Things the west Could Learn from China

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1. A huge majority of Chinese people are incredibly tolerant and patient.

There's no place where this is better revealed than in their driving habits. To honk your horn in traffic in China, you are simply letting others know where you are so that you avoid an accident. In the West, honking your horn is usually done out of anger for how the other person is driving. You hear of numerous cases of 'road rage' in the U.S. Americans are impatient and become easily angered while driving. Sometimes, in extreme situations, they become violent. And, since Americans are allowed to own guns, these situations can become quite deadly.

I think that there are several reasons why Chinese are so tolerant and patient. First, they have to share their space with a lot of other people. Second, I think it’s part of the Chinese culture to live more harmoniously with others. It seems to me that tolerance for others and patience is part of the mindset of Chinese people.


Yeah, you could honk. People could jump out of the way. Or, you know, you could just not hit them. It's a coin toss, for sure.

I honk all the time. Pedestrians are not predictable. They don't look when they step out on the street and they don't necessarily take an obvious route across the road. Two wheeled transport often do not follow any traffic rules at all.

Just not hit them? Good idea. The horn helps me do that.

Walking - can avoid most collisions without shouting.
Driving - lose the ability to judge distance, speed, your own place in the world.

Perhaps the exhaust is venting into the cabins.

10.  Chinese news is much more optimistic and rather than pointing out faults with their country like in the West will simply make up positive things

Incidentally, people the world over considerably over-estimate their ability to pilot a car. There was some comparison done once, somewhere off in the land of I-forget-where-I-read-this, where normal drivers and race car drivers were asked to rank their skills from 1 to 10. Normal drivers consistently gave themselves higher scores and race car drivers gave themselves lower, or some such urban legend. My point being, people in cars are amateurs. They get hysterical like amateurs. They think they have rights like amateurs. In industrial settings, if you move large weights around you have to wear hard hats and pretty orange and yellow jackets. On the roads, you can do it in your shorts.

The conventions of car driving are not natural laws. They are the barely-thought through contrivances of setting lethal force in motion so you can go shopping.

I will agree with the tolerant and patience thing with getting on the bus. You can push and elbow and squeeze your way in and I feel like no one is actually mad at me for it.

Although asking someone to move so you can squeeze into the window seat seems like an exhaustive burden for some people.

CP - it's called the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it applies to everything.

I actually took a square blow to the chest today while driving my moped. A guy was standing next to a car talking to the driver, when he wildly gesticulated and hit me while I was going about 20 km. I just kept moving along. I'm lucky he wasn't holding anything.

An ebike-taxi-man was hauling his victim errr customer through a walking street, this astute and convincing gentleman decided to try and drive through my girlfriend and I while we were holding hands and walking down said walking-street. I grabbed his wrist, trying to pull him off the bike, but managing only to pull off his knock-off wrist watch.
He looked at me questioningly, asking my girlfriend in CHangsha dialect, what he'd did wrong.. ....... I told her to tell him next time he did that to me or her I'd wallop him upside his head.

Seriously though, what country learns lessons from other countries? Don't these dimwitted authors know how culture works? At best they are suggesting there are lifestyle or attitude advantages in this system that they like better than the one they came from. And these stooges are seriously suggesting they enjoy the courtesy of being honked at?

But wait, the honking is supposed to demonstrate Chinese patience and tolerance. So, like, what Texas Michael is saying is, holy shit, does being honked at get right on my tits but darn if I can turn around and give the finger or reach for my holster I left in Houston because look at these fucks, none of them are getting annoyed. Thus "a huge majority of Chinese people are incredibly tolerant and patient."

The next one, Chinese people are more open and accepting to people regardless of their social or economic status, my eyes rolled hard I saw the back of my own head. Thus misdirected, the other 8 entries made so much more sense.

At first I thought it was 'tongue in cheek' humour... until I read the actual article and realized this fucktard - MichaelM - was serious. Perhaps he also thinks the West should adopt using Chinese baby pants to save on diapers?
 

Seriously though, what country learns lessons from other countries?

Only ones that have been colonized by people of that country I would imagine. Such as the difference between Hong Kong and the rest of China.

well in that case, China is quickly learning from HK and Taiwan. It is, in a sense, being colonized culturally by the 2

When I was a kid in England we were always being told how we should learn to be more positive like Americans and have better food like our European neighbours.

Come to think of it David Cameron went to China a couple of months ago and said that we could learn a lot from the Chinese about education (presumably keeping the poor kids without perfect scores out and ruining the smart kids lives)

Countries, even whole mythical regions, "the west" to name one, can learn from other countries if they understand at a basic level what's going on there. And that doesn't happen unless you're keyed into the culture and it meshes with your own. And since when does that happen? Meanwhile, when people say "we can learn from...", they are, more than anything else, emphasizing their own cultural values. They're saying, look here, I've identified an optimization within our own system. You can look at the MichaelIM crap and see it happening there. He is for the most part not even talking about China at all.

As to why China engages in propaganda of the cultural one-upmanship variety, it is at heart protectionism. It's not really any kind of cultural analysis. You can in fact tell it's politics by just how intellectually bankrupt it is.

Yeah I think I get what you're saying, look at the way other countries do things and say 'we could do that'

You can't be taking ChinaDaily seriously though, the people who write for it definitely don't. It's even worse than the tabloids back home. I know that this kind of chauvinism/blinkeredness really is a thing in China but it just drives you mad paying attention to it. I'm trying to ween myself off most of the China based stuff I read by laowai and Chinese because it's 90% depressing