Today, esteemed colleague and China Law guru Dan Harris posted the first of three guest posts by me on his multiple-award-winning China Law Blog. Please check it out, as he gives a nice introduction. For archival purposes, I’m putting the post here as well. Imagine for a moment that you’re going to set up a [...]

Besides universalism versus particularism, discussed in the last post, another angle from which to view the differences between the American and Chinese responses is “rule-based” versus “relationship-based” cultures. In the U.S., rules rule: as we have seen in the pedestrian scenario and in the discussion of the interview scenarios, Americans are much more likely than [...]

In the last two posts I’ve summarized similarities and differences between how Chinese and American interviewees responded to scenarios about a surprise arrest and a tax hike. I ended the last post with this: I got exactly what I had expected from the Americans: anger in response to both the Surprise Arrest and Tax Hike [...]

In today’s second consecutive tongue-in-cheekily titled post, we take a look at a different scenario from the one discussed in the last post: 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? [...]

In a post from last year, I touched briefly on some results from my research having to do with a hypothetical scenario. Today we take a deeper dive. The scenario: Suppose a citizen is walking down the street one day when the police arrest him.  They don’t tell him why; they simply arrest him and [...]

Building on the last post about the primacy of money in the Chinese mindset, today we take a look at how this stacks up with a contrasting view from the U.S. This post picks up exactly where the last one left off, just after Carolyn Blackman has described the elaborate, theatrical negotiations she observed in [...]

Elaborating here on the theme from the last book post: the scarcity of money in the Chinese mindset. I ended that last book post by contrasting the default Chinese view with a different, American view of scarcity: the opportunity to use one’s talents in the most fulfilling way possible. In this post we delve more [...]

In this book post, the first in a while, we delve into a world quite the opposite of the ethereal “God” world of the last book post — though we return to this world toward the end. A starkly different picture is painted by the Chinese data. This matter-of-fact statement encapsulates the essence of the [...]

So much more to say about the trip, but for now back to the book. In the last “book” post, I introduced “cultural models” in the context of a discussion about whether a hypothetical “Tom” should join a rock band or go to college. Here we’ll look at some actual linguistic data. An excerpt from [...]

Four years ago, while still living in Beijing, I began writing a book about my family’s experiences driving the Mazda around Beijing with California license plates for two and a half years without being pulled over. I have recently taken the project back up. In this blog over the coming months I’ll be posting pieces [...]