The Hard-Working Culture(aspects of the world’s most convincing success story)

[Jlaw]

Amy Chua is not Chinese. She is a Filipino married to a white man. Real Chinese find her values very questionable, like forcing her kids to learn piano and never go outside to play. The question today of Chinese parents is - are we stressing the kids too hard?

The real value of Chinese culture is recognizing that foundations need to be built first - humbleness in the face of knowledge and history. There is no easy route and no shortcuts.

Married to a Jewish man.

 

[AndrewJin]

You're quite right, I think it's the same set of value that are shared across Asia (including South Asia) but for some reason they are better practices in East Asia but for some reason East Asia is performing better than South Asia so I wonder what the reason is. My guess is that, it is the cooperation among East Asian ethnic groups that makes all the differences. In South Asia people are more likely to be happy about other people's failure.

don't be so hush on South Asians. I myself feel happy that way to some extent, it's human beings' nature.

I believe the secret is the organization of Chinese society, the foundation is family. The government in China is reckoned as the ruler a family. The legitimacy lies in whether the leaders bring prosperity to family members or not. But u can not copy this sort of mechanism in India since India is too multinational(90%Chinese are Han, Korean and Japanese are nearly 100%).

All major cities' mayors and provincial governors are directly appointed by central government, their performance is monitored by datas and feedback from citizens. And no movie status and famous lawyers can elect for these positions. That's why any Chinese president starts their political career from the lowest rank like village or county-level official even their come from some most privileged family. This is basically a system running in China for centuries.

When a government loses its legitimacy, i.e. no longer brings stability and harmony, there come about uprisings and revolutions. Generally, Chinese history is about a domestic war/uprising and then unification, again and again.

 

[AndrewJin]

One thing that Chinese-Korean-Japanese share in common is : Punctuality.

Maybe it's because trains in some countries are always late. U know If u arrived even one minute later than the scheduled time in East Asia, u'll cry for that. Sometimes being too strict on time may lead to some sort of worst scenario, like that train accident on 福知山line. Once my HSR train was early at the final stop, I was woken up by a passenger next to me. Super awkward!
In 2010, I took an overnight train from Wuhan to Kunming, scheduled to arrive at 6am, but factually it arrived at 5:30. As a consequence, I didn't wash myself on the train. Punctuality really matters, BEING AHEAR OF TIME IS NOT PUNCTUALITY.

 

[Sanchez]

I think Chinese are more imaginative than Indians, and we are pretty good at playing. Who invented Majiang, Chinese chess and 三国杀? Indians on the other hand are VERY hard working from what I've seen. The Indian students at my school stay until midnight working on their projects. They will keep slamming their head against the wall doing the same thing over and over again until it works while I give up if it fails twice and try something new.

From what I've heard, Indian high school is harder than Chinese high school, not because of content, but because of how both teachers and parents push their kids to pass the IIT entrance exam. It's worse than Gaokao I think because its either in or out, there's no middle ground.

If you study or work as hard as ever close to our far easterns (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and perhaps Viets), you'll get a plus...

You have no idea, right?

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

If you study or work as hard as ever close to our far easterns (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and perhaps Viets), you'll get a plus...

You have no idea, right?

I'm Chinese and doing a PHD in physics. I have plenty of idea. For Chinese its not hard work, its smart work. There is absolutely no amount of hard work that makes you understand physics if you don't have the ability to understand it through smart work. I struggled with relativity heavily, especially on tensor index manipulations, until I realized, hey, that's just not what I'm good at, so I gave up but then suddenly, a friend helped me out and told me the trick to understanding tensors. I still couldn't understand it at all, but I now could at least do some of the problems - smart work. But that's OK because 99% of the world cannot understand the mathematics of relativity theory. I found statistical physics to be easily understood, so I'm in the materials field instead.