1. You think the person has your best interests at heart, i.e. has good intentions toward you.
2. You think the person generally says what they believe.
3. You and the person share some set of values and/or objectives that are independent of either of your own personal agendas.

In earlier posts we’ve talked about #1 (intentions) and #2 (truth). Today we’ll talk about #3.

Nandani Lynton, a world-renowned business consultant and China expert, distinguishes between “personal trust” and “formal trust.” Personal trust is what we commonly think of as trust: trust between individual human beings, based on some kind of relationship built over time. Formal trust is based on shared goals and values that stand outside of the personal relationship, and are independent of any individuals who might happen to be part of the group that holds those goals and values. In the West, for instance, it’s easily assumed that a new colleague shares certain goals and values based solely on the fact that she’s an employee at the same company.

Formal trust is a rarity in China. Again we turn to Frank Gallo, who quotes a Chinese business leader:

In China, we are very slow to trust others. Do you know how hard it is to make close friends here? If you did not go to school with the person, you just don’t know them well enough to have strong trust right away. We go out together a lot. We drink together and tell stories about our lives. Sometimes we laugh and sometimes we fight. Over time, we begin to have trust.

Westerners usually will not do this. They want to get right down to business. We have a saying, “Xiān jiāo péngyou hòu zuò shēngyì.” (First make friends then do business.) (先交朋友，后做生意)

— Gao Yong, President, Career International, Inc., Beijing. Quoted in Frank Gallo, Business Leadership in China, Singapore: Wiley (Asia), 2008, p. 91.

It’s safe to say that by default you won’t be trusted by people in China whom you’ve just met. It’s nothing personal. It’s a deep cultural pattern that you’ll have to deal with. The best way to do this is to demonstrate trustworthiness in your actions over time.

Information is treated differently in China. It tends to be closely guarded. If it is shared, sharing generally happens within one’s “in group”: close family, plus colleagues and friends known for a long time. As with so many resources, information tends to be viewed through a lens of scarcity: it won’t be shared unless sharing it has a clear value-add for the person doing the sharing. And it’s not just scarcity: information is often viewed as a weapon, which can be used against people.

And finally, even though “face” is hardly specific to China, concern for courtesy over truth, in order to save face for someone, can mean that the truth isn’t shared in China to the extent it is in the West.

The result for business leaders is that the “truth” can be nigh impossible to discover. Frank Gallo quotes a Chinese leader:

Westerners can be a bit more direct than the Chinese. We tend to keep some of our ideas to ourselves. Therefore, it is sometimes more difficult to understand the true meaning of what a Chinese person says. For 5,000 years, this has been a family-owned and family-run country. Now that it is so much more complicated, people are afraid to say too much to others. Other families might have secrets that they don’t want to share. Very few of us are very direct and open. We have to be careful in our choice of words.

— Gao Yong, President, Career International, Inc., Beijing. Quoted in Frank Gallo, Business Leadership in China, Singapore: Wiley (Asia), 2008, p. 85.

It’s easy for a Western leader to fall into the trap of assuming that colleagues are openly sharing information just as they would in the West. This leader is in big trouble: s/he will be making key decisions based on, at best, insufficient information or, at worst, false information. Leaders need to build solid relationships with colleagues, find intermediaries, and create novel ways of sussing out information. Patience and a healthy skepticism help too.

When we see unfamiliar behaviors, we have even less than usual to go on. We flail around for some sort of theory about what could be causing the behavior. This is a big part of “culture shock”: whole groups of people are behaving strangely — what could they possibly be thinking? The stranger the behavior, the flimsier the basis for our theories. We try to understand the strange behavior based on our own default understandings of what might cause it. This explains my frustration and sense of betrayal at being “lied to”: in my familiar environment, only a certain kind of malicious intent could have generated the “lying” behavior. It was only over time, as I gradually came to understand more about Chinese relationships to “truth,” and my own, American, different ideas about “truth,” that I was able to see non-truth-telling as anything but malicious.

