[WS:} Very interesting. My own experience was the opposite. I lived in China for two years during the Cultural Revolution, and we expected many bad things from the Chinese, but cheating and criminal behavior in general was not one of them. There were very few Europeans in Shanghai at that time, and those were far better off than the locals. Yet I have not heard of a single instance of assault, scam, or theft. In one instance, my mom purchased an item from a nearby store and forgot to take the change. It was a trivial amount to us - although not so to the locals - and my mom did not even notice. She learned about only when a store clerk rung our door bell and returned the change.
I short, the Communist China was generally considered remarkably crime free by every European I met during that time.
Wojtek
On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 12:37 PM, Michael Perelman < michael at ecst.csuchico.edu> wrote:
> A bright young Taiwanese teaches in our department. Last semester, he
> had about 10 students from China in one of his classes. They all
> cheated. He asked me another teacher to form a panel to interview the
> students, which was a very interesting experience. After our
> interviews, he mentioned that cheating is an integral part of Chinese
> culture and that the students expected him to be sympathetic of their
> behavior.
> Blanche is reading Factory Girls, a book about young Chinese women
> working in sweatshops. The author, a former Wall Street Journal
> reporter, at one point she was interviewing some Chinese author, who
> asked why she was bothering to write her book when she could more
> easily just lift material from other sources.
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 08:09:27AM +0000, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
> > I'm confused. If they want to learn English, what's the point of
> cheating?
> >
> > Joanna
> >
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
> --
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> Chico, CA 95929
>
> Tel. 530-898-5321
> E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
> michaelperelman.wordpress.com
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