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.

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 to people on the basis of their achievements, others ascribe it to them by virtue of age, class, gender education, and so on. The first kind of status is called achieved status and the second ascribed status. (Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner, Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business, Second Edition, New York: McGraw Hill, 1998, p. 105. Emphasis in original.)

One of the probes used to get at this difference is the following statement, which participants were asked to answer with a number from 1 (“strongly agree”) to 5 (“strongly disagree”):

The most important thing in life is to act in the ways that best suit the way you really are, even if you do not get things done. (p. 107)

The percentage of participants disagreeing with the statement (i.e., answering 4 or 5) for China is 28, and for the U.S. 75 (p. 108).

Americans are conditioned to evaluate people based on what they accomplish. While race, class, gender, and other social categories matter a lot, as they do everywhere, the expressed ideal that we are all “created equal” carries great cultural weight. “Created equal” means equal opportunity — to get things done.

Americans chafe at the notion that someone would be accorded status based on factors unrelated to accomplishing things. What does it matter that you went to a fancy school, or have a flashy pedigree? Prove to me who you are by showing me what you can get done.

In China, factors such as age, gender, and rank matter much more than they do in the U.S. Hierarchies are more rigid. This causes problems for Americans who either aren’t aware of this, or who stubbornly resist it.

Societies which conduct business have developed two major orientations towards nature. They either believe that they can and should control nature by imposing their will upon it, as in the ancient biblical injunction “multiply and subdue the earth”, or they believe that man is part of nature and must go along with its laws, directions and forces. The first of these orientations we shall describe as inner-directed.…The second [as] outer-directed.… (Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner, Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business, Second Edition, New York: McGraw Hill, 1998, p. 145. Emphasis in original.)

Differences between the U.S. and China show up starkly in responses to the following:

A. What happens to me is my own doing.

B. Sometimes I feel that I do not have enough control over the directions my life is taking.

The percentage of people answering A is 39 for China (second only to Venezuela, at 33) and 82 for the U.S. (fourth highest after Norway (86), Israel (88), and Uruguay (88)). That’s a pretty big difference, and it plays out all across the board when Americans are doing business in China. To take but one major example, see these earlier posts on contracts: it’s hopeless and counterproductive to think we can control the future, which is in essence what a contract seeks to do. This difference also shows up frequently in people’s explanations for why things do or don’t happen.

For instance, one of our children’s caregivers once didn’t show up at a certain place and time to meet our family. Frustrated, I called her to find out what had happened. Her explanation was that “Beijing has a lot of intersections.” How could she be expected to find the right one? Of course my “inner-directed” American brain went nuts, seeing this as merely an excuse, and a lousy one at that.

The problem for the American in China is that our inner-directedness is just one particular way of thinking of things. Be ready for explanations that seem odd, even maddening. Using words like “unaccountable” or “irresponsible” will get you nowhere. Showing anger will only set you back. Instead, work hard to see an outer-directed orientation as a legitimate way of viewing the world, on equal footing with yours.

There are no quick and easy prescriptions here. One thing is certain, though: your chances of success will be much greater if you’re ready for this than if you’re not.

The dimension is called “specific” versus “diffuse,” with Americans toward the “specific” side and Chinese toward the “diffuse” side. The metaphor of a peach versus a coconut helps explain the dimension.

Think of a peach. Its soft flesh makes it easy to cut into and to separate into “specific” areas. This is meant to capture two things. First, that it’s easy to make entry into the life of someone from a “specific” culture — though not too deeply, as you’ll soon run into the pit. Second, that people from “specific” cultures tend to have many distinct groups of people that they do different things with, with some but overall little overlap: your golf buddies, the people you work with, etc. Americans, as “specific” people, thus end up having relatively superficial relationships with a large number of people — just as Francis Hsu and Fei Xiaotong noted about America.

The “diffuse” coconut is hard to crack. Once you’re in, though, you’re in everywhere. Diffuse cultures tend to mix business and personal. If you’re in my in-group, you’re in my in-group, period, regardless whether the relationship began as a work relationship or as a personal relationship. Relationships are hard to get going, but once they’re going, they go deep — just as Francis Hsu and Fei Xiaotong noted about China.

