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.

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.

One surprising logical consequence of these differences is that the classic distinction between “individualism” and “collectivism” gets called into question. This distinction is often listed first in discussions of how China and the U.S. differ. It is usually described something like this:

In the U.S., the main unit of society is the individual. Groups matter less. People are judged more on individual accomplishments and failures than on group accomplishments and failures.

In China, the group is king. Individuals are not free to choose their own actions if these actions interfere with the goals of the group. Individual accomplishments are deliberately muted, as are individual failures, at least in public.

These statements are more or less accurate. The problem is that they are often extended into a more general statement that “groups matter more” in China than they do in the U.S. Which is also true to some extent, except that a lot hinges on what is meant by “the group.”

Vast swaths of the scholarly literature in sociology and social psychology are devoted to the study of how human beings form social groups. One key distinction of the field is “ingroup” versus “outgroup.” An ingroup is a group to which members feel loyalty due to a sense of shared identity, such as an ethnic, racial or religious group. Outgroups are members of groups other than the ingroup. A classic example from American high school life would be the “jocks”: a group of people who share an identity as athletes, and a particularly high social standing. For any given jock, the other jocks are members of his ingroup; for non-jocks, the jocks are in an outgroup. Various other ingroup/outgroup divides characterize much of U.S. high school life: band members, “dirtheads”, nerds, and so on.

Within an ingroup, the shared sense of identity creates a sense of shared group interests. This, in turn, generates trust. If one of the ingroup members feels threatened by someone from an outgroup, it is the job of other ingroup members to protect the threatened member.

There is no single “ingroup,” of course, as people travel in many social circles, and degree of closeness can vary significantly. Relative to a group of classmates, one’s family could be an ingroup; relative to the school population as a whole, one’s classmates could be an ingroup. Concentric circles are often used to represent this aspect of ingroup–outgroup relations.

One of the key differences between Chinese and U.S. culture is where ingroup boundaries get drawn in society as a whole. The rule of thumb is that Chinese culture involves narrower group boundaries: ingroups are very small, perhaps consisting only of a person and her immediate family. Everyone else is an outgroup member, and is generally treated with a degree of suspicion.

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.

More on this in the next post.

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 early returns are in, and they aren’t pretty. This piece in the New York Times tells the tale. The gist is that, in anticipation of a visit to Beijing to promote their effort, the response rate among the Chinese super-rich was lukewarm. 50 people had been invited, and while there is no verifiable number of RSVPs, one report, from China’s official Xinhua news agency, pegged the number of committed attendees at…2.

What’s happening? The Times piece is a broad-ranging exploration of possible factors, including the rapidity with which wealth has been created in China, and the associated lack of public philanthropic tradition; the underdeveloped legal and incentive structure around making donations in China; and suspicion, bordering on jingoism, that Gates–Buffett is some sort of American conspiracy.

Hinted at in the piece is an aspect of a difference in mindset between the U.S. and China that isn’t spoken or written about much. I wrote about this in an earlier blog post. In essence, Americans tend to think of philanthropy from a “God’s eye” view: it is just plain the right thing to do to give away money if you’re rich. In China, though, money is primarily a tool for the advancement of oneself and of one’s social “in-group”: immediate family and perhaps one’s very closest friends. The notion of highly public, large-scale philanthropy is fairly new in China. This is noted in the Times piece:

The Chinese have been very generous for a long period of time,” Rupert Hoogewerf, who publishes Hurun Report, said by telephone. “The difference has been that they do it between families, and don’t publicize it. What we’re seeing now is a new era of transparency.”

Thankfully Bill and Warren are behaving sensitively. The article quotes a joint letter they wrote in response to the low turnout: “China’s circumstances are unique, and so its approach to philanthropy will be as well.”

It will be fun to watch how this plays out. Meanwhile have a look at another related blog post, which hints that the “individualist” versus “collectivist” divide may not be all it is claimed to be…

Tom is about to graduate from high school. He decides he doesn’t want to go to college, despite his parents’ wishes. Instead, he wants to join a rock band. What will the family members all say to one another? What will happen in the end? Who is right?

To overgeneralize: if you are an educated American, you probably have some sympathy for Tom, and you may even think he should go for it and forget his parents’ advice, even though you also think he will probably fail. You may think that he should pursue his dream; you may even think that he must pursue his dream, if he has truly been given a rare talent. You may believe that no matter what his parents say or do, they will not and cannot change Tom: he needs to learn lessons on his own, even if they are hard lessons, even if he suffers. His life is his to make, and the most valuable lessons are the ones learned through direct experience.

