Fei, whom we heard from once before, spent academic year 1943-44 in the United States, during the closing phase of World War II. He observed that America is a “land without ghosts,” which became the title of a collection of essays by Chinese visitors to the U.S. (Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present, ed. R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989). His own childhood, filled with ghosts, stood in stark contrast to ghostless America. He wrote:

How could a ghost gain a foothold in American cities? People move about like the tide, unable to form permanent ties with places, to say nothing of other people.…

Outside the family there is certainly much social intercourse, but dealings with people are always in terms of appointments. On my office desk is an appointment calendar marked in fifteen-minute intervals with a space for a person’s name beside each. Apart from business there are various kinds of gatherings, but if you go to one you will find it is no more than social pleasantries: a few words with this person, a few words with that one — it is hard even to remember their names. I cannot say all Americans pass their lives like this. But I once asked a fairly close acquaintance how many friends he had whom he could drop in on at any time without a previous engagement. Counting on his fingers, he did not fill one hand.…

…[Americans'] movements are so easy and they have contacts with so many people, that there seldom comes about the kind of relationship I had with my grandmother, living interdependently for a long time, repeating the same scenes, so that these scenes came to seem an inalterable natural order. Always being on the move dilutes the ties between people and dissolves the ghosts.…

In a world without ghosts, life is free and easy. American eyes can gaze straight ahead. But still I think they lack something and I do not envy their lives. (pp. 179-181)

If we combine this with the notion, from last Friday’s post, that culture goes extremely deep within us, we get a picture of Americans as thoroughly conditioned to form a certain kind of fleeting relationship with a great many individuals over a lifetime. We will naturally import these habits into our dealings with China, and this gets us into trouble.

In 1971, anthropologist Francis Hsu published the intimidatingly titled “Psychosocial Homeostasis and Jen: Conceptual Tools for Advancing Psychological Anthropology” (American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 73, No. 1, pp. 23-44). In the essay he sketches out a model for understanding differences between the psychologies of Chinese and Westerners.

He uses this image (p. 25) to make his point:

Hsu places special emphasis on Layer 3:

The need for Layer 3 is literally as important as his requirement for food, water and air. This is what basically gives the individual his sense of well being. Sudden loss of inhabitants in Layer 3 may be so traumatic as to lead to aimlessness and to suicide. (p. 29)

Hsu goes on to claim that through the development of intimate family ties, the Chinese have an abundance of Layer 3 companions, leading to “psychosocial homeostasis” — a state of relative stability and contentment.

He contrasts this with Westerners, whom he sees as having few people in their Layer 3. Instead, most Westerners have a relatively rich Layer 1 and Layer 2, and they will recruit people into their Layer 3. The problem is that these relationships are naturally unstable; as a result, Westerners have difficulty populating their Layer 3, leading to a general lack of psychosocial homeostasis. Hsu claims many effects of this, including the Western need to conquer.

While the claims may be a bit grandiose, I’ve found this a useful framework. What I like most about Hsu’s model is that it gives us something more concrete and explanatory than a broad cover term like “collectivism.” It’s not just that “Chinese are group-minded.” It’s more nuanced than that, and Hsu shows us how. The model also seems to explain a number of Chinese behaviors that I found confusing when I first arrived in China. I could never understand why, for instance, nobody seemed to do anything alone. Didn’t they value their personal time? And why wouldn’t they leave me alone when I was shooting baskets late in the evening? I deduced that for the Chinese, “alone” meant “lonely.”

In the intervening years I’ve gained much more appreciation for the Chinese love of company. When in China I’m still pulled at times by my automatic American hermiting instincts. But when I can push through those, the rewards of the human connection are great and enduring. This is a lesson for all of us from the West who have business in China.

]]> http://www.jasonpatent.com/2009/09/17/ph-balance/feed/ 6 http://www.jasonpatent.com/2009/09/16/now-thats-what-i-call-individualism/ http://www.jasonpatent.com/2009/09/16/now-thats-what-i-call-individualism/#comments Thu, 17 Sep 2009 01:25:10 +0000 Jason Patent http://www.jasonpatent.com/?p=799 On an email list I subscribe to, we’ve been discussing stereotypes, and how Americans often conflate “generalization” with “stereotype,” leading to a reluctance to talk about groups at all, for fear of dishonoring individuality. Back when I was designing a research project several years ago, I wanted to look into differing ways Chinese and Americans had of thinking and talking about racial categories. Given my experience in China of people freely sharing their opinions about the traits of China’s ethnic groups, I felt free to ask whatever I wanted. So I created a question in Chinese. Back-translated into English, it goes:

China is a multi-ethnic country, consisting of Han, Mongolian, Hui, Tibetan, and many other ethnic minorities. Do you believe that the abilities and natures of all ethnic groups are the same?

中国是一个多民族国家,象汉,蒙,回,藏,以及各个少数民族。你觉得每个民族的能力和天性都一样吗?

As I expected, these (highly educated) natives of China dove right into China’s different ethnic groups and all the stereotypes that are commonly held about the groups.

