This is obviously a tough issue as you don’t want to seem racist, but I do think there is (a little) something here and it should be stated forthrightly. My impression is this is more common in traditional Chinese societies than many other places—their greatest modern writer did after all have his literary interest sparked by witnessing his countrymen not stepping up to the plate to help each other in public. Three factors occur to me offhand which may influence people in this direction: 1) fear of legal consequences, 2) poor examples from the leadership (which is not public-spirited in the most fundamental sense—rules of right and wrong, ie the law, do not apply to the leadership, no everyone intuits this, so why consider questions of right and wrong yourself?), and 3) “Confucian culture,” the well documented support for core family and friends over larger networks/groups such as the nation—although, hideously intense pressure from having such a massive population creates out of necessity a more narrowly focused drive and this is also a huge hidden common sense factor in so many analyses of “Chinese” culture I’ve seen