I’ve quoted from the book before: it was Lin Yutang who referred to China as “a nation of individualists” in this book, published in 1935. Lin addresses what he calls Chinese “indifference,” which, he argues, is a function of the world’s unpredictability, especially with regard to (lack of) legal institutions to protect citizens:

Chinese youths are as public-spirited as foreign youths, and Chinese hot-heads show as much desire to “meddle with public affairs” as those in any other country. But somewhere between their twenty-fifth and their thirtieth years, they all become wise, and acquire this indifference, which contributes a lot to their mellowness and culture. Some learn it by native intelligence, some by getting their fingers burned once or twice. All old people play safe because all old rogues have learned the benefits of indifference in a society where personal rights are not guaranteed and where getting one’s fingers burned once is bad enough. (pp. 48-9)

This connects directly to what Americans sometimes perceive as an indifference to the “letter of the law”:

In one word, we recognize the necessity of human effort but we also admit the futility of it. This general attitude of mind has a tendency to develop passive defense tactics. “Great things can be reduced into small things, and small things can be reduced into nothing.” On this general principle, all Chinese disputes are patched up, all Chinese schemes are readjusted, and all reform programs are discounted until there are peace and rice for everybody. (p. 56)

No wonder Americans, laser-focused as we are on “honoring our word,” sometimes get up in arms. Contracts are about “honoring our word”; hétong are about reducing differences and working together to create “peace and rice for everybody.”

A caricature, to be sure, but one to bear in mind — and really think through — as you continue to develop your relationships in China.

The original Chinese Esquire series referenced in the Time piece is here (in Chinese only). It seems Chinese Esquire is using the power of dreams, along with fashion photography, to narrate a thoroughly modern Chinese man.

This kind of “modernity” highlights the shift, in certain young and “fashionable” circles in China, to a more future-based orientation. Dreams are by definition grounded in the future. The “pragmatic” aspects of Chinese culture in which we find resistance to dreams are, in contrast, based in the past: long and bitter experience has shown that the whims of the world can and do thwart the best of human intention and effort.

In an earlier post I wrote of Hoftede’s concept of “time orientation.” I mention it here because the drag of China’s deep past upon dreams can be formidable. And still we have the portraits in Chinese Esquire of China’s modern dreamers. No wonder so many Westerners return from China scratching their heads at the contradictions and the complexity. And while what I’m about to say is to some degree true of every place, and while I’m not nearly the first to say it, China defies all our efforts to put it into tidy boxes.

Not only do the Chinese feel no interest in that which belongs to the “public,” but all such property, if unprotected and available, is a mark for theft. Paving-stones are carried off for private use, and square rods of the brick facing to city walls gradually disappear. A wall enclosing a foreign cemetery in one of the ports of China was carried away till not a brick remained, as soon as it was discovered that the place was in charge of no one in particular. It is not many years since an extraordinary sensation was caused in the Imperial palace in Peking by the discovery that extensive robberies had been committed on the copper roofs of some of the buildings within the forbidden city. (Arthur H. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1896, p. 111)

What could be more “collective” than “the public”? What could be more “individualist” than neglecting “the public” in favor of “the self”? The complexity of culture can boggle the mind. We just need to be sure we minimize the bad decisions we make as a result.

A society with a differential mode of association is composed of webs woven out of countless personal relationships. To each knot in these webs is attached a specific ethical principle. For this reason, the traditional moral system was incapable of producing a comprehensive moral concept.…

The degree to which Chinese ethics and laws expand and contract depends on a particular context and how one fits into that context. I have heard quite a few friends denounce corruption, but when their own fathers stole from the public, they not only did not denounce them but even covered up the theft. Moreover, some went so far as to ask their fathers for some of the money made off the graft, even while denouncing corruption in others. When they themselves become corrupt, they can still find comfort in their “capabilities.” In a society characterized by a differential mode of association, this kind of thinking is not contradictory. In such a society, general standards have no utility. The first thing to do is to understand the specific context: Who is the important figure, and what kind of relationship is appropriate with that figure? Only then can one decide the ethical standards to be applied in that context. (From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society: A translation of Fei Xiaotong’s Xiangtu Zhongguo, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, pp. 78-9. Translated by Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng.)

Westerners in China will fail if you adhere rigidly to your universalist moral standards. If you can’t complexify how you relate to ethics, China is not for you. This emphatically does not mean that you must “sell your soul” or do anything you find repugnant. But it is true that you must consciously and consistently be willing to question many of your most deeply held beliefs, and walk a very fine line between remaining 100% “true to yourself” and doing things you might regret. There are no easy answers. But a bone-deep commitment to success will go a long way toward revealing that fine line and helping you walk it.

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.

