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 [...]

A fourth dimension of culture used by Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner that impacts Westerners in China — especially Americans — is what they call “ascription” versus “achievement”: All societies give certain of their members higher status than others, signaling that unusual attention should be focused upon such people and their activities. While some societies accord status [...]

While we’re on the subject of Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner’s seven dimensions (in earlier posts we’ve looked at specific/diffuse and universalism/particularism), let’s have a look at another of these dimensions that’s relevant to topics addressed in the blog: internal versus external “locus of control.” In the authors’ words: Societies which conduct business have developed two major [...]

Several weeks ago I introduced the notion of dimensions of culture, and took a look at the system of dimensions devised by Geert Hofstede. Others have devised other systems. One of the most famous of these is the “seven-dimension” system created by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner. Today we’re taking a look at one of [...]

Last week I introduced Francis Hsu’s framework and the notion of “Layer 3.” Readers’ comments on that post reminded me of something I read years ago by Chinese anthropologist Fei Xiaotong. 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 [...]

The Chinese flipside of the radical American individualism I addressed yesterday is sometimes called “collectivism.” It’s a broad cover term that’s used in many different ways. Today we’ll take a look at one anthropologist’s view of Chinese and Western notions of group membership. In 1971, anthropologist Francis Hsu published the intimidatingly titled “Psychosocial Homeostasis and [...]

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 [...]

Today we’re revisiting the topic of contracts versus hétong. There’s rich territory to explore here. I was recently revisiting Lin Yutang’s classic book, My Country and My People, and it spurred some more thinking on this issue. I’ve quoted from the book before: it was Lin Yutang who referred to China as “a nation of individualists” [...]

When doing business in China, sometimes the most “obvious” things can trip us up the worst. In his classic book Beijing Jeep, Jim Mann tells the long tale of American Motors Corporation’s Jeep-building joint venture in Beijing, including many an anecdote with cultural lessons. One such lesson involved Ed Schulze, head of production and maintenance [...]

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 [...]