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Comment by wozniacki | Hacker News Reader

  The Chinese had the reputation to be super reliable and
  men of their word, while the Japanese had the reputation
  to be unreliable and ready to cross you at the first 
  opportunity.

What has been the observation off late of those very same peoples? Have the perceptions markedly changed? If so, how?

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I suspect if you looked for statistics on corruption perception, and in local faith in locally produced products, you’d see a situation where the Japanese trust their compatriots and the Chinese severely mistrust theirs.

I’ve lived in China for six years. The consensus among Western businesspeople is that if you have a joint venture it’s not a matter of if you’ll be screwed but when. Once you find a good contact in a company, someone who will deliver you the goods you wanted, at the time and place you wanted, in the correct quality and at the agreed price, you hold on to that relationship. Once they leave you have to go back to fine tooth comb quality control, asking every day on the status of the delivery, and going ballistic when someone inevitably messes something up. It is very, very uncommon for a foreigner to make a great success of a business here without a Chinese business partner but that business partner is their wife a large majority of the time.

The Party is a large part of the difference in culture. Taiwanese and Singaporeans are Chinese but they didn’t have the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward to deal with. Communism does bad things to cultures. I’m sure things will get better in time but I doubt it will be the work of just one generation.

Communism does bad things to cultures

I read Paul Midler's "What's Wrong With China" recently, the followup to his "Poorly Made In China", and his research seems to indicate that communism and the Great Leap Forward are not the source of those aspects of Chinese culture, that those aspects go back much further.

Definitely a fascinating read.

Taiwan was a Japanese colony for 50 years and Japan deliberately "westernized" the local political and industrial culture. Whereas elsewhere the Japanese didn't see the locals as fit for modernization and so didn't bother. The KMT were beneficiaries of this when they took over the island, even though they implemented a program of sinicization.

Lee Kuan Yew famously fashioned Singaporean culture almost out of whole cloth as he believed that without a radical transformation in the social and economic culture that Singapore would quickly disintegrate. I can't find good quotes at the moment, but he had some really harsh opinions about the local ethnic Chinese culture from which he emerged; that it was corrupt, chaotic, criminal and an existential threat to the new nation.

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