The standard Chinese view is best summarized by three words, uttered by one of the Chinese interviewees: “Money makes money. (钱生钱)” It’s so plainly obvious on some level that what you do with money — the quintessentially useful stuff called money — is invest it, so that you can get more of the stuff, creating the ability to solve more and more problems, and to deal with more and more of life’s nitty-gritty practical issues.

After the moralistic agonizing of the Americans, the absence of any sort of moralistic tone in the Chinese responses created is, in turns, alarming and refreshing. Alarming because my American mind is trained to think of money in moral terms. Refreshing because there is no pain in the discussions, no agonizing, no navel-gazing about what people should do versus what they actually would do.

Not only is the moralism absent. In two cases the Chinese participants actually claim that the question itself is moralistic. Here’s the first case:

C-17 Saying a person has money, how should he use his money, that give you a completely generalized sort of feeling.  Its seems that as for you…

C-16 He should have a lot of ways to use his money, and should choose a way for him…a way of using his money that he likes.  If the money was made through normal, suitable means.

C-17 If you answer this way it’s like speaking about morals or preaching…which ways of using your money are better ways.

C-16 Right.

C-17 But I can only answer how I want to use my money.

C-16 The premise is that we’re rich. [laughter] I don’t have enough money to pay rent.

C-17 Also, for this part, “How should he use his money?” should, this word, maybe I’m a little bit uncomfortable.

C-16 Awkward, right?

C-17 Right.  “Should” has a bit of a feeling of morals, or preaching.

C-16 We should let everyone choose for themselves…how they should use…not should, let everyone choose how to use his money.  We can only say if I were rich what would I do with it?

C-17 Right.

They are essentially saying: We’re on to you, self-righteous American researcher, and we aren’t going to play your game. We are not interested in your moralistic pursuits. Please leave us alone to discuss for ourselves how we might imagine our fictional selves enjoying our fictional money, unencumbered.

Another pair of Chinese respondents have this to say on the matter:

C-18 This, I think…this question is different for each person.  Your saving or spending money depends on your own world view, on the direction of your ideas about value.

C-19 I think this question should ask, “If you were rich, how should you spend your money?”

C-18 Yes.  In reality you’re just expressing your own view, right, about how to use this sum of money.

C-19 It should be asked this way.

Just as we saw in responses to the Surprise Arrest and Tax Hike questions, once again the Chinese are looking like the individualists and Americans are looking like the collectivists. And just as before, if we add some nuance to our analysis, we can make sense of this by looking at where Americans and Chinese draw their ingroup/outgroup boundaries.

For this we have an interesting bit of data: in no Chinese interview is charity mentioned without the qualification that one should take care of oneself and one’s family first. In six of the nine American interviews, though, the idea of philanthropy is offered up before the suggestion that one meet one’s own material needs first. And in a seventh interview, even though philanthropy is ultimately rejected, it is at least addressed by them, while taking care of one’s own financial needs isn’t even raised.

It once again seems that the Chinese ingroup is relatively small: oneself and one’s family. For the Americans, members of “broader society” qualify as ingroup members. That is, at least, in theory: Americans like to think of themselves as caring for everyone in society, even though in reality their actions might not match this ideal. Hence the agony and self-doubt expressed by so many of the American interviewees.

In guilt cultures, such as the United States, behavior is internally and individually regulated through fear of judgment by some form of deity. Punishment for transgressions could come in this life or after death.

One aspect of the psychology of members of guilt cultures is that there is no freedom from internal assessments of actions and possible actions. In a shame culture, as long as a person is reasonably sure of not being caught, there can be some measure of peace of mind. In a guilt culture, no such luck: God is always watching, assessing, judging, and ultimately, we fear, punishing.

This gives tremendous energy and power to our thoughts: if God knows even our thoughts, then “bad” thoughts alone can be grounds for punishment, as in Jimmy Carter’s famous quote in his 1976 interview with Playboy magazine:

The Bible says, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Christ said, I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery. I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.…This is something that God recognizes, that I will do and have done, and God forgives me for it.

The former President believes he has been forgiven, but the fact that he has to say so only provides further evidence for the belief that unsavory thoughts alone can be punished.

The knowability of our thoughts by a perceived omniscient deity has a significant consequence when it comes to answering questions like the Rich Person question: it matters not only what we might and should do, but also what we might and should think about what we might and should do.

