EAHG

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East-Asian Happiness Gap

The East-Asian countries/regions referred to here include Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and Singapore. To some extent, it probably also applies to Malaysia and Vietnam, but not much to the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia which have rather different cultures.

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RAT RACE FACTOR

COMPETITIVE ATTITUDE

Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism are more emphatic on the virtue of contentedness while Confucianism is, at least relative to the previous three, more emphatic on the virtue of achievement. While Buddhism and Taoism are still believed in parts of East Asia, their influence has largely waned, especially relative to the importance of Buddhism and Hinduism in India.

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 similar report in 2000, Yuan Tzeh Lee (a Nobel laureate and President of Academia Sinica in Taipei) said, ‘Most Taiwan students are good in examinations. Their performance in science and mathematics are good at the stage of high school. However, after graduating from high schools, they become exhausted, as if going to retire … The educational system in Taiwan is very repressive of curious students interested in pursuing creativity. This is very bad.’ (My translation back from my Chinese translation of a report in China Times, 7 December 2000, p. 7.)

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Happiness researchers remark: ‘… in the Latin nations, such as Colombia, there is a tendency to view pleasant emotions as desirable… In contrast, in Confucian cultures, such as China, there tends to be relatively more acceptance of unpleasant emotions and relatively less acceptance of pleasant emotions… In China the ideal level of life satisfaction was considered to be neutrality—neither satisfied nor dissatisfied

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East-Asian culture is too emphatic on appearance, on not losing face and less on the real content and true feelings. The importance of ‘face’ (面子; mian4 zi3; the numbers here refer to the tones) is well-known.

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