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 [...]

Picking up on the “God’s eye view” theme from the last post: In her seminal 1946 study of Japanese and American culture, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, anthropologist Ruth Benedict popularized the distinction between “shame cultures” and “guilt cultures.” To oversimplify: shame cultures, like Japan (and China, though China wasn’t her focus), regulate behavior through [...]

In an earlier post I gave a brief summary of Chinese and American responses to this question: If a person is rich, what should he/she do with his/her money? How would you respond to this question? If yours is typical of any of the American responses, then: You probably have some fairly clear ideas about [...]

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” [...]

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 [...]

First things first: please read this piece by David Dayton. It’s a great read and extremely informative, plus it brings to life a number of themes addressed in this blog. 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 [...]

A few weeks ago I posted a series of pieces on Geert Hofstede’s five “dimensions” of culture. In my last three posts, the notions of universalism and particularism have come up. Today we’ll take a look at these two concepts in the context of the work of Dutchman Fons Trompenaars and his British colleague, Charles [...]

Yesterday and the day before we took a look at Chinese and American responses to scenarios about a fallen tree and a hypothetical rich person. Besides the lessons about the differences between abstract American moralism versus concrete Chinese practicality, there is, once again, also a lesson for us about oversimplifying.

First, yesterday I came across this article — a thoughtful discussion of some Chinese reactions to the Tonghua tragedy discussed last week in this blog. There is much worth commenting on, but I’m shirking the temptation in order to probe a little more deeply into a topic we began looking at yesterday: American moralism and [...]