Two of the American interviewees address this at length:

E-9 A common answer to this question would be, you should give to charity, you know, but there’s the problem of, if someone goes to help somebody while if they help them, you know if someone goes to a soup kitchen or something like that to help out and serves them food, no matter what their motives are in doing so, the person gets to eat, right?

E-10 Right.

E-9 But you know then there is the idea that if you go there with the idea that you’re helping them only so that you can feel good, that’s not necessarily the best idea, versus if you go there with the intent of helping someone.

E-10 Sincerely help.

E-9 Right.  So I have a rich godfather who is highly rich and gives a lot of his money to charity, but he always tells me, he’s an absolute capitalist and he thinks I’m not exactly, I don’t know I’m not really a socialist, but we always have this discussion and he tells me that, I’m not bad, and, capitalists aren’t bad, see I give my money away.  And so, I don’t know.  I believe they should give it away, but the motives behind it…

E-10 Yeah, yeah.  I don’t know, it’s like they justify all their bad things by giving away part of something and not, I don’t know, there’s no sincerity in it.

E-9 I mean that’s not good, however…

E-10 It does help someone.

E-9 It helps someone yeah.

E-10 I don’t know.  Well like this question though, it’s not the motive for doing whatever, it’s what you should do with your money.

E-9 Yeah, but I mean, what I’m saying is, what you should do with your money is, in theory you should give it to charity…

E-10 But do it for a good reason.

E-9 But do it for a good reason, and if you don’t do it for a good reason, like I was just saying, should you do it or not? So, if the person’s motives are good, then they should definitely give them to charity.  If their motives are not good then I think maybe I don’t know, maybe you should give it to charity, maybe you should be selfish with it. I mean you’re being selfish anyways, I don’t know exactly what a person with bad intent should do with their money.

As an American I can understand and appreciate the logic here. Hypocrisy is awful. Intentions should match words, which in turn should match deeds. It makes complete sense.

On the other hand, I’m offended by the logic: at the end of the day, if someone has food in their belly, or a roof over their head, what does it matter what the intentions are of the person who provided the food or shelter?

The tension between these two logic systems is palpable in the discussion. We saw another version of this tension earlier, in the American fascination with the “should”s of giving away or not giving away money, or of moving or not moving the tree that is blocking the road. This last discussion is probably the most extreme example of how God, or whatever invisible entity we imagine to be judging us, is constantly in the background, influencing our choices, and our evaluations of our choices. This is an American obsession.

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:

1. You probably have some fairly clear ideas about how this rich person should use his or her money.
2. These ideas have something to do with the public good: donating to good causes, setting up foundations, investing in technologies to better the world.
3. Despite the clarity of your preferences, you feel uneasy stating them too strongly, for fear that, were you the rich person, you’re not sure you’d do what that real you is saying the hypothetical rich you should do. Nobody likes a hypocrite.

The following, rather long, excerpt contains a number of gems:

E-13 Okay, this is “should” and not “would,” so…I think the person should give a large chunk of his money to some kind of charity. Not just one charity, but different charities, ’cause I think there’s a lot of people who are living in poverty, not just in the U.S. There’s a lot of people in third-world countries who don’t get anything, you know.  And, I think, just out of philanthropy, you know?

E-14 Yeah.  I don’t necessarily agree with this, but a lot of rich people believe that once they’ve made their money it’s theirs and they have no obligation to give it to anybody.

E-13 But this is should…

E-14 Should.

E-13 Not would.

E-14 Yes.

E-13 If we were talking would, people would not do that.

E-14 But do you think that?  Do you think that if they’ve earned their money, they shouldn’t…

E-13 No no, I’m not saying they should give all their money away.  I think what you earn is, yeah, you earned it, right?  But then you should give back to the society.  And you should give to people who don’t have much because they’re not as fortunate as you.  They don’t have those capabilities.  They’re not in the same situation as you.  So I think people should give back to the society.

E-14 I agree.

E-13 Like do something, like make a foundation, or a charity.

E-14 Just put it where it’s needed.

E-13 Yeah.  A lot of people do say, yeah, I earned the money, so I should keep it, but really what are you gonna do with all that money?  You’re just gonna spend it on yourself. That’s so selfish.  But then again if I were in that position I don’t know what I’d do.

E-14 Yeah.

E-13 It’d be…it’s easy to say…

E-14 Yeah, see, everybody says, this person should give it to charity, they should donate it, but that’s not what people do.

