If God is lurking everywhere in the American responses to the Rich Person question, God is nowhere to be seen in the Chinese responses. The concerns of the Chinese respondents are much less complex, and much less fraught, than the American responses. The one overarching theme of the Chinese responses is the same as the [...]

Having just argued that we should be skeptical about characterizing China as collectivist and the U.S. as individualist, I will now do a complete about-face and give a striking example of just how collectivist thinking can be in China, and just how individualist Americans can be. The goal, still, is to shed light on a [...]

Before the China Law Blog posts, I had promised to flesh out the ingroup/outgroup picture I sketched in the first In Crowd post. In that post I questioned the standard descriptions of the U.S. as “individualist” and the Chinese as “collectivist,” pointing toward the distinction between ingroup and outgroup as one possible way to clarify [...]

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 [...]

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are on a mission to make the world a better place. Using their vast fortunes and public visibility, they have launched an effort to get the world’s billionaires to donate more of their wealth to worthy causes. What would happen, some wondered, when they took their effort to China? The [...]

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 [...]

Shifting back to “collectivism” and “individualism,” we turn now to a Western interpreter of China from over a century ago: A.H. Smith, American missionary who spent decades in China, and whose 1896 tome Chinese Characteristics became a classic. In Chapter 13, “The absence of public spirit,” he wrote:

Today we turn to another great interpreter of China, anthropologist Fei Xiaotong. In his Classic From the Soil (乡土中国 Xiāngtǔ Zhōngguó), first published in Chinese in 1947, he writes of the “differential mode of association” in the Chinese cultural mindset. He contrasts this explicitly with a more Western, universalist mode, and ends up sketching the [...]