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.

Critique #1: (a) This abstract mindset stuff can’t possibly account for the dirty details of everyday business — (b) which makes it useless.

On (1a), absolutely. Mindset is one piece of a huge set of puzzles and challenges that have to be addressed in running a successful business anywhere in the world. Three brief blog posts are simply by necessity going to be somewhat abstract and vague. (And woe to the company that hires a consultant to write blog posts and do nothing else!) Any serious consulting engagement has to go way beyond mindset and into the organizational and operational nitty-gritty that real businesspeople face every day.

As for (1b), for the best chance at success you need both the abstract and the specific. To the extent that the day-to-day work of running a company can be informed by high-level principles like mindset, it is likely to be more effective. Unless one thinks the findings themselves are inaccurate, which is a separate conversation.

Critique #2: (a) Current political and social circumstances can explain all the relevant mindset differences. (b) Societies change over time (a form of evidence for (2a)).

I can’t do justice here to the volumes of statistically validated social science research that demonstrate the surprising stability of mindsets over time. For cultural issues generally, I’ll refer you to the work of Geert Hofstede and his team. For U.S. and China, pick up any of the 19th-Century works by U.S. missionaries in China (my favorite is Smith’s Chinese Characteristics. Or, better yet, read Lin Yutang’s 1935 classic My Country and My People, and see how well it’s held up over time.

Critique #3: Stereotypes may have some business use.

There’s a terminological distinction in the field of intercultural communication between stereotyping and generalizing. Generalizing is the act of making statements about a group of people, realizing that there is variation within any population. Stereotyping is taking a perceived characteristic of an individual and claiming, on the basis of this, that all people “like this person” share this characteristic (and probably other negative characteristics too). I simply don’t see the business value in this latter act. Generalizing, yes; stereotyping, no.

Critique #4: Don’t be too easy on the Chinese: they could in fact be out to mess you up.

True. No businessperson should act without a duly critical stance toward people with possibly competing interests. What I find disheartening is the certainty with which Westerners often attribute certain behaviors to this or that “Chinese characteristic,” which then often leads to broader, more negative generalizations, and ultimately to an unproductive, and ill-deserved, distrust.

There is no one best window through which to view the Chinese, or anyone. But the more possible windows we allow ourselves, the richer our set of cognitive tools for solving complex problems — intercultural and other.

In China you will be dealing with your own stereotypes of Chinese people. You could either pretend they’re not there and have them sink your business, or you can acknowledge them and re-frame them into more positive ways of thinking. It’s up to you.

Here are 9 common stereotypes you’re likely to have in whole or in part, and ways to re-frame them:

1. The Chinese are out to cheat me.

China has been through a lot of tough history, over thousands of years and even up to very recent times. Chinese people have had to make tough choices in a world of scarcity. This mentality has been passed down through the generations. No Chinese does anything a Westerner wouldn’t do if fighting for survival.

The upshot: Cross your T’s and dot your I’s. Be prudent, not paranoid.

2. The Chinese think they’re superior.

The Chinese are legitimately proud of their amazing cultural accomplishments. Think of the food, the monuments, the language, and on and on. Chinese give respect where it’s due: to Westerners for their advanced technology and social institutions, and to themselves for what they’ve done.

The upshot: Allow yourself to admire what there is to admire, while keeping your cool.

3. The Chinese lie.

People from every culture lie. What Westerners call “lying” in China is often just a more subtle form of communication than we’re used to. China is what’s known as a “high context” culture: information is assumed to be in the background — the context. The more you learn about the assumed context, the better you’ll get at seeing the meaning behind the words.

The upshot: Get trained on Chinese communication style. Learn as much as you can about the Chinese mindset, so that you know what background assumptions people bring to the conversation.

4. The Chinese go back on their word.

Shaped for millennia by a fickle, resource-poor environment rife with natural disasters, the Chinese see the world as constantly in flux. Circumstances change, and it’s foolish to set a plan in stone now for an imagined future, when it might not be a fit for the actual future. It’s best to remain adaptable and flexible.

The upshot: Be ready for your counterparts to ask for changes to contracts. Understand that in China the contract is often seen as the beginning of a relationship, not a fixed definition of reality.

5. The Chinese are always stalling for time.

Like any business counterpart anywhere in the world, the Chinese have strategies for getting what they want. A common one is to use home court to their advantage. It’s easier on the Chinese if things take longer than it is on you.

Upshot: Be ready and set reasonable expectations that things probably aren’t going to happen quickly.

6. The Chinese are stingy.

The Chinese are thrifty. Again, over millennia the Chinese have often had to scrape together meager livings out of a hostile, overcrowded environment. Every resource is precious, and could disappear at a moment’s notice if not carefully guarded.

The upshot: Negotiation is not viewed as a win–win proposition. Be thrifty with your resources too, and meet the Chinese on their own zero-sum terms.

7. The Chinese don’t care about quality.

Everyone cares about quality. But when it comes to priorities, sometimes it’s more important to the Chinese to save some resources than to make something that fits Westerners’ high standards. See above about precious resources.

The upshot: Be fastidious and unrelenting in your QC. Get feet on the street and keep them there.

8. The Chinese don’t care about their environment.

The world of the average Chinese person is relatively small. People are focused — narrowly, from a prosperous Western perspective — on day-to-day concerns like having enough to eat and a roof over their heads. It might be nice to have a cleaner environment, but for many Chinese that’s a luxury.

The upshot: Instead of complaining about the awful air, imagine what it would be like if you didn’t get to leave it in a week or two.

9. The Chinese hate Westerners.

In fact Westerners are much admired in China. What Westerners perceive as “hatred” is usually more a vague sense of suspicion. Like everything else, this results from the thought habits of the past, especially the past century and a half, which saw Westerners exploit and mistreat China. All this means is that you have to earn their trust.

The upshot: Behave in a way that is worthy of trust, and trust will come. With time.

Categories can be useful. Reasoned, informed judgment can be useful. Stereotypes have zero business value. Get savvy about your own stereotypes and re-frame them. Not only will you feel better and get along better, but your business will do better.

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