| A simple explanation: In China, the manager class, the bureaucrat class have an opinion of their own people as worthless. They don't believe that a Chinese engineer can make a widget better than an American engineer, because they think there is something inherently wrong with everything Chinese. In their disturbed minds, they think if everything Chinese is bad, this also makes them bad too. Thus, they make themselves appear as un-Chinese as possible: See, the only place in the world where American car brands making "falling apart as you drive" cars made a dent in the market is China! In reality though, this conduct of theirs, acquiring material attributes of "Americanness" themselves, is just a psychological compensation. I'm not trying to insult anybody here. This is my observation from working in trade with China for 10 years, and living there for 3 years. What needs to be fixed, is the toxic "Laoban" culture, an "old boys club" of inept, privileged, people currently running China. A real world example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16217995 |
Is this largely a generation-specific culture, that will mostly pass on as the generation dies off, or embedded within the Chinese culture itself, and has a far greater inertial momentum to overcome and thus will take much longer to turn around (perhaps even generations of change)? My gut feel from my general reading is this is an intrinsic part of Chinese culture, though slowly changing starting at the more youth-oriented demographic-populated fringes that interact the most with the outside world.