When I was a graduate student in linguistics doing research for my dissertation, I asked this question to several pairs of U.S.-born, native-English-speaking people. I also translated the question into Chinese and posed it to pairs of China-born, native-Chinese-speaking people. (The native dialects of the Chinese interviewees varied, but, being educated, all spoke Mandarin with great ease.) The summary I just offered of possible American views reflects a standard set of “cultural models” which my American interviewees turned to consistently in discussing this scenario.

Brief terminological aside: “cultural model” is a quasi-technical term used by scholars at the margins of linguistics, anthropology and psychology. Essentially it refers to an idealized notion of how the world works or should work. If I go to a restaurant and my server asks me to fill out a deposit slip or endorse a check, I will be surprised because the question violates my mental “model” of how restaurants should work. These models are called “cultural” because they are shared: I can reasonably expect my restaurant companions to be equally surprised about the server’s actions.

The cultural models that make up the “standard” Chinese view of the rock band question diverge sharply from the American cultural models. Before describing the “standard” Chinese view, though, I need to stop for a moment and address a concern that I hear every time I present my research. The concern is usually expressed as a statement like, “But that’s not how I think,” or “That’s not how it would go in my family.” My response is not to quote statistics, because I have none to offer. Instead, I say: Absolutely. No one person is going to follow the “standard” line entirely. I certainly don’t. The “standard” view I’m referring to is an approximation or aggregation, based on responses from interviewees, and, in the years since the research, on countless conversations with Americans and Chinese on the topic. The analysis will not stand up to rigorous scientific scrutiny; no social science research ever can, no matter how many statistics are quoted. It is by nature inexact, because the subjects, human beings, are by nature inexact.

The “standard” Chinese view (I’ll now stop “scare-quoting” the term) differs radically from the standard American view. Tom — or, more properly, his Chinese alter ego Wang Er — has an opportunity to receive an education. Fewer things are more valuable than this opportunity, because in an overpopulated world, competition is intense, resources are scarce, and you need every edge you can get. Wang Er’s parents are absolutely right to insist that he go to college. Nothing is stopping Wang Er from pursuing music as a hobby. But his focus should be on studying hard and getting a solid, reputable job upon graduating. Not only will this set up Wang Er and his family with a strong economic foundation to guard against future calamity, but everyone will look good too and gain the respect of those around them.

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 is a “land without ghosts,” which became the title of a collection of essays by Chinese visitors to the U.S. (Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present, ed. R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989). His own childhood, filled with ghosts, stood in stark contrast to ghostless America. He wrote:

How could a ghost gain a foothold in American cities? People move about like the tide, unable to form permanent ties with places, to say nothing of other people.…

Outside the family there is certainly much social intercourse, but dealings with people are always in terms of appointments. On my office desk is an appointment calendar marked in fifteen-minute intervals with a space for a person’s name beside each. Apart from business there are various kinds of gatherings, but if you go to one you will find it is no more than social pleasantries: a few words with this person, a few words with that one — it is hard even to remember their names. I cannot say all Americans pass their lives like this. But I once asked a fairly close acquaintance how many friends he had whom he could drop in on at any time without a previous engagement. Counting on his fingers, he did not fill one hand.…

…[Americans'] movements are so easy and they have contacts with so many people, that there seldom comes about the kind of relationship I had with my grandmother, living interdependently for a long time, repeating the same scenes, so that these scenes came to seem an inalterable natural order. Always being on the move dilutes the ties between people and dissolves the ghosts.…

In a world without ghosts, life is free and easy. American eyes can gaze straight ahead. But still I think they lack something and I do not envy their lives. (pp. 179-181)

If we combine this with the notion, from last Friday’s post, that culture goes extremely deep within us, we get a picture of Americans as thoroughly conditioned to form a certain kind of fleeting relationship with a great many individuals over a lifetime. We will naturally import these habits into our dealings with China, and this gets us into trouble.

In 1971, anthropologist Francis Hsu published the intimidatingly titled “Psychosocial Homeostasis and Jen: Conceptual Tools for Advancing Psychological Anthropology” (American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 73, No. 1, pp. 23-44). In the essay he sketches out a model for understanding differences between the psychologies of Chinese and Westerners.

He uses this image (p. 25) to make his point:

Hsu places special emphasis on Layer 3:

The need for Layer 3 is literally as important as his requirement for food, water and air. This is what basically gives the individual his sense of well being. Sudden loss of inhabitants in Layer 3 may be so traumatic as to lead to aimlessness and to suicide. (p. 29)

Hsu goes on to claim that through the development of intimate family ties, the Chinese have an abundance of Layer 3 companions, leading to “psychosocial homeostasis” — a state of relative stability and contentment.

