Chinese & Japanese share same attitude towards Westerners

[Maciamo]

I was reading China Cuckoo, by Mark Kitto and chuckled while reading this passage on pp. 85-86.

The banquet started quietly. I forced myself to smile as I listened to foreigner friendly clichés for the thousandth time, addressed to me with patronizing grins. 'Do you miss Western food?' 'Do you like Chinese food?' 'Can you cook it?' 'You use chopsticks well.' 'Your Chinese is good.' And so on and so on. I replied exactly as I had a thousand times at hundreds of other banquets, summoning as genuine a smile as possible from somewhere deep within my patience. 'No, yes, no, thank you, thank you.'

The Chinese are very much like the Japanese in their attitude to foreigners, which means that there is be a common root to this attitude.

Chinese and Japanese cultures are related through the traditional values of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, and a little bit through the language. However, Communist China did all it could to get rid of the old Confucian and religious values.

Consequently, this common attitude of the Chinese and Japanese is not so much a cultural similarity, but something more deeply rooted in East Asian civilisation. It is not impossible that this common mindset be rooted in genetics, and therefore in the character and cognitive functions of East Asians.

If there is one thing that genetics has taught us about East Asians in recent years, it is that the Japanese are surprisingly close to the Han Chinese, Manchurians and Koreans. In fact, the Han Chinese are genetically closer to the Japanese than to ethnic minorities of South-West China, like the Miao-Yao. Hans, Koreans and Japanese are also closer genetically than Europeans are between each others, even within a same country like France or Britain.

I would like to investigate here the similarities in the way East Asians think of themselves in relation to Westerners, and evaluate whether there could be a possible genetic root to this East Asian mindset that transgress cultural boundaries.