With the Americans I felt the need for kid gloves. It’s just not okay to be explicit about racial stereotypes in the U.S., or even to admit their existence — especially on a college campus. So instead of translating the Chinese question into English, I came up with a new, very different question in English:

There are stereotypes about certain ethnic groups in the United States. Some claim, for instance, that because few African Americans play volleyball, that this says something about abilities possessed by certain ethnic groups. Is there any truth to such stereotypes?

It’s almost painful to read. It feels like I’m literally walking on eggshells, carrying a tray of the finest crystal champagne glasses filled to the rim with Dom Pérignon. And sure enough, even with this ginger wording, the Americans were halting and hesitant in their discussions. For example:

A: Each person has talents that they can contribute to a body.

B: Right. More of an individualist…instead of having a broad label of being a part of a certain ethnic group, it’s more that each person brings a certain set of skills or interests to the table.

A: Yeah, and that each one is unique, not that we have to include everyone in every particular aspect of life, because that’s not where each individual person fits.

B: The way to look at it would be, you know, to basically, to break away this whole concept of the ethnic group. You’d have to look at people as having their own separate sense of values, or each individual as having a sense of special value, or interests. Everyone’s different in that sense, yeah.

I’ve written plenty about individualism, and I’ve called into question the sacred cow that Americans are “individualist” and Chinese are “collectivist.” Here, though, I think there’s a lot of validity to the claim that Americans are “individualist.” It’s meant in a very specific sense: the American belief — faith, really — that each human being has something unique to contribute to the world, and that this uniqueness must be honored (see also earlier posts on dreams). This sense of individualism is so strong that, as we can see from the excerpt, even the notion of group membership can be deemed offensive.

Now, there are all sorts of issues that come up as far as the eggshells go, and the equating of “stereotype” with “generalization.” That’s worth addressing another time.

]]> http://www.jasonpatent.com/2009/09/16/now-thats-what-i-call-individualism/feed/ 0 http://www.jasonpatent.com/2009/08/25/still-dreamin/ http://www.jasonpatent.com/2009/08/25/still-dreamin/#comments Tue, 25 Aug 2009 04:10:20 +0000 Jason Patent http://www.jasonpatent.com/?p=454 Dreams are, as I claimed near the end of last Friday’s post, alive and well in China. If we needed any more evidence that dreams hold appeal in China as they do in the U.S., we’ve got some. First, this piece from Time, about lawyer Xu Zhiyong, who was arrested under false-seeming pretenses, and has just recently been released.

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.

In their own words:

Universalist, or rule-based, behavior tends to be abstract. Try crossing the street when the light is red in a very rule-based society like Switzerland or Germany. Even if there is no traffic, you will still be frowned at.…There is a fear that once you start to make exceptions for illegal conduct the system will collapse.

Particularist judgments focus on the exceptional nature of present circumstances. The person is not “a citizen” but my friend, brother, husband, child or person of unique importance to me, with special claims on my love or my hatred. I must therefore sustain, protect or discount this person no matter what the rules say.

Business people from both societies will tend to think each other corrupt. A universalist will say of particularists, “they cannot be trusted because they will always help their friends” and a particularist, conversely, will say of universalist, “you cannot trust them; they would not even help a friend.” (taken from Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner, Riding the Waves of Culture, 2^nd Edition, 1998, pp. 31-32.

In a survey distributed to tens of thousands of managers worldwide, the following question was asked, in order to probe this distinction (from pp. 33-34):

You are riding in a car driven by a close friend. He hits a pedestrian. You know he was going at least 35 miles per hour in an area of the city where the maximum allowed speed is 20 miles per hour. There are no witnesses. His lawyer says that if you testify under oath that he was only driving 20 miles per hour it may save him from serious consequences.

What right has your friend to expect you to protect him?

1a            My friend has a definite right as a friend to expect me to testify to the lower figure.

1b            He has some right as a friend to expect me to testify to the lower figure.

1c            He has no right as a friend to expect me to testify to the lower figure.

What do you think you would do in view of the obligations of a sworn witness and the obligation to your friend?

1d            Testify that he was going 20 miles an hour.

1e            Not testify that he was going 20 miles an hour.

It’s a tough question. The title of this post is taken from the title of another book by Trompenaars. People from particularist cultures have asked if the pedestrian died, in order to help them think through their response — though it’s hard for a hardcore universalist to see why it would matter.

Responses to the scenario were aggregated from national cultures the world over, with 100 representing 100% of respondents from that culture choosing c or b + e. In other words, the higher the number, the more universalist. China comes in at 47, the U.S. at 93. Of the 31 cultures listed, only four are more particularist than China (Venezuela, Nepal, South Korea, Russia), and only one (Switzerland) is more universalist than the U.S.

With the usual caveats about too-broad brush strokes, this is a stark finding. It sets a rich and fraught stage for Chinese and Americans to do business together. It fits in well with many of my research findings, discussed in previous posts (look under the Cultural Models category), as well as with observations I’ve made earlier about contracts/hétong. It touches so many aspects of the differences between American and Chinese cultural mindsets that it’s hard to overstate its significance.