I don’t know if I ever had an actual conversation with another American that went like this, but I’m certain I had internal dialogs that went like this. In fact, every time I’ve enjoyed some windfall, however small, part of me is tortured by the contrast between what I know I “should” do and what I actually end up doing. Even when I can coax some generosity out of myself, it’s often not really generosity, coming as it does from a sense of scarcity, when what I “should” have is gratitude for the great abundance in my life, for God’s grace in even allowing me to live, and on top of that have shelter, food, water, and clothes.

American’s often talk of “giving back to society.” In order to give back, I must have been given something. What have I been given, and by whom? The “what” includes the standard list of things Americans are “supposed” to feel grateful for having. In addition to the basic material comforts, we have freedom of many kinds (to choose our leaders, to pursue our passions, to choose our spouses and where we live) and opportunity (to advance socially and economically, to travel the world, and so on). And probably a lot of other things, depending on whom you ask. None of these are things any of us has earned. And yet we have them.

Which leads us to the “who” question: Who exactly gave us all these things for which we are grateful? We often point to the Founding Fathers, and to all those who have given of themselves to protect what the Founding Fathers founded, including and especially all the veterans of America’s wars. How many times have we heard, “If you love your freedom, thank a vet”?

The story doesn’t end there, though. Another entity is at play here. Who? God. Which brings us back to a place we visited briefly when discussing our imaginary friend Tom’s decision whether or not to join the rock band: civil religion. Who, after all, inspired the Founding Fathers, and so many soldiers? And while many cringed when George W. Bush said it in 2003, just as the war in Iraq was getting underway, it can’t be denied that a deeply American belief system is behind his statement that “Freedom is not America’s gift to the world. It’s God’s gift to humanity.”

God is everywhere in the American mindset, running the show throughout American society and in the thought patterns of America’s people — even, I suspect, atheists. When I say that, I need to point out that I am making a purely ethnographic statement, not a theological one: whether you believe in God or not, you’ve got an uphill battle to fight if you want to claim that something or someone like God isn’t imagined to be operating behind the scenes when we talk about rock-band Tom being “given” his talents, or when we state our upset at not “giving back to society” enough. The “God’s-eye view” dominates the American mindset.

My 23-year-old response was a mixture of shock and pity. The response of my current self, with many more years of experience and professional training under my belt, is a nod of recognition.

If we dig deeper into what’s going on in the responses by both the Americans and the Chinese to the Surprise Arrest, Tax Hike, and Draft scenarios, what starts to emerge are two starkly differing models of the relationship between human beings and the world around us.

For the Americans, there is a deep-seated expectation that our desires do and should shape the world at large. When there is something in the world that is out of alignment with our desires, we expect that, all things being equal, we should be able to change the world, as opposed to being shaped by the world. This belief shines through in the Americans’ responses to all three scenarios:

Surprise Arrest: The situation created by the police officer is in direct and extreme conflict with the desires of the arrestee. It is incumbent upon the arrestee to take action in order to bring the world into alignment with his desires: sue the officer and bring some justice.

Tax Hike: The situation created by the government is in direct and extreme conflict with the desires of the citizenry. It is incumbent upon the citizens to take action in order to bring the world into alignment with their desires: demonstrate, refuse to pay, rebel.

Draft: Chris’s desire not to fight, born of his pacifist religious beliefs, threatens to be overwhelmed by the hard fact of the draft. Even the hardness of this fact, though, might not stop Chris from avoiding fighting. At the very least, it is reasonable to expect that Chris won’t be a great soldier, because if he doesn’t want to do something 100%, he won’t do it well: lack of desire leads to lack of worldly effect.

On the Chinese side, this expectation is by no means missing; it’s just much more muted. We saw in the Chinese responses to Surprise Arrest that, at least under this one set of circumstances, there is a strong expectation that humans can change the world around them, here by suing the police officer and demanding some form of “justice.” Still, as we’ve seen, this expectation is due to the particulars of the situation, not due to any overarching belief that humans can shape their worlds. From the Chinese side, the scenarios could be summarized as:

Surprise Arrest: The situation created by the police officer is in direct and extreme conflict with the desires of the arrestee, and also poses a major inconvenience to the arrestee. It is incumbent upon the arrestee to take action in order to protect himself and his reputation.

Tax Hike: The situation created by the government is probably in conflict with the desires and material well-being of greater society, but there really isn’t anything to be done about it: the government is too big and vague to fight, the harm isn’t immediate or apparent, and it isn’t even clear who the victims are.

