Why Chinese People Don’t Get Along With Other Chinese People

One of my favorite jokes is that Chinese people are the only people Chinese people are racist against.

And before anybody gets upset, relax.

I’m Chinese, I was born Chinese, I grew up Chinese, my parents are Chinese, my relatives are Chinese. I’ve spent over forty years dealing with Chinese people; I think I’ve earned the right to bitch :)

The funny thing is that whenever I make this joke, every Chinese person within hearing distance immediately starts nodding and chuckling. Not cautiously, not politely—just full recognition, like I’ve just said something everybody already agreed on but nobody wanted to say out loud.

Now I’m not saying Chinese people are uniquely terrible. Every culture has its own internal chaos.

But there is something uniquely funny about how a Chinese person can walk into a room full of Chinese people and immediately find twenty-seven reasons to dislike the other Chinese people in that same room.

In the video attached to this post, I go into the deeper reasons behind all of this: history, politics, geography, massive population density, regional identity, wealth gaps, Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, overseas Chinese communities, generational divides, and centuries of people arguing over whose province makes better food.

But here, I just want to share a few stories, because honestly, reality does a better job explaining this than theory ever could.

A good friend of mine once told me straight up, “I really hate Chinese people.” Funny, cause he's as Chinese as we get...

I asked him why.

He told me about a winter when his car broke down on the side of the road. He was stuck there trying to flag people down while freezing, and according to him, about ten Chinese drivers passed without stopping. Then a white guy pulled over, got out, helped him figure out the problem, and got him back on the road.

He told me that story like it was a final verdict. Like that one moment explained everything he needed to know about people. And maybe for him, that was "the" moment.

Image: Two bundled men laughingly pull a car with a strap on a snowy road during heavy snowfall, struggling together in winter conditions with snow-covered surroundings and a roadside guardrail.

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Then there was another time I spent a full day running errands with another Chinese friend. At the end of the day, he just suddenly said it, completely out of nowhere. He looked at me and said he really FUCKING HATED Chinese people. That came out of nowhere so I raised an eyebrow. He said, “Look, you’re blind, so you didn’t see what happened today.”

Apparently, while him and I were out and about, on one bus, a white passenger immediately stood up and offered me a seat. On another bus, an East Indian woman did the same without hesitation. But on a third bus, packed with Chinese people, nobody moved. Nobody acknowledged me. Nobody even looked in my direction.

To him, that pattern was the whole story. Three buses, three outcomes, one conclusion, and that conclusion had nothing gentle about it.

To me, it was just a long day of transit. But to him, it became proof of something much bigger about people he already had strong feelings about.

Image: Crowded city bus interior; a blind man in dark glasses and blue jacket stands centrally with a white cane, while surrounding passengers sit closely packed, quietly absorbed in their phones.

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My favorite story happened in Taiwan in 2015 while my documentary crew was filming.

Myself and two white colleagues walked into a hotel lobby and immediately hit a wall of people. There were maybe fifty Chinese guests packed into the space, talking, shouting, standing around, blocking every possible path to the elevators. It didn’t feel like a lobby so much as a system failure in human form.

We tried being polite. We said “excuse me.” Nothing. We asked again. Nothing. We tried English. Nothing. We tried Mandarin. Still nothing. It was like we had been rendered invisible by sheer volume of conversation.

Then my mother arrived. She looked at the situation, looked at us, and casually asked why we hadn’t gone upstairs yet. We explained we couldn’t even reach the elevators.

She laughed and told us, “You people are too fucking white.”

Then she walked straight into the middle of the crowd like she was marching in for the kill. No hesitation, no polite positioning, she knew no mercy, just pure forward motion. HOLYSHIT! Mom gone turned into the Terminator! Cept she was like 5 FT tall (on heels) and weighed less than 140 LBs. She started waving her arms and loudly demanding space, telling everyone to move, not asking, not negotiating, just asserting reality until it bent around her.

And the crowd just split. Instantly. Like somebody had flipped a switch. One moment it was impossible to move. The next moment we were standing in front of the elevator wondering what just happened. My mother just acted like that was normal behavior, and we were idiots not to have done the same.

It wasn’t “excuse me” that worked there. It was controlled aggression delivered with absolute confidence.