In order to have trust, I have to believe that your words are sincere. Before I got to know Chinese ideas of truth, and therefore of sincerity, I simply wasn’t capable of thinking it was possible that a person could say something that isn’t true and be sincere at the same time. The equation in my mind was simple: saying something untrue = lying; lying = insincerity; insincerity = malice. From one angle the logic is impeccable. The problem is that this is a distinctly American angle; inside the Chinese system we’ve been discussing, it just doesn’t add up.

Take the case from an earlier post where someone tells their dying father he’s going to be fine. In a Chinese context there’s nothing at all insincere or malicious about this. Quite the opposite: it’s a person’s way of showing that they sincerely and compassionately care about their father’s emotional well-being during the final days of his life.

From long and sometimes bitter experience I know how deeply ingrained American notions of truth are. Laying it all out in a blog post is easy; dealing in the moment with our own reactions to being told an untruth is entirely different. It requires an attention and a focus that needs serious practice over time.

Back in 1981, Linda Coleman and Paul Kay, a graduate student and a linguistics professor, wrote a paper about the English word lie (Linda Coleman and Paul Kay, “Prototype Semantics: The English Word Lie,” Language, vol. 57, no. 1, Mar. 1981, pp. 26-44). They were curious about whether some lies are “better” than others, and, if so, what makes one lie more of a lie than another. They realized that there are plenty of cases where a person doesn’t tell the truth, but which we wouldn’t call “lies.” Sometimes we say things that aren’t true because we don’t know they’re false: I might honestly believe that Tom said he’d get here at 8:00, even though he actually said 9:00, and I either misheard him or misremembered. We wouldn’t call that a lie. Same goes for my saying, “I’m so hungry I could eat a wagon wheel”: we wouldn’t call this a lie because I don’t intend to deceive you. The “best” lies should involve all three: the speaker says something false, knows it’s false but says it anyway, and is deliberately deceiving me.

Coleman and Kay ran an experiment, asking native speakers of English to read eight scenarios and evaluate each one for how “good” a lie it was. Sure enough, the “best” lies involved factual falsity, knowledge of falsity, and intent to deceive. The “worst” involved none, and the rest fell in between.

The big surprise in the study was that, when they ran statistics to see which of the three mattered most, factual falsity came in last. The speaker’s belief that something was false, and their intent to deceive, were stronger indicators of “lies” that actual falsity. So much for the idea that a lie is just a “false statement.”

Six years later, in 1987, Eve Sweetser, another linguist, explained Coleman and Kay’s results: factual falsity only matters to people because information is valuable, and because trust matters: for human communication to work, we need to be able to trust that others are generally going to tell us things that they believe are true and that are actually true. (Eve Sweetser, “The definition of lie: an examination of the folk models underlying a semantic prototype,” in Dorothy Holland and Naomi Quinn eds. Cultural Models in Language and Thought, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 43-66)

It’s just not the case that Americans are committed to absolute truth. This makes Americans no different from the Chinese. If we clear out the moralistic overtones — the canard that “we” are truthful and “they” are not — we might become more curious about just what those differences are between how Americans and Chinese relate to “truth,” and we might be less inclined to perpetuate stereotypes.

That’s why I reacted the way I did to the situation I described yesterday. I just couldn’t get my head around the truth being treated so cavalierly.

Over the years I’ve learned more and more about just how culturally relative, and slippery, “truth” is as a concept. It just doesn’t do to say, “The Chinese aren’t honest,” and stop there. It’s understandable that an American might react this way, but it doesn’t even begin to tell the whole story, and it does nothing to further cooperation.

