i agree with zhulaoye.
most chinese just want something for free, but without investing, or a basic level of courtesy.

it has to do with a lack of education and ethics.

most chinese are terrible business negotiators. most businesses only know how to take advantage,or using inproper practices. and that reflects in social life as well. you rarely see a win-win business deal .

if locals would really just want to know foreigners, they could use chinese if the foreigner can speak a little. or a combination of both. if there is a mutual interest communication is never a problem.

many just want free english classes and if you refuse, you get scolded, or worse. even profanity is in the ball park.

when i go to the playground with my kid, i have parents pushing their kids, to talk to me in english. even saying out loud, that i am a free english opportunity. when i speak chinese with their kids, they freak out.

you want something from me, invest in me!time, effort, affection, attention and maybe we become friends,after i offer the same. but most chinese want everything, right away and without effort. and if you say no?..., try it out!

goes for education, business and for sure, friendship as well.

in 15 years in china, i have about 3 real friends and all went through the international way of becoming friends.
plus we were interested in each others lives and not trying to benefit or use our connections.
and now we are very tight friends.

a rare chinese win-win.

I have loads of local friends. There are a lot of really cool people wandering around here.

I think that some of you who are complaining about locals need to take a step back and find some perspective. Yes, a lot of the things that annoy you (asking overly personal questions, always wanting favors) may be very "Chinese" things, but they're things that a lot of Chinese people find annoying too.

I've met a lot of annoying Americans, but I'm not going to write off the whole country because a few of them tried to bring me under the wings of Jesus or demanded I take a stance on abortion.

The best thing to do, which is probably difficult for some of you who don't speak Chinese very well, is to try to get beyond the places where people are specifically looking to make friends with foreigners. If most of your interactions with locals take place in the English school/English corner/foreigner bar context, you're going to walk away with a very skewed perspective on the people here. You're also going to have to filter out a lot of "opportunistic friends" before you find some real ones. It appears a lot of people give up along the way.

As for the dialect thing, try not to take it personally. It may make it difficult/impossible to get to know that person, but he's not doing it to spite you.

i have many local aquiantances but noone i could really trust, and trust is a big part of true friends. i never had trust issues b efore, but now...

Xiefei's got it.
For Pete's sake, just talk to Chinese people as you would anyone anywhere, remembering, of course, that most people don't share whatever your own cultural background is and that you are going to have to respect the rules & manners of their culture just as you would do if you went to France, Pakistan, Nicaragua or anywhere else, and just as you'd expect foreigners to do in your own country. Oh yeah, that's right, a lot of Chinese people perhaps haven't spent any time in your country, so they may find it a bit difficult to deal with your perspectives or your language, whatever they are. But that's the way the world is and it's about time we got used to it. You don't have to deal with or even like everything about the country, which you can't pretend to fully understand, but you need to be able to deal with the person in front of you and not expect her/him to conform to whatever standards you imagine and/or that you, or he/she, think should be in place for the whole universe. There's no excuse for not understanding that nobody, including yourself, is able to communicate with complete clarity, but if you handle the problem one person at a time you might be able to pick up a few clues, despite whatever general judgements you want to make. I would guess even marital relations are like that. Not everything is a matter of 'us' (whomever that is supposed to be) vs. 'them'.

One big problem is that they can't speak Mandarin correctly. So you say to yourself: "WTF is he/she saying?" They think that you are speaking incorrectly when in fact it's them. They look at you as if you have shit on your face. Communication is not easy when the majority can't speak clear 'putonghua'. Add this to all the other things that makes it different to make 'true' friends.

xiefei and alien,
of course you are both correct. i am not walking around trying to exclude every possible chance for friendship.

my point is that chinese society is or became an opportunist society. where the majority is trying to advance themselves disregarding the necessary commitment.

i don't expect a chinese person to be like a western person. but when it comes to friendship and trust,chinese society doesn.t make it easy.

i am not judging it. i understand that many people have to live with it. i just don.t want to be included. hence the lack of courtesy....coz in other (incl. asian) countries, people can and will accept if you don't participate in the culture race.

but the chinese friends and acquientances feel similar. none of them like those social events in china, where everyone pretends, and tries to juggle their face.

i like the personal questions and chit chat. better than talking about weather and how busy the workday was.

@liumingke: So you want to change the cultural history of the world to produce a different linguistic situation in the present, one that you can handle? It's not anybody's fault that we're not all the same in everything (thank god), you know. Pointing out real difficulties (no, I can't handle Kunminghua either) is no excuse for not dealing with them.
Or you can just give up, like the people I know here from elsewhere who have apparently decided that, because they know they'll never be perfect in speaking Chinese, decide never to learn anything at all.
Now how much sense does that make?

Talking to someone who speaks KunmingHua or non-standard Mandarin would be the same as talking in English to a Scottish or Australian. It's extremely painful to the ear, but some are already socially conditioned to ignore the difficulties and double efforts to understand/guess what the person is saying.

The "proper" way to make friends with foreigners: mp.weixin.qq.com/[...]

@yankee: Right, so now you know the cause (lack of proper social conditioning) you can just give up with a clear conscience.
Sorry non-american/non-English English is so painful to your ears - what does American sound like to others?
Now I'm dropping out of this conversation because it's all just more examples of what I've been hearing from people living outside their original culture most of my life and I'm beginning to lose patience with it ('The Spanish do this wrong, the Nigerians are all scam artists, the Chinese don't know...' whatever it is - but I'm smugly the objective and unconfused judge of all of their faults...)