To a “typical” American a contract serves two purposes. First, it helps ensure that something gets done, regardless of who the parties are and what feelings they might have. Second, the contract ensures that my organization’s interests are protected: should any dispute arise threatening my organization’s well-being, the contract can stave off damage.

A key assumption, far off in the background, underlies this: the deep-seated belief in the ability of human beings to mold the world as we see fit. This is central to the founding myths of the United States: a new land waiting to be created, intentionally, by human beings. Bending the world to our will requires planning, and a key part of the planning process, designed to maximize the probability of success, is the contract.

Given these beliefs, the contract is a way of saying:

“We all know what there is to be done. It’s up to us to do it. And we need a plan to get there. Here is a breakdown of who’s responsible for what in order to get the job done. We know we may want to change things, but we know we can’t, because this is what has to be done, and since we’re all strangers here we’re not really sure we can trust the other guys, and we need a guarantee that they’ll uphold their end of the bargain and not put our organization at risk.”

The Chinese cultural mindset operates from different basic assumptions. If the key unit in the American mindset is the “project,” or “getting something done,” in the Chinese mindset the key unit is the relationship. And if the world is at the whim of humans in the American mindset, in the Chinese mindset humans are at the whim of the world. These two aspects are related: what gets people through hard times is relationships. Things might be going well today, but tomorrow could hold disaster. It’s best, then, to maintain equanimity and keep relationships solid.

These beliefs create a fundamentally different frame of reference for hétong than for contracts. In an inherently harsh and unpredictable world, we must be ready to change our approach on the fly, and to maintain alliances, possibly at the expense of short-term “self-interest,” for the sake of mutual support, even survival, through difficult times. We might “translate” the above statement as:

“We all know what there is to be done. Here is a breakdown of who’s responsible for what. We also know that this is an agreement among people, and as we get things done together we want to be sure we don’t ruin any relationships, because we may need each other later. We also know that circumstances are always changing, and we must adapt. So if we run into trouble we may have to reconsider what we write down here. These are guidelines; what’s more important is that we work together when there are problems, adapting appropriately to changing circumstances, and making sure that relationships stay intact.”

One crucial thing to see about this is that it has nothing to do with what we call “honesty.” Nothing whatsoever. Both views of the contract/hétong are perfectly “honest” in their own ways. But because of all the cultural baggage Americans bring along with our views of contracts, it’s very easy to go from “my Chinese counterpart wants to rework the contract” to “the Chinese are dishonest.”

Will your organization have to deal with cultural differences when it comes to contracts/hétong and their enforcement? Most likely. But it doesn’t have to go down the familiar and unproductive road of finger-pointing and crying foul. Know what you’re dealing with. Expect it and understand it. If you do you’ve got a leg way up on your competition. While they’re busy complaining, you’re working things out and moving forward, solidifying your partnerships, and laying a foundation for a productive and successful future.

Today I met with the “ayi” who used to take care of our children when we were living in Beijing from 2004–2007. I hadn’t seen her since we’d left. I was eager to “get caught up” — a very American thing to do — and so I had invited her to a Starbucks not far from where she lives. I also wanted to give her some photos and artistic creations of my girls, though I didn’t mention that.

The conversation was wonderful. At one point, however, she asked, seemingly out of the blue, “Are you all moving back to Beijing?” I answered no. “Oh. I thought that might be why you wanted to meet.” No problem ensued, because we have a strong, and open, relationship that we developed over the years, but I still felt a bit of a heel for my blunder.

What’s the blunder? Edward T. Hall, anthropologist and giant in the field of intercultural communication, in his 1976 classic Beyond Culture, described what he called “low-context” and “high-context” cultures. People from low-context cultures spell everything out, say things directly and explicitly; high context cultures rely more on background information – context – and “reading signs.” I had told her that I wanted to see her and talk, which is exactly what I had intended. She, however, with her high-context background, thought there must be some underlying reason for my invitation that I hadn’t stated. Her best guess was that we were moving back to Beijing.

Now, even in a low-context culture, people “read signs” and infer; it’s just done with much greater frequency and consistency in high-context cultures. The difference, as always, is a matter of degree, not of kind.

This makes your life quite a bit more complicated than it might otherwise be as you navigate your way through your relationships with your Chinese partners and counterparts. Before you can begin to guess how someone might respond to something you say or don’t say, you have to have some way of knowing, or at least guessing, what the background context is. This requires a resourcefulness, alertness, and agility, as well as a vast knowledge base, which few possess. You’ll need to rely on many others to fill in the blanks for you.

But doing this difficult thinking before you blunder will reward you profoundly. You will be viewed as someone who “understands China,” and will generate the “good feeling” that is so crucial to successful partnerships in China — more on this in future posts.