Seeing as you've followed his posting so closely and have a reasonable working knowledge of the topic perhaps you'd care to comment on his assertion that the Chinese are morally inferior to westerners. I personally can't accept such a statement.

First of all, although this post quotes from and follows the "astf" poster's post it's more tailored for Turnoi and others who have discussed this with me in the past as I feel only people of intellectual integrity could understand where I am coming from. I would not accept such a statement of saying the Chinese were morally inferior to the west or any culture either if it was coming from a person whom I know was not qualified to speak. I do feel I am qualified to speak on this, and I have the sources to back it up as well. As a matter of fact, many of the sources I have used came from the very people (chinese or formerly chinese)whom people like the romanticist type posters are so eager to defend. But the problem I have with posters such as astf (not the first time, either) is his own lack of experience with actually knowing the Chinese and knowing the good points they possess. From his own working perspective he wants to say that my views are inaccurate and yet he does not say why which leads me to believe he is defending something that he knows almost nothing about. That is an integrity issue, and it is one I have seen too many expats possess, making everybody open to exploitation.

For example, if I went to work at a public university or a private training center I would hold that place up to certain standards of decency and expect the head/owner of whomever runs the place to hold a certain level of accountability, integrity, compassion, empathy, and understanding with all of these traits taking equal priority towards the expat teacher. However due to the lack of regulations you can count on the private sector to be a complete mess beyond fixing, and even at a good number of public jobs the expat teachers are open to abuse on so many levels. An example would be I could not even get the school to properly reprimand a cleaning lady for her intrusive and insults towards me at a public school, which in a hierarchy society like China shows that we are must migrant workers who in the eyes of the chinese deserve anything we get. But this is also an accumulation of the behavior of so many pollyanna types who decided to take the abuse and neglect heaped onto them as being part of the "china experience". Which leads me to my next point, my main one on why I believe the moral inferiority issue.

The very foundation of what compromises the remnants of the known ancient chinese culture as well as the translation into modern chinese culture as interpreted by the chinese is one that rests its laurels on taking abuse and breaking down individualism. For example the core values of Chinese Buddhism (Known as Zen Buddhism and vastly different from the Buddhism practiced in Thailand, Tibet, and India) state that life is suffering, and everyone who feels suffering when an outside source of negativity hits them can only blame themselves for not being "empty" enough on the inside to understand and hold compassion for the people heaping the abuse on to them. Basically what goes around comes around eventually and people should just wait for the "just" punishment for the abusers to arrive by karma. This mindset guarantees that societal abuse and oppression starting from the very basic unit of family will not be curtailed, but will only become more intrusive over time, and it spills out onto society with business, government, and interacting with alien cultures. Individualism is demonized and made to seem like only bad can come from it. What ends up happening is people who are raised in this manner do not become full of life and see anti-intelligent practices as being smart, such as not respecting the boundaries/privacy/space of others. Due to the authoritative mannerisms of this philosophy they only continue the cycle to the next generation. Eventually innovation, originality, and most importantly IMO spiritualism is extinguished. The vices in the society do not become smaller, only bigger over time. There was a great article written by an overseas Chinese person who by now is probably naturalized somewhere else who said that the very idea of "good" has been replaced by the "face" culture which does not define what good actually is, and the lack of actually doing actual good in this culture means that every few hundreds of years the lack of accountability creates ill will so prevalent that the hateful minds of ordinary chinese spill out and manifests the worst evils of mankind including but not limited to genocide, cannibalism, and war. Like a pandora's box these actions lead to massive drops in population and complete annihilation of culture.

There is also the ethnocentrism. Even the poorest, laziest, and most below average chinese person who is on government aid and living overseas will still call non-chinese laowai, which in my mind shows a total lack of respect and complete ignorance. There is the world of "chinese" and the world of "laowai" in most minds of chinese people. The centuries upon centuries of non-accountability made everyone lazier in the mind and shallow in knowledge. This could actually be seen as a self-fullfilling prophecy of sorts as karma really did work for the country and the people. For a place to have an 1800 year head start with being able to publish books over everyone else, how come medieval Europe wasn't converted by the superior culture of the East at the time and Mandarin (or whatever standard chinese was being used) wasn't the official language of business like how English is now? If China really had it better the free market would have openly accepted her values and converted without the need for any aggression on the part of China. Yet the compass was used for feng shui, and gunpowder for fireworks. The selfishness at protecting the bottom line values of having a right to tell others what to do before developing your own mind and individualism ended up turning into universal acceptance of anti-intellectualism with downright heretical practices. The problem with getting them to change is the absolute refusal to do so. The idea that a person cannot learn anything new after the ripe "old" age such as 35 is still a popular belief amongst the population. The right to have the arrogance without knowing why they have it except for the fact that they were merely born is a big roadblock to development.

The chinese as a group get easily satisfied with themselves and their own achievements, and do not want to see others actually make new things which can bring a new paradigm since they believe it is something they cannot control. The Confucianist aspects of hierarchy and obedience to status is complimented by the inferiority complex that most chinese have due to a lack of humanistic approaches across just about everything in life there to form jealousy, fear, and anger towards anyone who can do even the most trivial of things better. I do think this has been around since ancient times, and it is certainly big now.

To summarize, the overall level of moral aptitude does not make the chinese as a group possess the talent to carry the world on its shoulders or lead as a superpower as so many chinese will brag about. I think for anybody who wants to know about the bad qualities that can be seen in most chinese, I will say this: If a chinese feels that he/she doesn't know you well enough, they will be kind, courteous, and even careful of boundaries to a limited extent. However once they feel they know you well enough (and trust me evaluating where you belong on their hierarchy pole is of utmost importance to them no matter the socioeconomic status), you will find them to be more sniveling, judgmental, controlling, and childish in their mannerisms. If you feel that this can be even called "culture" and can be respected then you are just going along with being helpless.

I do not speak what I have said for one minute believing that the west is superior just because it exists. In fact, we can all agree on the fact that it probably is not what it used to be. But finding virtues such as universalism, equality, and non-judgmental folks is still a lot easier there than in china, that is what I have found anyway. I would not argue with anybody who says that the USA and China are causing probably most of the world's problems today, and I am just as willing to be critical of the west as I am of the east. But I do not tolerate folks who accuse me of somehow being judgmental of a group of people I don't know, when it's a mere projection of their own lack of knowledge of those very people. For those who have supported my views, I thank you all again.