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Q: Are waidiren and foreigners the most efficient workers in China?
Most migrant workers break their teeth in factories and on construction sites for miserable salaries, they might not work very intensely but reported to their salary it's a very good wage/efficiency balance for the employer.
Meanwhile your average locals earning ~6000 monthly spend their day sleeping in the office, doing very little work as they probably got their position thanks to their relations.
As for foreigners, some might disagree but while earning more they are usually more efficient than the locals doing the same job, for e.g. those in training centers, I have never heard of Chinese teachers teaching 30 classes a week, usually it's more like 10 or 12 especially in public education.
Your generalization doesn't apply to teaching. True, during my year of teaching, I taught 17 oral English classes to 17 different classes of students a week, while all the Chinese teachers only taught 8-10 English classes to two different classes of students a week. While I spent more time in the classroom than the Chinese teachers, I taught the same lesson to all 17 classes, while the Chinese teachers prepared different lessons for each day. I gave no homework, while the Chinese teachers had to correct over 50 homework papers for each class. 50 papers per class*2 classes per day = a s*** ton of work per week. Not to mention the Chinese teachers also have to deal with the students' parents and take care of all the other stuff behind the scenes for their classes.
As for office workers, maybe many local Chinese people waste their time in the office, but I haven't seen them. My company does work with technology for America and the people in my office are busy non-stop, and I know the work they're doing. It's difficult for them and is mostly in English. Your generalization is probably more applicable to Chinese companies doing business in China in Chinese for Chinese.
hi2u:
I'll also add that my perception of foreigners teaching in the training centers is to do the dancing monkey act for the kids. Doing any actual teaching seems rare.
Lord_hanson:
Chinese teachers also have to write weekly reports. They get regular assignments that require them to write essays with a minimum word count.
Answer 
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DrMonkey:
icnif put verbs, subjects and complements, he is at least approximativaly syntactically correct. That guy sounds like "my cat stepped on the keyboard". Maybe Internet have brain farts too.
I'm the only foreigner in our small bio-tech company. The stereotypes you mention are nowhere to be seen here. We are small (about 50 peoples), everybody got a well-defined task, hierarchy have only 3 layers (boss & investors, manager, lab staff & administrative), we are not having many projects going-on in parallel. I don't think I'm here because I'm super efficient, it's because I'm a rare commodity at a good price. The day Chinese scientists worth their salt don't leave the country to go abroad and stop asking crazy incomes to come back, I'm toast.
coineineagh:
I don't think Chinese scientists sell themselves too high. The reason they end up abroad, is because they see all the problems here and prefer to stay away. Those who really want to stay are here already.
As your in Guangdong, I couldnt disagree more. Yes waidiren will put up with crappy hours and are generally working. The key point of your question was efficiency. And Cantonese are the only Chinese born with a brain. ( Very Generally speaking of course. Dumb Cantonese too and im sure ur GF is brilliant, but in larger numbers i stand by it because its true)
Yes you can easily control the Hunan zombies but given the choice, I will work with the Cantonese ,ie locals, every single time.
My take on the matter: Evaluate people by their performance. Don't go too far in making predictions of people's work ethic based on their ethnicity or socio-economic status. There are lazy foreigners, and lazy waidiren. And there are lazy Chinese locals; quite a few of them. But no matter a person's background, judge them by their actions.
If you generalize too much, you'll be quoting top-10 lists with your kind of people in them, and professing your superiority based on this. A job well done with Chinese characteristics.
