How to educate bachelor and master exchange students from Asia? I am working at a university in Europe.  We have a great number of exchange students (one semester, year, of multiple years).  I am having difficulties reaching some of these exchange students, especially, it seems, but not limited to those from non-Western cultures (e.g. China and India).  Treating them in the same way that I would treat native Western students is proving ineffective.  I am looking for ways to improve my teaching strategies to better serve these exchange students, and especially those from Asian cultures.

Here are some of the things that I would like help with:


I am having trouble getting them to attend class.  Sometimes it seems that presence at classes and labs causes them some tremendous pain.
They have complaints about the too high difficulty of the courses. 
They often prefer to communicate via email. It is very difficult to elicit interaction from them during class or lab.
Communication is sometimes difficult, and when I ask them how I might best help them, some invisible barrier prevents me from discovering a solution.


Note: Although some of these problems are endemic to exchange students (such as a focus on things besides class), the alignment of this, cultural barriers and language barriers are causing me an especially difficult time reaching out to students from Asian cultures.  

Thus, I am especially interested in strategies for improving the following metrics for my Asian exchange students:


class attendance
class engagement
engagement with me outside of class
engagement in person, rather than via email.
class performance (grades)


My sample size ~100 of those students in two years. It is not a big sample at all (including my cognitive biases as well). However, it seems that my poor results at improving the outcomes for my exchange students are not unique to me, as my colleagues report a similar experience.

My questions:


What are some strategies to improve my teaching impact for Indian and Chinese exchange students?  This includes improving class attendance, engagement with class and with me, and class performance.
In what ways are their educational systems and culture at home significantly different from those in Europe?


Note: I know that "Asia" is an extremely large place with a lot of strongly different countries, so feel free to limit your answer on India and/or China.

Update

As I state before, there are common problems in the population of exchange students in general. It seems that they are coming for different reasons than study (finding new friends, experimenting with new drugs, investigate different culture ...).  However, I am capable of recognizing and dealing with the popular strategies of Western exchange students: finding ways to abuse rules for their profit, etc. 

Unfortunately, my strategies for improving outcomes with Western exchange students are proving ineffective for my Indian and Chinese students.  I do not really understand their behavior.  My questions are mainly about how to gain a greater understanding of their behavior so that I can make all-around improvements to our teacher-student relationship.

Day after edit

According to the excessive number of comments (all of them interesting I have to say), I need to make this clear. I am not saying they are not good students at their universities or in general. I am just unable to work with them in the same effective way as with the local students. So I would like to know the origins of this ineffectively and I would like to utilize different approaches of education to reach their potential (for their benefits).

Stating that they are "awesome students" (at their home) and I am "an ignorant teacher" does not help. I already know this.
I teach at a university in Asia and I could say the exact same thing about our European/American exchange students. 

Quite simply, exchange students have very different incentives from regular students. They often convert their grades to a simple pass/fail on their transcripts so they just need to pass the class (we get students from very reputable institutions in the US Canada and Europe, I was surprised to hear about that practice at first). In addition for many of them it’s their first time in a new and exotic location. They want to party and travel. With all due respect, lectures are the last thing on their mind.

Some of the exchange students are hard working, but I would say that they are a minority. 

To conclude I think your question has a bit of a cultural bias to it. European students can be equally annoying in an exchange program.

Edit: the question is biased because it seems to attribute this behavior to the students’ “Asian-ness” rather to them being in an exciting foreign country, away from their parents, dealing with a new language and academic practices, and all that within a few weeks. All of the bad practices the question describes can be easily observed in European/American students who come on exchange to my Asian university. Also, lumping together all students from Asia (or even just India/China) is completely inaccurate, and an over generalization of a group of people constituting the majority of humankind. I would suggest that the OP revisit their own beliefs and consider the circumstances under which they observe this group.

By the way, we also get exchange students from China and India. Surprise! they do fine in general, because to them our university/location is not particularly exciting or different! It’s like if an American student had a semester in the UK. Sure it’s different, but a lot of things are the same. Have you considered that option?

Edit 2: (reflecting OP's edit and discussion below)

There are, of course, cultural differences between Students from different cultural backgrounds. By and large, students from China tend to be quieter and ask less questions (this is especially true for female Chinese students in my experience). There are several great suggestions in the comments and in other answers: listen to them, do not be confrontational, try to schedule office hours where these students might feel more free to interact with you. 

With all this out of the way: I think that the solutions offered above are not quintessentially unique to handling Asian students. They are excellent approaches to handling any reserved student, regardless of their background. 

Moreover, exchange students (American, European, Asian or African) tend to be  more difficult than regular students (as I describe above). This is a far more important factor in this equation than the cultural parameter from my own limited experience. 

I think it's great that the OP is looking to improve their teaching, I just don't think that the difficulties have so much to do with cultural differences as they do with the universal difficulties that arise with foreign exchange students.

As an aside, there are some comments in the threads that are very close to sounding like "I'm not racist, but...". In my opinion, that is unfortunate.