Draft: It’s a time of war. The nation must be protected. It doesn’t matter what a person’s own beliefs or desires might be. Everyone must do his duty to the country.

I will never know what it is like to be Chinese, to be like my student back in Qiqihar, or like her sister, waiting for my “edge” to be “worn down.” I only know “reality” from my particular, highly American perspective. Still, I can’t help but think that the differences I have described in this and other posts on locus of control reflect a fundamental difference in the moment-to-moment reality of Chinese and American people. It’s actually not much of a stretch to posit this. We know from psychology that people are, in real time, perceiving and responding to and interacting with their environments, and strategizing how to do so most effectively in order to achieve their goals. The world must feel inherently different if it is something rule-governed that is there for my shaping, as opposed to being more or less chaotic, whose caprice I am eternally at the mercy of.

This difference shows up throughout Chinese and American responses to the “draft” question I wrote about in the last post, repeated here:

The government decides to go to war. Chris is drafted into the army to fight, but he feels strongly that war is wrong. What will Chris say and do? What should he do?

I have dubbed the cultural model that embodies Americans’ internally-directed nature “You Can’t Change Me”: People are who they are, and they will do what interests them. Especially young people. Trying to force people to do things they don’t want to do will have the opposite result.

With regard to Chris, our draftee, here is what some of the Americans have to say:

E-13 What would Chris say and do?  Okay I agree with you. He’ll probably try to get out of it, he’ll probably say, oh, I have to go finish my college degree. But I think if the government is insistent that he go to war, that he would do it.  But then he wouldn’t go a hundered percent.

E-21 Chris can still say something like, I can be governed by the government, I’m certainly not going to go against this war.  But personally I’m against this war, and I feel war is wrong.  And in that case I wouldn’t be a good addition to the army anyway.

E-25 Well I think to a certain extent you can’t really make people fight if they don’t want to.

The last sentence by E-25 sums it all up perfectly: “You can’t really make people fight if they don’t want to.” Taking the American position to an extreme, we could say, “You can’t make people do anything if they don’t want to.”

Per usual, this model, You Can’t Change Me, is perfectly comprehensible in both cultural worlds. It’s just given much higher priority by the Americans. The one time it shows up in the Chinese responses it is instantly rebutted:

C-14 He definitely won’t be a good soldier.

C-15 No, no, no.

C-14 At the same time he’s killing people he’ll be thinking that war is wrong.

C-15 This question is too difficult for you.  It’s not that I can necessarily give a good answer, because…I don’t know how to answer this.

C-14 This is hard, this…what should he do?

C-15 That depends on what you put first.  There’s an order to the things he’s facing.  Traditionally in China the country comes first, but I believe it’s also this way in America, so it’s really simple.  He will go fight, and he will be a very good soldier in the war.

That’s all there is to it: there may be some conflict there, but Duty to Country wins, hands down.

In the next post we’ll take a look at how this internal versus external locus of control orientation fits into the two very different Chinese and American cultural model systems governing relationships between people and their environments.

One of the interview questions asked:

The government decides to go to war.  Chris is drafted into the army to fight, but he feels strongly that war is wrong.  What will Chris say and do?  What should he do?

Here, the answers I got were exactly what my stereotypes told me to expect: “blind obedience” from the Chinese and “rugged individualism” from the Americans. Some sample from the Chinese responses about what Chris’s alter ego, Zhang San, would think and do (using my coding system, with “C” for Chinese and “E” for English):

C-13 He can only go.  Because being a soldier he can only…it doesn’t matter what his individual will is, he must go, right?

C-12 Right.

C-21 Following orders is a sworn duty.  Because, after all, he’s been drafted.  Now we common people aren’t soldiers, we can oppose war and such, but a soldier, maybe in his heart he thinks it’s wrong but there’s nothing he can do.

C-14 “In this sort of situation what would Zhang San do?”  Well I think even though he thinks it’s wrong, if the government tells him to join the army it’s not okay for him not to.  So he still must go fight.  “What should he do?”  I think this person is in a tough position as to what he should do, because under conditions of war it seems that individual ideas, individuals’ voices manifest very weakly.

C-15 Right.

C-14 He definitely still must go fight, but what should he do?

C-15 I don’t know.

C-14 I think his only option is that he still must go fight, but he would tell his opinions to his close friends or to the news media.  But this sort of person might become a traitor, so that’s not okay either.

C-15 He won’t become a traitor.

