After living here for four years, I have also discovered that modern China is mainly a culture of COMPLAINING.

They will complain about everything, from your tie to your "passion, from wrinkles on your "non ironed shirt" to your lack of an extreme and obsessive punctuality (arriving 30 minutes before the start of a class and NOT 29 minutes!).

Of course there are sensible people out there, however, in most of the cases, I feel as if if a person is not "greeted" by a chinese in a superior position with a daily complaint, there would be something missing.

Rant over... but in all seriousness it has become part of their modern culture.

I cal big BS on this one. It is just another excuse to excuse that Chinese have for behaving in many ways that just plain unacceptable in the eyes of most cultures in the world. It is easy to mark it of as "That's what they have done for 3000 years, or it was Mao, etc"

That's what they do simply because of their arrogent, self centered nature on the whole. But TIC.

My observation is that Chinese people sometimes smile at times that most of us laowais would consider a little strange. For example, when discussing the train station incident. I remember watching BBC news, where an eyewitness was telling of how the murderers slashed and stabbed their way through the crowd, and the whole way through the interview he had a big smile on his face. It seemed incredibly inappropriate (to me as a Brit).

Another example is when my friend and her Chinese best friend caught a woman and the security guard(!) red handed stealing the Chinese friend's e-bike. It was all awkward smiles and laughing, whereas in other countries I can imagine it being a much less pleasant (and more threatening) situation.

@Haali:

There are all different kinds of smiles in every country.

It's part of some of the working papers and studies I mentioned before.

sounds interesting Kate. I'm having a read now.

I'm thinking when I say Chinese, I must mean Han. Because a lot of minorities do smile publicly, especially the Dai. That's support for the cultural influence.

However, no one smiles in any ex-Communist state I can think of, so I thought maybe the crummy lives those governments provided killed off smiles. Not much Confucius in Russia. Not much to smile about in day to day life under Mao.

@mmkunming: important to start by understanding, but culture, like human bodies, is only alive because it is always changing. This doesn't make the changes either good or bad, but it does make them complicated for relative 'outsiders' to understand. cultures are 'preserved' in museums - this can teach us things about the present (e.g., where it came from, how & why) - but of course somebody has to decide what should be in the museum and what should not, and how it is to be understood (and fortunately people are often smart enough to out-think the official bs, whatever it may be). I will agree with you that one needs to start without a lot of previous assumptions and learn something before one does or doesn't conform to it (and, during this process, to realize and reconsider the assumptions one has, perhaps without knowing it), but at the end of the day one doesn't have to practice footbinding - I'm rather glad that the Chinese population, as well as those who lead/control them, came to a cultural understanding that this was to come to an end. Plenty of foreign Christian missionaries (who I am certainly not praising for everything, and who were usually culturally arrogant one way or another) encouraged them to abandon footbinding, but I don't think that it was dropped as a result of cultural colonialism, or that, at least in this aspect at least, the Christian missionaries were 100% 'wrong'.
As to smiles, I see plenty of them, they are part of communication, but like everything else, one must understand the particular cultural 'language' of behavior to know what it may or may not mean. Takes awhile, like for the rest of your life, even at 'home'.