A subway ride in Shanghai during rush hours is a vastly different experience from a subway ride in Toronto, also during rush hour. If you don't push and shove, you have no chance of getting on the train.
Everytime I visit Shanghai, I have trouble crossing the street, and have to adjust my mentality. Instead of waiting for a traffic signal or crossing at intersections, you have to watch the traffic and cross whenever there is an opening. Lights and intersections are largely irrelevant.
Here's a video of people in Taizhou gathering around and taking pictures of a stranger's kid:
This would be a huge no-no in Canadian culture.
Here's an article where the author, an American, is freaked out by trays of blood in a Chinese hospital:
These are not stereotypes. These are real, genuine cultural differences.
From a psychosocial point of view, I strongly dislike the word "culture" -- because while the definition of the word is relatively benign ("the way of living, behaviours, symbols, values, beliefs, which a group of people accept and act by, generally without thinking, and passed along by one generation to the next" -- as a definition) -- the word itself inherently pins those behaviours, actions, values and beliefs on the people of that group instead of acknowledging the major role of the environment.
All human culture is dependent on the external environment in which they have grown up in, and the root of that environment which in turn causes individuals to behave in a certain way I think can best be attributed to socio-economic status and the physical environment of a group.
You mention things such as riding the train and rush hour traffic in Toronto vs Shanghai, and it is not incorrect to say that the difference in behaviour of people can be attributed to "culture" -- but when we dig down a bit further, it is quite easy to see how the difference in socio-economic status, industrial and economic development can impact on the behaviours of people, especially taking into account their historical socioeconomic status and historical industrial and economic status.
Less developed countries or developing countries undergoing rapid industrialization tend to have less stringent traffic laws than other nations which are developed and which have been developed for a long time. That in turn causes things like more chaos during commutes and people naturally adjust their behaviour to the environment.
You also mentioned driving scams -- which is actually a lovely example to describe my point, because traffic scams exist in many other developing countries in the world as well. Russia is actually infamous for its driving scams, where people deliberately seek to injure themselves to try and sue a driver -- that is why Russian dashboard cams are such a big internet hit. Certain laws and regulations and economic circumstances between China and Russia share similarities which likely make certain people willing to conduct these kinds of scams -- is there something about the "culture" of each nation which makes these people more predisposed to the scams? Well, yes, but the culture arguably only exists due to the underdeveloped laws and the socioeconomic circumstances of the nations as well -- which are all then dependent on socio-economic status, and economic-industrial development of a nation.
If we want to go a dirtier route, we can ask why does China and many other developing asian countries have squat toilets in public restrooms instead of sitting toilets? It is easy to say "oh it's a cultural difference," but then when one starts to look into the socioeconomic and economic/industrial explanations for it, such as sitting toilets tending to be more complex, more difficult to maintain, and more costly overall than squat toilets, then it explains the "cultural" difference in a much more helpful way, which offers a solution to a problem (if it is perceived as a problem in the first place).
If we want to go one step more down in the toilet example, one can ask why a country like India has such high rates of public defecation -- would one be so arrogant as to assume that it has to do with their "culture"? Well, sure, we can attribute it to culture if we acknowledge that it is facilitated by the limits of the physical environment, such as the low rates of indoor plumbing, the poor status of public toilets in many Indian cities, which are all in turn dependent on the socioeconomic and economic/industrial status and development of India overall.
Other examples that we can relate to better also exist -- for instance, there are strong associations between low socioeconomic status groups and obesity in many developed countries. Would it be fair to assume that those groups have some kind of culture where they are perhaps lazy, not willing to work out and more susceptible to fast food? Well, no, because that ignores other major factors such as the quite widely documented association that lower SES communities in many developed countries tend to have more fast food joints, and ignores the possibility that lower SES communities find it more difficult to access healthier foods, that fast food is cheaper and more convenient (which is important if we consider that low SES groups often tend to work low paying jobs with many hours, often with long commutes).
I've ranted on a little bit here, and this is only tangentially related to the original discussion you and vesicles have been having, but the overall point I'm making is that the idea of "culture" is very much a downstream "symptom". If we want to truly and usefully explain "culture" one must look more upstream.
That is why whenever I read the word "culture," I always automatically mentally replace it with "behaviours, actions, beliefs, which are strongly shaped by the environment of socioeconomic status, economic and industrial status and history"... because the word culture I think bastardizes a much more complex issue, and it tends to ascribe positive traits of a group as if it is something inherent to that group's being (such as "moral fibre" or considering them as more "civilized"), and also simultaneously ascribes negative traits of a group as if it is something inherent to that group (whether it's traffic scams, obesity, public defecation, or whatever) and in the latter is is almost a form of victim blaming.