If you’re interested in the most complete and insightful treatment I’ve seen of these questions, I invite you to read Susan Blum’s masterful Lies That Bind: Chinese Truth, Other Truths (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). Blum lists 16 “maxims” used by Chinese in considering how to treat the sharing of information. (For her, “Chinese” means urban Han Chinese — the type most Westerners interact with, especially in business settings) These maxims often compete with “tell the truth,” and include “guard information,” “give and save face,” “take relationships as primary,” and “consider consequences.” (p. 19).

A classic example of this last maxim occurred in a class I taught at Peking University (PKU), which included students from both PKU and Stanford. We were discussing a study of the English word lie, and I asked the students to give an example of a “white lie.” A PKU student offered up telling your terminally ill father that he’s in good health. The Stanford students and I were all stunned. The PKU students were nonplussed. I’d never seen the class so starkly divided along cultural lines.

The student’s point was simply that the consequences of the “truth-telling” must be considered — in this case the emotional state of the father. Telling him the truth would mean all sorts of unpleasant emotions as he moved toward death. Much better to protect him. He’s going to die anyway; might as well have him be at ease. To the PKU students the American insistence on truth-telling was painfully abstract.

I’m an American and as much as I puzzle over this I can’t get past an intellectual understanding of this. In my gut it still doesn’t seem right. I have moments where I get it viscerally, but they pass quickly.

Which is ultimately my point: many of the cultural differences Americans encounter in China hit you in the gut. It’s on you to understand where that reaction comes from, and to deal with it in whatever ways work to keep your focus where it needs to be. I could get away with more as a 23-year-old teacher in Qiqihar than I could as a middle-aged director of a study abroad program. I’m glad I got to climb a gradual learning curve. Most of us don’t have that luxury.

Today we begin a series on truth and trust. The starting point is a something I experienced my first year in China.

It was early spring, 1992. I had been in Qiqihar, in the frozen Northeast (Heilongjiang Province), teaching English since September. Partaking of the local custom of a mid-day nap, I awoke to a knock at the door of my dorm-style “foreign expert” apartment at Qiqihar Light Industry Institute. I was annoyed that they kept knocking. I ignored them and went back to sleep. I awoke again, seemingly a minute later, to find two men in my bedroom — two men I’d never met. They spoke to me in Chinese — an oddity, since everyone I knew at the Institute spoke to me in English. My Chinese wasn’t so good yet, so it took me a while to figure out what they were saying. It turns out they were informing me that my “English Corner” class would not be held that evening because of an “activity.” I was puzzled, but mostly sleepy, and even a bit tickled that I wouldn’t have to prepare.

Once fully awake, though, I went over it again. The whole thing had a sinister feel. I had been through some difficulties with the Institute’s administration throughout the year. (I found out years later that some of the leaders had thought I was a spy.) I decided to show up for my class anyway and see what happened.

I got there a few minutes early. The previous class hadn’t yet let out. Before long I spied a few officials — some of whom I’d met, some of whom just looked vaguely familiar — huddling together, talking in hushed tones, looking at me out of the corners of their eyes. They looked to be scrambling. Whatever plans they had had — surely, my 23-year-old brain thought, some sort of “education” session about the perils of associating with foreigners — might be in jeopardy. Truth on my side, I was the picture of smugness.

My showing up early worked. The officials disbanded and left. English Corner happened as originally scheduled. I was determined to tell the whole truth to my students about what their evil leaders had perpetrated: an elaborate lie, to try to manipulate their naïve minds into…I didn’t even know. Something dark and hopeless, for certain. I expected to be treated as a hero, a liberator, as truth-tellers are meant to be treated.

What I got, rather, was chuckles, mostly — as if I were the naïve one. What’s the big deal? they asked. This kind of thing happens all the time. No problem. Just part of life. Don’t let it bother you.

I thought: How could they? How could they brush off my pure-hearted attempt to save them from abuse at the hands of their leaders? They had lied to me. Did that count for nothing?

My story is extreme. At the same time, something akin to it — dismay at what Americans would call “lying” — happens frequently with Americans in China. We’ll spend the next few posts looking into this.