(editors note: The reader should bear in mind that this article is to be considered the author's attempt at satire and irony. Should the reader take exception with any of the statements put forth here by the author, tough toe-nails.)
There are plenty of reasons why Chinese culture seems so bizarre to Westerners: Chinese is not an Indo-European language for one. Consequently, the thought processes are not ordered in the same manner. Sino-Tibetan languages have an entirely different grammar. The logic of Chinese thought appears solecistic and out o' whack to someone from say, anywhere else besides China. (Consider these info-nuggets: Both 'tall' and 'fat' are verbs. The English verb 'can' can be said four distinctly dissimilar ways in Chinese, each expressing a different aspect of ability, permission, etc. The only Chinese word for 'logic' is a transliteration, a phonetic imitation of the Greek word.)
But the real reason Asian societies seem so off-kilter to Westerners is that the Chinese, before Maoism, had a single dominant school of social theory for more than two millennia: Confucianism. The Analects of Confucius, the rules of Chinese society, were set down five hundred years BCE. Mr Kung Fu-tze, with the help of his disciples, delineated the whole of humanity into strata of servants and masters. From the lowest of the low (i.e. those without the 'Y' chromosome) to the highest of the high, the Yellow God/Emperor hims-elvis, the role of each individual was ordained, assigned and strictly enforced.
This is the old socio-political pyramid scam of divine descent: the monarchy gets the 'real goods' direct from his own 'god-head' and gets the first strata of ministers to sell his claim to divinity to each subsequently lower strata of mandarins, governors and judges who in turn fill their own coffers by attesting to having a conduit to the dude who is 'the real deal' and a super-bad ma'am-ma-jamma. Power flows up-hill; excreta flows down. Most advanced cultures pass through this phase. Western European by and large threw this one to the dogs in bits and scraps on their way to egalitarian democracy and universal suffrage. The Chinese had their first free election for a state leader less than ten years ago.