He contrasts this with Westerners, whom he sees as having few people in their Layer 3. Instead, most Westerners have a relatively rich Layer 1 and Layer 2, and they will recruit people into their Layer 3. The problem is that these relationships are naturally unstable; as a result, Westerners have difficulty populating their Layer 3, leading to a general lack of psychosocial homeostasis. Hsu claims many effects of this, including the Western need to conquer.

While the claims may be a bit grandiose, I’ve found this a useful framework. What I like most about Hsu’s model is that it gives us something more concrete and explanatory than a broad cover term like “collectivism.” It’s not just that “Chinese are group-minded.” It’s more nuanced than that, and Hsu shows us how. The model also seems to explain a number of Chinese behaviors that I found confusing when I first arrived in China. I could never understand why, for instance, nobody seemed to do anything alone. Didn’t they value their personal time? And why wouldn’t they leave me alone when I was shooting baskets late in the evening? I deduced that for the Chinese, “alone” meant “lonely.”

In the intervening years I’ve gained much more appreciation for the Chinese love of company. When in China I’m still pulled at times by my automatic American hermiting instincts. But when I can push through those, the rewards of the human connection are great and enduring. This is a lesson for all of us from the West who have business in China.

]]> http://www.jasonpatent.com/2009/09/17/ph-balance/feed/ 6 http://www.jasonpatent.com/2009/09/16/now-thats-what-i-call-individualism/ http://www.jasonpatent.com/2009/09/16/now-thats-what-i-call-individualism/#comments Thu, 17 Sep 2009 01:25:10 +0000 Jason Patent http://www.jasonpatent.com/?p=799 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 had of thinking and talking about racial categories. Given my experience in China of people freely sharing their opinions about the traits of China’s ethnic groups, I felt free to ask whatever I wanted. So I created a question in Chinese. Back-translated into English, it goes:

China is a multi-ethnic country, consisting of Han, Mongolian, Hui, Tibetan, and many other ethnic minorities. Do you believe that the abilities and natures of all ethnic groups are the same?

中国是一个多民族国家,象汉,蒙,回,藏,以及各个少数民族。你觉得每个民族的能力和天性都一样吗?

As I expected, these (highly educated) natives of China dove right into China’s different ethnic groups and all the stereotypes that are commonly held about the groups.

With the Americans I felt the need for kid gloves. It’s just not okay to be explicit about racial stereotypes in the U.S., or even to admit their existence — especially on a college campus. So instead of translating the Chinese question into English, I came up with a new, very different question in English:

There are stereotypes about certain ethnic groups in the United States. Some claim, for instance, that because few African Americans play volleyball, that this says something about abilities possessed by certain ethnic groups. Is there any truth to such stereotypes?

It’s almost painful to read. It feels like I’m literally walking on eggshells, carrying a tray of the finest crystal champagne glasses filled to the rim with Dom Pérignon. And sure enough, even with this ginger wording, the Americans were halting and hesitant in their discussions. For example:

A: Each person has talents that they can contribute to a body.

B: Right. More of an individualist…instead of having a broad label of being a part of a certain ethnic group, it’s more that each person brings a certain set of skills or interests to the table.

A: Yeah, and that each one is unique, not that we have to include everyone in every particular aspect of life, because that’s not where each individual person fits.

B: The way to look at it would be, you know, to basically, to break away this whole concept of the ethnic group. You’d have to look at people as having their own separate sense of values, or each individual as having a sense of special value, or interests. Everyone’s different in that sense, yeah.

I’ve written plenty about individualism, and I’ve called into question the sacred cow that Americans are “individualist” and Chinese are “collectivist.” Here, though, I think there’s a lot of validity to the claim that Americans are “individualist.” It’s meant in a very specific sense: the American belief — faith, really — that each human being has something unique to contribute to the world, and that this uniqueness must be honored (see also earlier posts on dreams). This sense of individualism is so strong that, as we can see from the excerpt, even the notion of group membership can be deemed offensive.

Now, there are all sorts of issues that come up as far as the eggshells go, and the equating of “stereotype” with “generalization.” That’s worth addressing another time.

]]> http://www.jasonpatent.com/2009/09/16/now-thats-what-i-call-individualism/feed/ 0 http://www.jasonpatent.com/2009/08/19/who-stole-the-road/ http://www.jasonpatent.com/2009/08/19/who-stole-the-road/#comments Thu, 20 Aug 2009 01:34:30 +0000 Jason Patent http://www.jasonpatent.com/?p=385 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:

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.