This is not the only viewpoint expressed by the Chinese interviewees, but it is by far the dominant one. Yes, Zhang San may have a contrary view, but it doesn’t matter one bit. “Individual will” be damned: the enemy is at the doorstep and the nation has called. Collective will wins the day.

The American picture is radically different. It’s not that they come down firmly on Chris’s side. Rather, whereas individual will is clearly subservient in the Chinese responses, with the Americans there is a far more equal tension between individual and collective will. As such, the Americans are deeply conflicted. A sampling:

E-17 And so I think about that in terms of what it means to be patriotic, like how far will I take that, am I just all talk, or would I get out on the field and support that?  And I’d like to think that I would.  But there’s so much I want to do in my life.  And war just seems like such a bad table to go to in Las Vegas, you know, it’s just a bad deal, it’s like the odds are not good, the benefits are not worth it. When it’s a question of life or death, and compared with having the rest of my life, following through on what I say, I don’t think I’d do it.

E-20 I really don’t know, it’s kind of a difficult question.  From my point of view, being the sacreligious type person I am…uh, no.  ’Cause that’s not fair to everybody else.  I mean, nobody wants to go to war, and nobody wants to get killed in the line of fire.

E-21 I think Chris can still follow what the government does, and yet be individually opposed to the government, in that he can…not go to war.  Or, go into the army.  I think he has that right, although the government, if every person did this, wouldn’t be able to wage war.

The self-doubt expresses itself in many ways in these and in several other examples. At no point does any of the Americans come down firmly on one side or the other.

The draft scenario is meant to be an extreme, limiting case in the battle between individual will and collective duty. It is hard to imagine a scenario that diminishes the importance of individual will more than this scenario does. Yet, even here, the Americans go to bat for Chris. To me this shows how extreme American individualism can be.

In the U.S., in contrast, people are more willing to consider a broader range of others as potential ingroupers — hence Americans’ famous (and, viewed from some perspectives, cloying, and even insincere) friendliness toward strangers.

One way to represent this would be:

To massively oversimplify: ingroup boundaries in China don’t venture much past circle #2, while American ingroup boundaries might extend all the way out to #5. It’s oversimplified for many reasons. First, the People’s Republic of China as a whole is certainly an ingroup in the context of the world — hence patriotism. Same with the U.S. Second, ingroups can and do crosscut geography: religious, ethnic, and racial groups, for instance. There is just no simple way to accurately depict all the complexities of ingroups and outgroups.

Caveats aside, there really is something to this. And if this is true, then we could make the case that Americans, with their more inclusive group sense, are the true communitarians, while the Chinese are the true individualists.

Lin Yutang, one of the most famous interpreters of China to the West, wrote of this in his most famous book, 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.)

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 is 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.

So, if “the Chinese are a nation of individualists,” what are we to make of the famous distinction between U.S.-as-individualist and China-as-communitarian? Clearly the distinction does not work if it is interpreted too literally or too strictly. Instead, a more nuanced view of what constitutes “groups” in a society will allow us to keep what works about the distinction, without forcing us into inaccurate conclusions.

One surprising logical consequence of these differences is that the classic distinction between “individualism” and “collectivism” gets called into question. This distinction is often listed first in discussions of how China and the U.S. differ. It is usually described something like this:

In the U.S., the main unit of society is the individual. Groups matter less. People are judged more on individual accomplishments and failures than on group accomplishments and failures.

In China, the group is king. Individuals are not free to choose their own actions if these actions interfere with the goals of the group. Individual accomplishments are deliberately muted, as are individual failures, at least in public.

These statements are more or less accurate. The problem is that they are often extended into a more general statement that “groups matter more” in China than they do in the U.S. Which is also true to some extent, except that a lot hinges on what is meant by “the group.”

Vast swaths of the scholarly literature in sociology and social psychology are devoted to the study of how human beings form social groups. One key distinction of the field is “ingroup” versus “outgroup.” An ingroup is a group to which members feel loyalty due to a sense of shared identity, such as an ethnic, racial or religious group. Outgroups are members of groups other than the ingroup. A classic example from American high school life would be the “jocks”: a group of people who share an identity as athletes, and a particularly high social standing. For any given jock, the other jocks are members of his ingroup; for non-jocks, the jocks are in an outgroup. Various other ingroup/outgroup divides characterize much of U.S. high school life: band members, “dirtheads”, nerds, and so on.

