Gulick sez:
This is going to be crudely formulated and I don't want it to be taken the wrong way -- yeah, right, that's always what someone says before stuffing his/her foot in his/her mouth -- but I think there's something to the idea that in certain cultural formations, there is little to no sense that one has legitimate obligations to people outside one's extended family, or his her patron/client network. I haven't necessarily thought of India this way, but it is a huge problem in China. What might be regarded as extremely rude mobile phone behavior in the public places of other countries -- although it happens often enough in the U.S. for sure -- is absolutely rampant in China. In impersonal crowd environments, one owes anonymous strangers who one has never seen before, and will never see again, absolutely nothing. What institutions keep people in line with the threat of sanction? The state -- largely regarded as illegitimate, people will break laws willy-nilly the instant the state stops watching -- and family (and to a lesser degree, friends). Mix in an element of neo-liberalism (China of course is far from neo-liberal across the board) and the situation gets even worse.
The Chinese Communist Party is actually quite worried about the lack of civilized self-restraint/public-minded sensibility among its tens/hundreds of millions of new urbanites. But the same CCP "intellectuals" who are gobbling up Tocqueville are also advocating less public enterprise and more market allocation, too. They also seem to think that once everyone Chinese becomes a suave yuppie, the country will at long last be fully developed -- there is some seriously harebrained mechanistic-modernization "thought" going on in the CCP think-tanks.
On the other hand, the Chinese state doesn't bomb to smithereens hundreds/tens of thousands of innocents and call it "freedom," either...