested and I think the term barbarian, while properly used as describing peoples who are not part of the Chinese kingdom is too strong a term. It’s more an Us and Them mentality. There’s the Han (Chinese people) and everyone else.* The question brought up every semester in my Chinese history courses was, “What makes someone Chinese?” and the professor said, “If you accept the Chinese classics and Chinese culture, you’re Chinese.”, anyone who didn’t was a non-Chinese. Yes, below the status of the Han, but not to be completely disregarded as I think the term barbarian implies.
*Japan has the same, possibly even stronger sense of this.
As for Jung Gwo (Mandarin), I’ve never heard of the three tiered interpretation. There is Heaven and Earth, with Jung Gwo being the center of the World. And yes, by extension, there’s Heaven, Jung Gwo and everyone else. But I think it’s too harsh to say China is any different than any other country/peoples throughout history. As you said, Americans at some level think of themselves and our country as superior to everyone else, but that doesn’t mean we seriously think that second and third world countries are barbarians.
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My American father seriously thought that Australians were barbarians when he arrived here: the pride in their outdated backwater telephone system, the retail customs, the way they fail to enunciate their syllables, but mostly, the lack of central heating.
And the only reason my Chinese relatives and Japanese contacts don’t “seriously think” that westerners are barbarians is because it’s because, being obvious, it’s not the kind of thing that requires serious thought. (My Chinese relatives think that there are identifiable Chinese groups that are barbarians, it’s not a color bar, or based on the shape of your nose.)
Here is a video called “White Guy Pranking Chinese with perfect Mandarin”
I cannot find it now but there is a good reddit discussion about Americans who can speak a foreign language and they pick up alot of not so good things said.
The Chinese look down on the Koreans, the Koreans look down on Southeast Asians and the Japanese look down on everyone! LOL
Substitute any nationality/ethnicity and it’s the same all around the world.