If you’re an American in China, and if you’re not prepared for these differences, you’re liable to make serious missteps. The divide between “business” and “personal” that we like to keep hermetic in the U.S. is much more porous in China. You will find yourself being invited to social functions that might not seem appropriate for business. Remembering that China is “diffuse,” and that your Americanness has trained you to be “specific,” can help you overcome your automatic resistance to such affairs, and help you succeed in China.

As with any of these dimensions, we shouldn’t take them too seriously by themselves. They’re best thought of as useful guidelines that capture high-level differences among cultures.

Not only do the Chinese feel no interest in that which belongs to the “public,” but all such property, if unprotected and available, is a mark for theft. Paving-stones are carried off for private use, and square rods of the brick facing to city walls gradually disappear. A wall enclosing a foreign cemetery in one of the ports of China was carried away till not a brick remained, as soon as it was discovered that the place was in charge of no one in particular. It is not many years since an extraordinary sensation was caused in the Imperial palace in Peking by the discovery that extensive robberies had been committed on the copper roofs of some of the buildings within the forbidden city. (Arthur H. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1896, p. 111)

What could be more “collective” than “the public”? What could be more “individualist” than neglecting “the public” in favor of “the self”? The complexity of culture can boggle the mind. We just need to be sure we minimize the bad decisions we make as a result.

A society with a differential mode of association is composed of webs woven out of countless personal relationships. To each knot in these webs is attached a specific ethical principle. For this reason, the traditional moral system was incapable of producing a comprehensive moral concept.…

The degree to which Chinese ethics and laws expand and contract depends on a particular context and how one fits into that context. I have heard quite a few friends denounce corruption, but when their own fathers stole from the public, they not only did not denounce them but even covered up the theft. Moreover, some went so far as to ask their fathers for some of the money made off the graft, even while denouncing corruption in others. When they themselves become corrupt, they can still find comfort in their “capabilities.” In a society characterized by a differential mode of association, this kind of thinking is not contradictory. In such a society, general standards have no utility. The first thing to do is to understand the specific context: Who is the important figure, and what kind of relationship is appropriate with that figure? Only then can one decide the ethical standards to be applied in that context. (From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society: A translation of Fei Xiaotong’s Xiangtu Zhongguo, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, pp. 78-9. Translated by Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng.)

Westerners in China will fail if you adhere rigidly to your universalist moral standards. If you can’t complexify how you relate to ethics, China is not for you. This emphatically does not mean that you must “sell your soul” or do anything you find repugnant. But it is true that you must consciously and consistently be willing to question many of your most deeply held beliefs, and walk a very fine line between remaining 100% “true to yourself” and doing things you might regret. There are no easy answers. But a bone-deep commitment to success will go a long way toward revealing that fine line and helping you walk it.

Today, a bit more building on last week’s discussion of “individualism.” This time not my thoughts, but those of Lin Yutang, one of the most famous interpreters of China to the West.

His most famous book in the West is 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)

To me this rings a lot of bells around Chinese responses to the “fallen tree” question: it’s not about “right” and “wrong”; it’s about getting my truck where it needs to go. And with the “rich person” question, recall for a moment the interviewees who commented that the question is too general, and that we can only ask what you would do with your money. Lin Yutang writes: “To a Chinese, social work always looks like ‘meddling with other people’s business.’” (p. 171)

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’s 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.

For your own China explorations, thinking of China as “collectivist” and the West as “individualist” is helpful, as far as it goes. Maximizing your success in China requires that you go further. The more you’re able to nuance your view of the Chinese cultural mindset, and how it relates to the U.S. and the West, the better off you’ll be.

In their own words:

Universalist, or rule-based, behavior tends to be abstract. Try crossing the street when the light is red in a very rule-based society like Switzerland or Germany. Even if there is no traffic, you will still be frowned at.…There is a fear that once you start to make exceptions for illegal conduct the system will collapse.

Particularist judgments focus on the exceptional nature of present circumstances. The person is not “a citizen” but my friend, brother, husband, child or person of unique importance to me, with special claims on my love or my hatred. I must therefore sustain, protect or discount this person no matter what the rules say.

