It sounds like you havent spent much time in Academia. There it is a serious offense to take credit for work you did not do. Unfortunately, the system is set up so that "getting credit" is what allows you to keep doing your job, get better jobs, publish in high impact journals, etc. Scholars hold themselves to a higher standard because here your ideas will be used as the foundation for other ideas and that lineage will survive for as long as the sun burns.

Its not the same as a normal bullshit office job where mid-level manager A steals idea from underling worker B and pawns it off on his own idea. In the office your job is to make the company as much money as possible and no one cares if, in 2012, you decided to use 99 plastic peanuts per package shipped to customer instead of 100.

I do agree that this is not just a American / Chinese issue, and its easy to over-generalize but I do think there is often a difference in thinking between students of good U.S. schools vs. good Chinese schools. When you come out of a good Chinese university, you should be able to figure out which lines of code you need, which statistical methods to apply, and which combination of commands and inputs, to calculate the correct answers. When you graduate from a good U.S. university, you should be asking questions-- Why did human hands evolve to have 5 fingers? Why not 4 or 6? How in the world did they discover chemotherapy? How should the scientific method change as we shift from research starting with very little data to research that starts with all the data but no understanding?

U.S. schools have also changed to focus more on practical results-- ability to earn a high salary after graduation, loan repayment, etc. And its as the point where some universities dont even punish students for plagiarism anymore. It'll be interesting to see in 10-20 years how this affects science. Maybe credit isnt important anymore.