Within an ingroup, the shared sense of identity creates a sense of shared group interests. This, in turn, generates trust. If one of the ingroup members feels threatened by someone from an outgroup, it is the job of other ingroup members to protect the threatened member.

There is no single “ingroup,” of course, as people travel in many social circles, and degree of closeness can vary significantly. Relative to a group of classmates, one’s family could be an ingroup; relative to the school population as a whole, one’s classmates could be an ingroup. Concentric circles are often used to represent this aspect of ingroup–outgroup relations.

One of the key differences between Chinese and U.S. culture is where ingroup boundaries get drawn in society as a whole. The rule of thumb is that Chinese culture involves narrower group boundaries: ingroups are very small, perhaps consisting only of a person and her immediate family. Everyone else is an outgroup member, and is generally treated with a degree of suspicion.

In the U.S., in contrast, people are more willing to consider a broader range of others as potential ingroupers — hence Americans’ famous (and, viewed from some perspectives, cloying, and even insincere) friendliness toward strangers.

More on this in the next post.

I got exactly what I had expected from the Americans: anger in response to both the Surprise Arrest and Tax Hike questions. In the Chinese population, why was the response to Tax Hike so different from the response to Surprise Arrest?

The question shows my American bias. A simple Chinese answer to the question might be: These two questions are completely different. Why would you even expect that there would be similar responses to the two questions?

Here’s why: because in both questions a wrong is perpetrated by someone in power over someone out of power. And because right is right and wrong is wrong, I would be equally angry about both scenarios. And because I would be equally angry, everybody else should be too.

This string of statements has logical and factual flaws and weaknesses that I didn’t see at the time I was beginning my research. What I didn’t think of at the time:

1. What is considered a “wrong” varies a great deal by culture.
2. What is meant by “someone in power” and “someone out of power” can be construed in many different ways.
3. “Right is right and wrong is wrong” is a highly contestable statement.
4. My own angry feelings would be a poor predictor of how other people would feel, even without culture to complicate matters.

#s 1, 2 and 3 turned out to explain the differences between the Chinese and American responses fairly completely. #4 is generally true, but in this case my intuition that “other people” would be angry was not completely false, given how angrily the Americans responded to both scenarios.

Regarding #s 1-3, I am not going to descend into a post-modern spiral of moral relativism here. That said, I do want to put “right” and “wrong” into a cross-cultural context.

In earlier posts I have at times written about universalism and particularism. Universalist cultures tend to believe in timeless truths holding of all situations; particularist cultures are more likely to take into account the specifics of individual situations. This difference can account for most of the puzzling similarities and differences in the Chinese and U.S. responses to the Surprise Arrest and Tax Hike scenarios.

Fundamentally what is at play here are two starkly divergent default ways of viewing the world. From a typical Chinese perspective, life presents itself as a series of problems to be solved. Ideals may exist, but they are secondary to whatever is the most immediate need. I think of it as a kind of triage: life throws so much at us that we can’t possibly address everything, so let’s figure out what’s really at stake, and put our energies where they are best used. This requires a mastery of detail: if I don’t understand exactly how situations differ, how can I possibly decide which of them are worthy of my time and effort?

In short, life is a series of particular events with particular actors whose actions cause particular consequences for particular people. I can’t be asked to evaluate a scenario unless I know the…particulars.

For Americans, the calculus is different. Americans tend to be more interested in abstractions, and are more willing to engage in abstract discussions, because Americans are fundamentally interested in what is universal, on what unites across difference. The reasons for this are often debated, and range from hard-core “materialist” approaches that view America’s physical environment, especially its abundant land and other resources, as the fundamental determinant, to more nuanced approaches that factor in what the American mindset inherited from European antecedents. (It turns out, for instance, that the Swiss are even more universalist than the Americans.)

Regardless, those who subscribe to the universalist world view will approach the scenarios in a radically different way from how the Chinese do. Instead of richly specific scenarios, Americans see roles, such as perpetrator and victim. Who actually instantiates the roles is of secondary importance; what matters more is that a wrong was committed, and when a wrong is committed, there must be some form of redress.

So let’s pan out and look at Surprise Arrest and Tax hike through these two different lenses. An American will likely see the scenarios as follows:

• Surprise Arrest describes a powerful perpetrator committing a wrong against a powerless victim. The power asymmetry combines with the actual harm to the victim to generate anger, along with calls for strong counter-action.
• Tax Hike describes a powerful perpetrator committing a wrong against a powerless victim. The power asymmetry combines with the actual harm to the victim to generate anger, along with calls for strong counter-action.

