[coldtea]

>We hear a lot about Chinese cheating, from sat scores to ip theft. I've long wondered - why is cheating endemic in China whereas you don't hear the same complaints about people in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore; places with large ethnic Chinese populations which should be very similar culturally to mainland China

You use to hear it all the time about people in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and Singapore too. Back in the day (for Singapore that's as close as the 70s), they were seedy ports, with anything goes rules, prostitution, gambling, counterfeiting, drugs, and so on. Look for old books on those places.

Those things gradually changed as those 3 places became richer and more important for trade (and Taiwan was an early "China", getting outsourced industrial production from the West).

Note that all three places are much smaller than China, don't have 600+ strong rural population still struggling to get by/to middle class by any means, and some of them had a "Delaware/Switzerland" role in the region, with multiple interests vested in that working well (which is how the law sausage gets made to benefit corporations, the rule of law is held, and the countries get "high marks" for "economic freedom": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_... ).