First things first: please read this piece by David Dayton. It’s a great read and extremely informative, plus it brings to life a number of themes addressed in this blog.
Today, a bit more building on last week’s discussion of “individualism.” This time not my thoughts, but those of Lin Yutang, one of the most famous interpreters of China to the West.
His most famous book in the West is My Country and My People. He wrote it in 1935, before the full occupation of China by the Japanese, before the rest of World War II, before the Communist revolution and Mao Zedong and the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution and Deng Xiaoping and Tian’anmen and Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. He wrote the book in English, after having lived in the U.S. for several years. Nobody before or since has written with such clarity and wit about fundamental aspects of Chinese society.
He kicks off Chapter Six, “Social and Political Life,” like this:
The Chinese are a nation of individualists. They are family-minded, not social-minded, and the family mind is only a form of magnified selfishness. It is curious that the word “society” does not exist as an idea in Chinese thought.…
“Public spirit” is a new term, so is “civic consciousness,” and so is “social service.” There are no such commodities in China. To be sure, there are “social affairs,” such as weddings, funerals, and birthday celebrations and Buddhistic processions and annual festivals. But the things which make up English and American social life, viz. sport, politics and religion, are conspicuously absent.…They play games, to be sure, but these games are characteristic of Chinese individualism.…Teamwork is unknown. In Chinese card games, each man plays for himself. (Lin Yutang, My Country and My People, Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2000 [orig. 1935], p. 169)
To me this rings a lot of bells around Chinese responses to the “fallen tree” question: it’s not about “right” and “wrong”; it’s about getting my truck where it needs to go. And with the “rich person” question, recall for a moment the interviewees who commented that the question is too general, and that we can only ask what you would do with your money. Lin Yutang writes: “To a Chinese, social work always looks like ‘meddling with other people’s business.’” (p. 171)
Of course this is one man’s opinion. All grain-of-salt warnings remain in force. At the same time, this was a particularly insightful person.
And he’s not alone. Observers East and West, as well as a great many social scientists (chiefly psychologists, but also anthropologists and linguists), have provided further evidence for an enduring Chinese mindset roughly along the lines sketched out here by Lin, and echoed in my research.
For your own China explorations, thinking of China as “collectivist” and the West as “individualist” is helpful, as far as it goes. Maximizing your success in China requires that you go further. The more you’re able to nuance your view of the Chinese cultural mindset, and how it relates to the U.S. and the West, the better off you’ll be.
Jason, I couldn’t agree more.
My personal experience in China is that that Westerners get lost in China by assuming that China as a “socialist” country means that everyone is a) communist and b) collectivist minded. I don’t think that either is true. Yes, Chinese are more often described in group terms–but with the physical restrictions on space and the huge population and the historical scarcity of money/resources how could they be otherwise?! Chinese are individually aggressive–meaning they understand the rational limitations of supply and demand (much better than most “western capitalists,” I would argue) and know how to purse individual needs within a larger social environment.
China is, in my experience, actually the most capitalistic and individualist place I have ever worked. Much more so than the US. There does not seem to be the sense of social responsibility (outside of feelings of nationalism) in China that you have in the West. There is a very conscious attitude of scarcity and temporary opportunity in China that is much more tempered in the “fruited plains,” over-abundance and underpopulated US. You have to be individualistic here just to be able to stay alive with all the competition.
While in the US it may be selfish individualism there is much more independence/opportunity in the US culture than China has historically experienced. Thus American’s can afford to go it alone–because there are opportunities and resources to be had. The Chinese version of selfish individualism is, as you point out, real but limited to the immediate family–at most another 4-6 people today in China. Not very “socialist” or “collectivist” in the sense that most westerners think.
In business this translates into a number of things that define Chinese marketplaces. First, the use of personal connections to gain advantage. Politics, business, school. You name it. It’s about who you know. Second, get it while the getting is good–you never know when the govt policy will change or the market/supply will dry up. If you have a chance you’d better take full advantage because you may never see it again. Both of these practices drive westerners crazy–there seems to be no logic other than immediate greed. And yet it’s not greed as much as it’s a rational way to act in an incredibly inefficient system with limited resources.