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I have been to Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, multiple times and lived and worked in Beijing China for over a year.
Chinese workers do not live or act as if they are under some sort of totalitarian state. They call in from work at the drop of a hat, or take two hour lunches to get in a few rounds of tennis (this was not just because they were rich or well connect, one of the regulars at the court was literally a beat cop). I would also say that the average Chinese is not very principled, less so than the average westerner in my experience. They are obsessed with 'face' and looking good but will lie and cheat at every opportunity. I would just assume their self reported fraud data is fraudulent.
Taiwan and Hong Kong seem mostly the same, honestly, maybe a bit more 'liberated' but the base Chinese cultural programing seems to go hard.
Japan feels VERY different culturally, and really seems like a high trust society. It is true that interacting with Japanese police can be onerous, especially for foreigners. Still, given the massive gulf in behavior between the Japanese and the Chinese it is hard for me to accept that it is down stream of how draconian their respective governments are. The simplest and most obvious form of this is queueing. Everyone, everywhere in Japan will queue properly into lines and wait their turn, and nobody, anywhere in China will do the same, but I could be unaware of the death penalty anti-cutting laws in Japan.
Honestly though I am not sure how much I disagree with you.
Seems, almost trivially true and correct to me.
The example of the money on the ground stood out to me, because I honestly think a significant number of Japanese people would actually take money they found to the police lost and found. While I don't think this behavior is driven by the strictness of their State, I am not confident in saying it is because the Japanese are more principled, in the abstract. I would rather say, that principles are easier to hold when everyone around you holds them. This would also be my explanation for the small town effect.
I imagine that after a critical mass of defection only a handful of people would continue to hold to principals while everyone around them constantly defected. There is a sense in which only those people ever really had principles at all. Still, I value fair-weather principles. I think Liberalism, is a sort of coordinated attempt to get everyone to agree to some core principles and follow them and this is valuable and good, and should be encouraged.
It's interesting then how similar our observations are, yet we still seem to disagree. One of my biggest gripes with Americans who comment on Asia, is in precisely pointing out that despite the overt presence of the CCP in nearly every corner of the country, a country like China who has 'always' been autocratic, stretching back to the beginning of civilization, it's remarkably democratic and representative in addressing the material needs and demands of the population. Which goes to show you that despite the CCP's totalitarian leanings, the average working Chinese person doesn't feel an overbearing presence breathing down his neck and dictating his actions to him.
There you go. You don't need "principles" to have morality. Policymakers have known forever that people respond to coercion far more than appealing to people's moral idealism. Relying on the good will of principled actors is not a recipe for a functioning society, because there are so few people that have it and it's far too inconsistent to make it workable on any large scale.
That's another thing I was going to point out. High levels of homogeneity correlate with high levels of social trust. "We" may view their style of governance as draconian, to them it's just the way things are. That's something I find annoying about Americans who live abroad, come back and later criticize the governments of the country's they lived in because of a lack of civil liberties. Different societies have radically different views of what they believe a citizen's relationship to their government should be. How Americans come back home without learning a thing about the people who live there is disappointing.
Same here.
Holy smokes LKY just smokes that western interviewer right there. What a man and how much poorer we all are without him now.
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