Not a new phenomenon

I live in China and have worked as a teacher for the last year. Cheating is a way of life in China. It's what they do. Conformity of answers mean nothing to them. They are the borg. They would rather have the same answers than risk being different and losing face.

I postulate that given a pattern of 1000 repetitive actions and a limited time period to work at them, over the course of the 1000 repetitive actions, a Chinese worker would consistently have a lower percentage of mistakes than a western educated person. But introduce some kind of change or need for thinking past a defined repetitive learning experience I'd bet my house that this advantage would disappear.

It's their education system that's failing them, not the natural entrepeneur ship of human kind profiting from a market where demand far exceeds supply....

@ Greg Orton

sounds like you need to get out of china mate!

not that i haven't felt the same way as you, but the chinese are not the borg

they're just like you and me with an added dose of competition and peer pressure

but given the state of local residential construction your bet is not particularly tempting

I thought they had to be Eunuchs

and I not talking the BSD or Solaris kind, more the Aled Jones snowman variety.

A life in the Triads doesn't seem so bad, when compared with being two balls short of a sack, they can have tattoos and do Kung Fu, and all that.

China is the copy central of the world, there is no innovation it has been beaten out of them by years of Communist Labour rule. Still if they could only all jump together, then we could see if it is an urban myth or not.

-- Signed Prince Philp

@ Greg

Not quite the borg, not far off either though.

I worked in a company in China for some time and what struck me is their fear of being to blame for something going wrong. This lead to almost all design decisions being made by groups.

Also the Chinese method of learning is by repetition (starts as small children with learning to write all those characters - "copy each character on this page 20 times") so you will end up with quite a few people having the very same answer almost word for word - i.e. word for word what was written in their school books.