Those guys live in a different universe. I went to university with a guy from Taiwan who had never heard of Hitler. Their view of the world is very foreign and very interesting.
The mainland Asian cultures are very much centred around the group and the society. Individualism, and the sense of the individual, is greatly suppressed to a degree that Western raised cultures have difficulty understanding.
Imagine a grade school (kids from pre-school age through high school), with 36,000 students, and the primary curriculum is Shaolin kung-fu:
It's from schools like this that the Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Taiwanese, militaries draw their primary soldiers from. There may be mandatory service for the masses, but most of these soldiers are only in for a short time, receive rudimentary training, and are used primarily in logistics roles, or as highly expendable meat-waves in the case of a conflict.
The officers, non-coms, and elite units, are all drawn from these academies, and form the true core of their militaries. These are kids who's life path is dictated from a very early age. It creates a very specific kind of individual.