Depends on the teacher. I enforce attendance, much to the students’ chagrin; on the other hand, there’s a case to be made for not enforcing attendance, since that reduces the number of students in class to just those who care, which makes things better in a number of ways.
Smoking in the back of classes?! That may happen, but it’s certainly not normal.
Taiwan university students do seem somewhat horrified by the idea of regular homework. The philosophy seems to be that the class time + maybe one project is enough. They figure they did the work in high school; university is vacation time.
The plagiarism is truly awful and happens throughout the system; it can become one of those “You just don’t understand Taiwanese culture” things. Many of the students truly don’t understand the concept and think that we westerners have this prissy idea about having to write your own work. I’ve had to go through a lengthy appeal process where I needed to justify failing a student who plagiarized for her entire final exam [open-book: last time I did that!]. I won, but I was told to make it MORE clear in my guidelines that plagiarism will get them a zero (I already had it in there, but I guess it wasn’t boldface or repeated enough).
One thing to understand about classes here is that they’re big - 60 is normal; conversation or composition classes will have “small” groups of 25 or so. Most courses, throughout undergrad but NOT in grad school, are what we’d call lectures in North America: seminars/ discussions don’t exist. The profs don’t normally have TAs for marking, so when a professor is supposed to mark the assignments for 60-90 students… not many real projects get done. Individual essays are very unusual; group presentations are more the norm.
(The above is for undergrad private universities, which is where I’ve had experience; I can’t speak to the public and theoretically higher-level schools.)