Image: Two worried men with backpacks and suitcases stand in front, one saying “How are we going to get to the elevator”.

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The older I get, the more I realize this kind of dynamic starts much earlier than people think. Take my father, for example. Dude was not just a tough man. That word is too soft for what he was like. He trained as a frogman in the Taiwanese military. He worked in organized crime. He built businesses and became a multimillionaire. He once took a gunshot to the face and kept fighting- even drove himself to the hospital after that. But none of that really captures his personality.

With Chinese people, he didn’t really argue. That would imply two sides exchanging ideas. What he did was escalate. Instantly. Like flipping a switch. If a Chinese person challenged him, even slightly, it wasn’t a disagreement. It was a full-scale confrontation. He would go from zero to absolute chaos in seconds, threatening to destroy things, not as a metaphor but as a very real possibility. Furniture, property, the entire environment around him could become collateral damage just to make a point.

Then something almost absurd would happen. Put a white person or a black person in front of him, and it was like someone swapped the operating system. The aggression disappeared completely. He would become polite, respectful, almost gentle in tone.

“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Have a nice day, sir.”

I remember watching that as a kid and thinking I was dealing with two completely different people living in the same body. To this day I still don’t fully understand it.

Maybe one way to make sense of it is this: people sometimes learn, consciously or not, that what “works” in one cultural setting does not work in another. My father may have simply known that the same intensity, the same pressure, the same style of confrontation that would shake a Chinese opponent does absolutely nothing in front of someone who expects different rules. So he adapted. Not necessarily politely. Just strategically.

And I’ve seen smaller, funnier versions of that same idea play out in real life.

Years ago, a friend of mine who is as white as Wonder Bread was standing at a train station when he saw a Chinese woman doing exactly the same thing my mother did in that hotel lobby. She was pushing, shoving, forcing her way toward the front of the line, and the Chinese people around her scattered immediately, like scared chickens.

My friend didn’t say anything at first. He just walked up, calmly grabbed her backpack, and pinned her against the wall.

She started screaming, “Let me go! Let me go!”

He responded very calmly, almost politely, saying, “Look, you are being very rude.”

"LETMEGO, LETMEGO, LETMEGO!"

He told her, “You shouldn’t try to get in front of people like that.”

More screaming. More struggle, cussing...

Then he said, “I will not let you go until you apologize.”

And just like that, the energy shifted. The fight drained out of her. She said, “I am sorry.”

He let her go, and everyone went on with their day and got on the train without any further chaos.

What’s interesting is how different systems of behavior seem to collapse or stabilize depending on who pushes back, and how.

Sometimes it’s loud authority.

Sometimes it’s quiet enforcement.

Sometimes it’s just someone deciding the rules apply today.

And in a strange way, it all loops back into the same pattern I keep seeing everywhere.

Chinese people who are calm, reasonable, even warm in one context, and then suddenly sharp, critical, and intensely reactive when dealing with other Chinese people.

It’s like we understand each other just well enough to push every button on purpose.

If there were an Olympic event for arguing with people who share your ethnicity, we would probably take gold, silver, and bronze without even training.

Sometimes I think one reason Chinese people struggle with each other is because there’s just enough shared context to make everything more personal, more reactive, and more exhausting than it needs to be.

A guy from Shanghai thinks the guy from Beijing is impossible. The guy from Beijing thinks the guy from Taiwan is weird. The guy from Taiwan thinks everybody is too loud. The overseas Chinese guy thinks everybody needs to calm down. And somehow everyone is convinced they’re the normal one.

The truth is that “Chinese people” isn’t one thing. It’s a massive collection of people spread across countries, regions, generations, languages, and political realities, all carrying slightly different versions of the same identity.

The surprising part isn’t that we clash.

The surprising part is that we manage to agree on anything at all.

Still, if there’s one thing that seems to hold across all of it, it’s this:

Nobody complains about Chinese people more passionately than other Chinese people, and that, might be the most consistent cultural trait we have.

Check out the video below where I go deeper into the history, politics, and cultural reasons behind all of this.

For more stories, podcasts, martial arts, accessibility advocacy, and random observations about humanity, visit johnnytiger.com.

For my tactile artwork and accessibility-focused art projects, visit tigertactile.com.

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