Business people from both societies will tend to think each other corrupt. A universalist will say of particularists, “they cannot be trusted because they will always help their friends” and a particularist, conversely, will say of universalist, “you cannot trust them; they would not even help a friend.” (taken from Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner, Riding the Waves of Culture, 2^nd Edition, 1998, pp. 31-32.)

In a survey distributed to tens of thousands of managers worldwide, the following question was asked, in order to probe this distinction (from pp. 33-34):

You are riding in a car driven by a close friend. He hits a pedestrian. You know he was going at least 35 miles per hour in an area of the city where the maximum allowed speed is 20 miles per hour. There are no witnesses. His lawyer says that if you testify under oath that he was only driving 20 miles per hour it may save him from serious consequences.

What right has your friend to expect you to protect him?

1a            My friend has a definite right as a friend to expect me to testify to the lower figure.

1b            He has some right as a friend to expect me to testify to the lower figure.

1c            He has no right as a friend to expect me to testify to the lower figure.

What do you think you would do in view of the obligations of a sworn witness and the obligation to your friend?

1d            Testify that he was going 20 miles an hour.

1e            Not testify that he was going 20 miles an hour.

It’s a tough question. The title of this post is taken from the title of another book by Trompenaars. People from particularist cultures have asked if the pedestrian died, in order to help them think through their response — though it’s hard for a hardcore universalist to see why it would matter.

Responses to the scenario were aggregated from national cultures the world over, with 100 representing 100% of respondents from that culture choosing c or b + e. In other words, the higher the number, the more universalist. China comes in at 47, the U.S. at 93. Of the 31 cultures listed, only four are more particularist than China (Venezuela, Nepal, South Korea, Russia), and only one (Switzerland) is more universalist than the U.S.

With the usual caveats about too-broad brush strokes, this is a stark finding. It sets a rich and fraught stage for Chinese and Americans to do business together. It fits in well with many of my research findings, discussed in previous posts (look under the Cultural Models category), as well as with observations I’ve made earlier about contracts/hétong. It touches so many aspects of the differences between American and Chinese cultural mindsets that it’s hard to overstate its significance.

And it’s in an area where nerves can be raw: deeply-held beliefs about loyalty and principle. This is where our leadership will be most direly tested, and where we need to be most on guard for our automatic reactions winning the day. Definitely time to breathe deeply, detach, and refocus on why you’re in China in the first place.

Recall the following from the “rich person” discussion, said by Chinese participants:

C      How should he use his money,” “should”, this word, maybe I’m a little bit…uncomfortable.…“Should” has a bit of a feeling of morals, or preaching.

D      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      Right.

C         “应该怎么样用他的钱,” “应该” 这两个字我可能有一点…不舒服。”应该” 还有一点道德, 说教的感觉。

D     我们应该让每个人自己选择…应该去怎么用…不是“应该”…让每个人自己选择去用他的钱。  我们只能说如果我有钱的话我会怎么办。

C     对。

And:

E      This, I think…this question is different for each person.  Your saving or spending money depends on your own worldview, on the direction of your ideas about value.

F      I think this question should ask, “If you were rich, how should you spend your money?”

E      Yes.  In reality you’re just expressing your own view, right, about how you should use this sum of money.

F      It should be asked this way.

E     这个我觉得…这个问题就是因人而异的。  你这个钱的省花, 取决于你这个人的一种世界观啊, 价值意识的指向。

F     我觉得这个问题应该问, “如果你很有钱, 你应该怎么样用你的钱?”

E     对。  实际上你就是表达你自己的看法嘛, 应该怎么样去使用这笔钱。

F     这样问。

Here’s my question to you: In their responses to this scenario, between the Americans and the Chinese, who would you say is more individualistic? To me the answer is clear: the Chinese are hands down the individualists here.

How could this be? Especially for these two cultures, which are often presented as opposites based on the U.S. being “individualist” and China being “collectivist.”

No neat answers here. Instead, a healthy reminder that our generalizations and simplifications can come back to bite us when we least expect. And also a reminder that, as I discussed last Friday, there’s plenty about each culture contained in the other. There’s nothing inherently American or Western about “individualism,” and nothing inherently Chinese or Asian about “collectivism.” We can all comprehend both, and will call on some version of one or the other at different times.