Referring back to a quote from Milton Bennett, pillar of the field of intercultural communication: Intercultural sensitivity is not natural. It is not part of our primate past, nor has it characterized most of human history. Cross-cultural contact usually has been accompanied by bloodshed, oppression, or genocide. (Milton Bennett, “Towards Ethnorelativism: A developmental model of [...]

In November 2009, President Obama announced the 100,000 Strong initiative, “a national effort designed to increase dramatically the number and diversify the composition of American students studying in China,” under the Department of State. Recently a separate initiative, Project Pengyou, signed on to manage the vast alumni network of 100,000 Strong. On December 10 in [...]

With this post the blog turns 100…in blog years. Or blog posts. To observe my 100th post I’m offering a quick tour of what I consider the “greatest hits” of the blog: the five key posts that get at core issues around intercultural communication, especially regarding China. The sentimental favorite has to be Post #1, [...]

I ended my last post with this quote from intercultural guru Milton Bennett: Intercultural sensitivity is not natural. It is not part of our primate past, nor has it characterized most of human history. Cross-cultural contact usually has been accompanied by bloodshed, oppression, or genocide. (Milton Bennett, “Towards Ethnorelativism: A developmental model of intercultural sensitivity.” [...]

We all know how fear feels. And most of us probably don’t have to think too far back to remember the last time we felt fear. Maybe the boss was acting funny that day and you felt in danger of losing your job. Or maybe you were driving, thought you knew where you were going, [...]

I wanted to share an interesting thought thread that I came upon last Friday. I was in Shanghai, participating in a gathering of a new, informal body called American and International Universities in China. The event was sponsored by the Harvard Center Shanghai. Around two dozen representatives of American and International universities with a presence [...]

I’m about a third of the way through a fascinating book that has a lot to teach us about why mindset mismatch between cultures is such a pervasive — and pernicious — fact of life. It’s called Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, and it’s by David M. Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine. [...]

If God is lurking everywhere in the American responses to the Rich Person question, God is nowhere to be seen in the Chinese responses. The concerns of the Chinese respondents are much less complex, and much less fraught, than the American responses. The one overarching theme of the Chinese responses is the same as the [...]

Picking up on the “God’s eye view” theme from the last post: In her seminal 1946 study of Japanese and American culture, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, anthropologist Ruth Benedict popularized the distinction between “shame cultures” and “guilt cultures.” To oversimplify: shame cultures, like Japan (and China, though China wasn’t her focus), regulate behavior through [...]

In an earlier post I gave a brief summary of Chinese and American responses to this question: If a person is rich, what should he/she do with his/her money? How would you respond to this question? If yours is typical of any of the American responses, then: You probably have some fairly clear ideas about [...]