I am most embarrassed when my friends ask me what I am doing. Because my answers will always either be “studying” or “working”. To the dismay of my lack of leisure, one friend once said to me: “Because you’re a Chinese, right?” I was baffled; my reply of “yes” was forced.

While he had said it as a throwaway remark, the stereotype of the “hardworking Chinese” seems long accepted. In billionaire entrepreneur Robert Kuok’s upcoming memoir, he called the overseas Chinese ‘the most amazing economic ants on earth’.

Robert Kuok is one of the remaining sages of our country, and his insights are surely representative of a worldview that is much broader than ours.

So, it is timely to ask the question: why do the Chinese work so hard?

Kuok suggested a mixture of two things: one, genetics; two, culture.

On genetics, he attributed the Chinese hardworking attitude to ‘being blessed with some of the best entrepreneurial genes in the world’. In other words, the Chinese are simply “born” hardworking.

This is a strong assertion that is hard to prove, since scientific research had shown that any qualitative assumptions about race are at best non-generalisable. Gone are the days where social Darwinism had mainstream prominence, not least because of the destructive political and social ramifications it had brought.

This might simply represent his own subjective opinions, to which he would find an ally in the young Dr Mahathir Mohamad when he first published “The Malay Dilemma”.

Thus, on Chinese being “born” hardworking, it is merely Kuok’s opinion, and nothing more...