When seen through the role-based universalist lens, it’s no surprise that the two scenarios seem essentially identical.

From a Chinese perspective, the scenarios look like this:

• Surprise Arrest describes a specific individual (policeman) committing specific, immediate and tangible harm (physical restraint, deprivation of information) to someone (the arrestee) who has done nothing to deserve this treatment, and whose life is immediately affected in specific ways. Redress by the victim toward the policeman is a logical consequence.
• Tax Hike describes an amorphous and distant group of people (“the government”) taking a somewhat abstract action (passing a law) which will probably harm an amorphous and mostly distant group of people (“society”). The action might harm me or someone I know at some later stage, but it’s not at all clear how severe the harm will be. And besides, no immediate, or even long-term, actions present themselves for the taking: how can “society” punish “the government”?

It’s not that the government’s actions aren’t wrong. The Chinese participants made it clear that they thought it was wrong. Viewed, however, through the particularist lens and its triage approach, Surprise Arrest is bound to draw a lot more ire than Tax Hike. There is potentially much more bang for one’s precious problem-solving buck in redressing the Surprise Arrest scenario than in redressing the Tax Hike scenario.

So, the universalism/particularism split solves the biggest piece of the mystery. But it’s not the whole story.

The government passes a law doubling the income tax without consulting the citizens. Is the government right to do this? What would citizens say? What would they do? What should they do?

For the Surprise Arrest scenario discussed in the last post, the Chinese responses were, to me, shockingly severe. This caused me to question some preconceived notions of mine. In the case of the Tax Hike scenario, however, my expectations were met: in general the Americans reacted much more strongly (again, the same coding system — C for Chinese, E for English):

E-19     What would the citizens say?

E-20     They’d be very pissed off. Like, really pissed.

E-13     “What would they do?” They would probably rebel…

E-14     Yeah, violently maybe.

E-13     Yeah, mobs.  I can totally imagine that.

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E-21     The citizens’ response to this would be to somehow combat the government.E-22     Anarchy.

E-21     Anarchy. [laughter] Um, maybe not anarchy, but maybe to not pay the income tax would be one way.

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E-24     So I think they would definitely speak out.  They would form rallies and protest.E-23     Yeah, I agree that would happen.

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E-26     There’d be rioting.
E-25     Major backlash, yeah.E-26     Yeah, I mean if they did something that huge…

E-25     You would get failure to comply, distrust of government, people would be voted out, or forced out by the media, or by just the general public.

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E-19     Should they work like within the laws already set down by the government, or should they do their own thing?E-20     Well, I don’t know, if the government doubled their income tax without consulting the citizens first, I think there’s something wrong with the government. Anarchy, anarchy! That’s exactly what’s gonna happen.

Contrast this with the Chinese responses:

C-21    Just doubling the income tax wouldn’t cause much anger.  But society in general would oppose this if there are many, many problems in society, and if everyone is extremely dissatisfied. Then they may actively stand up and oppose it.  But if everything else is good, and it’s just the doubling of the tax, there won’t be a very big reaction.

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C-10    I think the reaction…of course people will have opinions, but also might leave the matter unresolved.  But they will complain.C-11    Yes, I think this is how it is.  There won’t be too big a reaction to this problem…. Many places of work, with regard to this matter, they will take all sorts of measures to sidestep it, I think.  So there would be a reaction.  As for actions, I imagine there aren’t any actions to take. How to you think the people should respond to this situation?

C-10    There’s nothing to be done.

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C-19    The people would complain.C-18    They would complain, but only in the moment. There wouldn’t be people hitting the streets to resist, or marching and demonstrating.…That is, if people can keep living in a relatively comfortable and stable environment, no one will we willing to hit the streets, hold up a sign, demonstrate, march, and so on.  “What sort of actions would they take?”  I think there would be people publicizing their opinions in the media or in public places, saying they think this method, this method of doubling the income tax is extremely wrong.  What specific actions…I think there wouldn’t be anyone doing anything too extreme.

My own experience of hearing these responses, interview after interview, was one of growing confusion. I got exactly what I had expected from the Americans: anger in response to both the Surprise Arrest and Tax Hike questions. In the Chinese population, why was the response to Tax Hike so different from the response to Surprise Arrest?

Any ideas? Obviously I have a lot to say about it, and will in the next post.