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Comment by jotjotzzz | Hacker News Reader

Basic human ettiequte and decency is taught at home, at schools, and within the culture of society (e.g., Mr. Rogers neighborhood or Sesame Street on TV). I do notice that countries that have serious overcrowding, like mainland China, India, and probably other third-world countries, just do not bother or have no access to, or maybe just plain don't know any better.

I don't think this has anything to do with the lack of travel experience. It's just the way that they were brought up and perhaps in their village or town it's just like that.

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By far the biggest reason why Chinese tourists act the way they do is because most of them are not even one generation removed from the villages. Most have not gone to university, maybe not even high school. Westerners can look down their noses all they want but when their countries were 70% agrarian, most people were pretty uncouth too.

Culture changes. Once two generations of Chinese have lived in affluent urban settings, their manners will converge with those of other developed countries.

There's no such thing as human etiquette, only a specific culture's etiquette. Many behaviours that are perfectly normal in your culture would be unspeakably rude in mine and vice-versa. From the perspective of my overcrowded island in the north Atlantic, Americans are often unbearably loud and brash; to Americans, we often come across as cold, distant and unfriendly. Travel is a skill that has to be learned - we aren't born with the ability to quickly acclimatise to different cultures.

> There's no such thing as human etiquette, only a specific culture's etiquette.

Please, name the cultures that consider defecating in public (sidewalks, shopping malls, airplane aisles) to be normal behavior when there is a washroom less than 1 minute walk away.

For this specific issue, open defecation is actually considered "normal" behavior in many less developed countries (particularly in impoverished areas). This is indeed a health concern; from what I understand, reducing open defecation is a big goal for global health organizations, and countries such as India (where open defecation is unfortunately common, and I definitely witnessed plenty of when I went many years ago) have made large information campaigns to try and discourage the practice.

From the little I can Google (http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/china/people-practicing-open...), it appears that open defecation was possibly more accepted in China, particularly in rural areas, 30 years ago. It looks like China has made a lot of progress regarding sanitation and reducing this practice, which is good. Still, I bet there's still some leftover bad habits, which may carry over to some of the tourist mishaps.

In these countries, is open defecation common as a preference, or because of lack of clean toilet facilities (India, for example, has made some efforts to install public facilities, but from what I've read they are so disgusting due to lack of maintenance, resorting to using the field is the only option).

And before I'll consider the notion that "There's no such thing as human etiquette, only a specific culture's etiquette.", I think I'm going to have to see wealthy people from some other cultures with similar behavior. Until then, my worldview is going to be based on observable reality over optimistic but baseless theories.

The premise that the cultural revolution had literally no lasting effect on anyone is an extraordinary claim, and you know what they say about extraordinary claims...

It's difficult for me to comment on those cultures too extensively since I don't live there; some articles like this -- http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-27775327 -- mention "ingrained cultural norms" though.

I get the impression from forums, articles, etc. that while open defecation does happen in China, it is "culturally" only really acceptable in their country for little kids. That's a big difference to the rest of the world, where nappies / diapers are more prevalent (I can't think of another country with open-crotch pants, eg kaidangku, for children like China). But my impression is nowadays that in China parents who use kaidangku are generally thought of as "peasants" / "old fashioned" / etc.

And yes I agree that it's possible that the hangover from the cultural revolution may explain a little bit about the "lack of manners" aspect of the Chinese tourist stereotype.

If you can afford to fly international, carry a $2000 purse, and drive a Mercedes, I'm sorry but "not knowing any better" gets a little old after a while.

If race wasn't a component of this discussion there's no way people would be willing to go through the mental gymnastics required to constantly find a new excuse for this being in no way whatsoever the fault of the "public pooping supervisor".

I suspect this same anti-racism-at-whatever-measure is what makes financial fraud so easy as well.

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