I disagree but in a kind of odd way.

I actually think median Indian is more on the same wave length with median Westerner than median Chinese is. The culture shock Chinese students in American universities face, for example, is always bigger than that faced by Indians.

But https://twitter.com/shrikanth_krish/status/1198400855386599425

It is a little more complicated than this. In China attitudes towards the West are more sharply demarcated. There has been a significant intellectual minority of Chinese who have wanted to tear Chinese society to shreds and replace it with something more Westernish since the

1910s. (Google “New Culture Movement.”) Modern Chinese nationalism as an intellectual project was conceived those same people. China existed as political and cultural unit but was perceived not to be *technologically* and *socially* behind. Traditional culture was an obstacle

to wealth and power.

Situation faced by Indian nationalists in the 1910s and 1920s was very different. They were arguing for the existence of an entity not recognized. Their challenge was not technological but cultural and political.

The early 20c Chinese nationalists defined themselves against traditional China and its weakness; their Indian counterparts defined themselves against British imperialism.

Rejecting Western culture—while locating identity in things all Indians could feasibly call their own—was baked into the project from the beginning.

A lot of the difference between the two groups today are inheritances of that time.

To which we can add some practicalities of language, law, and the like. Educated Indians are proficient in English. The majority of educated Chinese are not. Indian elites have been in constant contact with the West for a century. China spent four decades sealed off.

India’s legal and government system bears the mark of the Anglosphere. China’s does not. Indians use twitter, Facebook and live in the same technological universe as the Westerners. Chinese do not.

Which is another way of saying base level of familiarity with Western ways is much higher in India and among Indians than with the Chinese.

So the people in China who go through all the effort to learn English and master Western culture and all that, they are a minority—and a self selected one. They are the ones who identify with the outside world the most.

They tend to be the ones least comfortable and most critical with the sort of things China’s current leaders celebrate: collectivism, Chinese traditional culture, and so forth. As well as the underbelly of Chinese culture (eg sexism).

And so when you say “Chinese immigrants seem to adapt to American norms faster than Indian ones do” Is argue there is a selection problem. The Chinese that stay in America are precisely the ones who are most comfortable with American norms!

The other Chinese students—and that is 4/5ths as of mid 2010s—go back to China.

(There is also a generational thing with attitudes of Chinese who came over in late 80s/early 90s being very different from those who came in the 2010s but I won’t get into that here).

Whereas with the Indian American diaspora there seems to Ben much less self selection at play: most anyone from India who can get to West will succeed in it, especially if they come with strong educational credentials.

So my impression (is there a way to objectively measure this?) is that the av Indian is much more ‘Westernized’ than the average Chinese, but that the minority of Chinese that represent China to the world abroad are far more Western inclined than the Indians in same role.