And it’s in an area where nerves can be raw: deeply-held beliefs about loyalty and principle. This is where our leadership will be most direly tested, and where we need to be most on guard for our automatic reactions winning the day. Definitely time to breathe deeply, detach, and refocus on why you’re in China in the first place.

Recall the following from the “rich person” discussion, said by Chinese participants:

C      How should he use his money,” “should”, this word, maybe I’m a little bit…uncomfortable.…“Should” has a bit of a feeling of morals, or preaching.

D      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      Right.

C         “应该怎么样用他的钱,” “应该” 这两个字我可能有一点…不舒服。”应该” 还有一点道德, 说教的感觉。

D     我们应该让每个人自己选择…应该去怎么用…不是“应该”…让每个人自己选择去用他的钱。  我们只能说如果我有钱的话我会怎么办。

C     对。

And:

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

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

E      Yes.  In reality you’re just expressing your own view, right, about how you should use this sum of money.

F      It should be asked this way.

E     这个我觉得…这个问题就是因人而异的。  你这个钱的省花, 取决于你这个人的一种世界观啊, 价值意识的指向。

F     我觉得这个问题应该问, “如果你很有钱, 你应该怎么样用你的钱?”

E     对。  实际上你就是表达你自己的看法嘛, 应该怎么样去使用这笔钱。

F     这样问。

Here’s my question to you: In their responses to this scenario, between the Americans and the Chinese, who would you say is more individualistic? To me the answer is clear: the Chinese are hands down the individualists here.

How could this be? Especially for these two cultures, which are often presented as opposites based on the U.S. being “individualist” and China being “collectivist.”

No neat answers here. Instead, a healthy reminder that our generalizations and simplifications can come back to bite us when we least expect. And also a reminder that, as I discussed last Friday, there’s plenty about each culture contained in the other. There’s nothing inherently American or Western about “individualism,” and nothing inherently Chinese or Asian about “collectivism.” We can all comprehend both, and will call on some version of one or the other at different times.

Another of the interview questions I asked in my research was:

If a person is rich, what should he/she do with his/her money?

如果一个人很有钱,他应该怎么用他的钱?

As with the fallen tree question, the Chinese respondents hold to a very practical line: invest the money, because money makes money (钱生钱). The Americans, however, agonize over the question. They seem to feel intuitively that the “right” thing to do would be to give away a lot of the money. At the same time, they are troubled by the gap between ideal and real:

A      And you should give to people who don’t have much because they can’t…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 society.

B      I agree.

A      Do something, make a foundation, you know, I mean, you know like a charity.

B      Just put it where it’s needed.

A      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.

B      Yeah.

A      It’d be…it’s easy to say…

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

More than anything, what the Americans find troubling is hypocrisy: Saying one thing, doing something else. Not practicing what we preach. This is a function of the “universalist” aspect of American culture: Americans are inclined to judge a broad range of situations according to a fixed, static, set of criteria. In contrast, Chinese culture is “particularist”: specific situations, in all their complexity, tend to be privileged over abstract, universal principles.

The Chinese distaste for this kind of abstraction shows up in two responses. First:

C      How should he use his money,” “should”, this word, maybe I’m a little bit…uncomfortable.…“Should” has a bit of a feeling of morals, or preaching.

D      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      Right.

C         “应该怎么样用他的钱,” “应该” 这两个字我可能有一点…不舒服。”应该” 还有一点道德, 说教的感觉。

D     我们应该让每个人自己选择…应该去怎么用…不是“应该”…让每个人自己选择去用他的钱。  我们只能说如果我有钱的话我会怎么办。

C     对。

Another pair of interviewees goes as far as to suggest that a different question should have been asked:

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

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

E      Yes.  In reality you’re just expressing your own view, right, about how you should use this sum of money.

F      It should be asked this way.

E     这个我觉得…这个问题就是因人而异的。  你这个钱的省花, 取决于你这个人的一种世界观啊, 价值意识的指向。

F     我觉得这个问题应该问, “如果你很有钱, 你应该怎么样用你的钱?”

E     对。  实际上你就是表达你自己的看法嘛, 应该怎么样去使用这笔钱。

F     这样问。

To put a harsh-sounding spin on it, we could say: What Americans do is pass judgment. We do so because we’re conditioned to judge based on how closely actual behaviors match up to a universal moral code. And lest I pass judgment on passing judgment, I’ll state again, as I’ve stated before, that in my own (very American) opinion, this has been, in the right contexts, one of the greatest gifts American culture specifically, and Western culture generally, has brought to the world.

You can see, though, what a mismatch a stubbornly universalist approach can be in the nitty-gritty, messy, detail-oriented context of Chinese culture. From one possible Chinese standpoint, Americans are hopelessly naïve: how could you hope to take one set of principles and apply them everywhere? Only someone who hasn’t lived in the world could think that way.

This is just one more way in which Westerners can get ourselves into trouble in our China dealings. It takes a special, hard-earned kind of self-awareness and leadership to function well, consistently well, in ways that are so contrary to our deepest, culturally conditioned norms.