I’ve quoted from the book before: it was Lin Yutang who referred to China as “a nation of individualists” in this book, published in 1935. Lin addresses what he calls Chinese “indifference,” which, he argues, is a function of the world’s unpredictability, especially with regard to (lack of) legal institutions to protect citizens:

Chinese youths are as public-spirited as foreign youths, and Chinese hot-heads show as much desire to “meddle with public affairs” as those in any other country. But somewhere between their twenty-fifth and their thirtieth years, they all become wise, and acquire this indifference, which contributes a lot to their mellowness and culture. Some learn it by native intelligence, some by getting their fingers burned once or twice. All old people play safe because all old rogues have learned the benefits of indifference in a society where personal rights are not guaranteed and where getting one’s fingers burned once is bad enough. (pp. 48-9)

This connects directly to what Americans sometimes perceive as an indifference to the “letter of the law”:

In one word, we recognize the necessity of human effort but we also admit the futility of it. This general attitude of mind has a tendency to develop passive defense tactics. “Great things can be reduced into small things, and small things can be reduced into nothing.” On this general principle, all Chinese disputes are patched up, all Chinese schemes are readjusted, and all reform programs are discounted until there are peace and rice for everybody. (p. 56)

No wonder Americans, laser-focused as we are on “honoring our word,” sometimes get up in arms. Contracts are about “honoring our word”; hétong are about reducing differences and working together to create “peace and rice for everybody.”

A caricature, to be sure, but one to bear in mind — and really think through — as you continue to develop your relationships in China.

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.

Another of the interview questions I asked in my research was:

If a person is rich, what should he/she do with his/her money?

如果一个人很有钱,他应该怎么用他的钱?

As with the fallen tree question, the Chinese respondents hold to a very practical line: invest the money, because money makes money (钱生钱). The Americans, however, agonize over the question. They seem to feel intuitively that the “right” thing to do would be to give away a lot of the money. At the same time, they are troubled by the gap between ideal and real:

A      And you should give to people who don’t have much because they can’t…they’re not as fortunate as you.  They don’t have those capabilities.  They’re not in the same situation as you.  So I think people should give back to society.

B      I agree.

A      Do something, make a foundation, you know, I mean, you know like a charity.

B      Just put it where it’s needed.

A      Yeah.  A lot of people do say, yeah I earned the money, so I should keep it, but really what are you gonna do with all that money?  You’re just gonna spend it on yourself. That’s so selfish.  But then again if I were in that position I don’t know what I’d do.

B      Yeah.

A      It’d be…it’s easy to say…

B      Yeah, see, everybody says, this person should give it to charity, they should donate it, but that’s not what people do.

More than anything, what the Americans find troubling is hypocrisy: Saying one thing, doing something else. Not practicing what we preach. This is a function of the “universalist” aspect of American culture: Americans are inclined to judge a broad range of situations according to a fixed, static, set of criteria. In contrast, Chinese culture is “particularist”: specific situations, in all their complexity, tend to be privileged over abstract, universal principles.

The Chinese distaste for this kind of abstraction shows up in two responses. First:

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。

Another pair of interviewees goes as far as to suggest that a different question should have been asked:

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。

To put a harsh-sounding spin on it, we could say: What Americans do is pass judgment. We do so because we’re conditioned to judge based on how closely actual behaviors match up to a universal moral code. And lest I pass judgment on passing judgment, I’ll state again, as I’ve stated before, that in my own (very American) opinion, this has been, in the right contexts, one of the greatest gifts American culture specifically, and Western culture generally, has brought to the world.

You can see, though, what a mismatch a stubbornly universalist approach can be in the nitty-gritty, messy, detail-oriented context of Chinese culture. From one possible Chinese standpoint, Americans are hopelessly naïve: how could you hope to take one set of principles and apply them everywhere? Only someone who hasn’t lived in the world could think that way.

This is just one more way in which Westerners can get ourselves into trouble in our China dealings. It takes a special, hard-earned kind of self-awareness and leadership to function well, consistently well, in ways that are so contrary to our deepest, culturally conditioned norms.

In some research I did, I asked the following question to American and Chinese respondents:

A tree has fallen and is blocking a public road in a remote location, hours from the nearest city.  Several large trucks are present, and could move the tree off of the road.  Will they?  Should they?

在一个很偏僻的乡下地方,有一棵大树横倒在公路上,挡住了过往车辆。在这个时候正好有几辆卡车经过。你觉得他们会不会主动把这棵大树从公路上拉开?你觉得他们应该不应该这样做?

To most Chinese respondents this was a fairly straightforward question, with an equally straightforward answer: the truck drivers’ actions would line up with their personal interests. If they could significantly speed their own passage by moving the tree, then they would; otherwise not. Since from the question it looks like moving the tree would speed them along, then in this case they probably would move the tree.

The Americans sound a similar theme, but the focus of the discussion is entirely different. While the Chinese discussions center around the “Will they?” question, the Americans are drawn to the “Should they?” question. And they are broadly in agreement that the truck drivers should indeed move the tree. What I find most interesting is how the Americans, explicitly or implicitly, frame the discussion in moral terms. One American says flat out:

You know if there’s an ambulance that needs to get through that public road, and it’s sitting there and a tree happens to fall down in front of it, I mean I would think that there’d be a sense of a moral obligation to help out by moving it.

The word moral comes up several times in the American discussions. Not once, though, does any Chinese discussion touch even remotely on issues of morality. In fact, there seems to be an aversion even to discussing the “should” question. One Chinese respondent says:

I think they would do this.  “Should they do this?”  I think this is a conceptual question.

我觉得他们会这样做的。  “他们应该不应该这样做?”  我觉得这就是一个观念的问题。

By itself there’s nothing shocking about saying that this is a “conceptual question.” What shocked me, though, when I heard it is that being a “conceptual question” is grounds for dismissal: after saying this the speaker abruptly shifts the topic back to what would happen under various circumstances.

Eventually I discovered that the responses to the “fallen tree” question were but a small part of two contrasting systems of thinking: an American, “God’s eye view” that has to do with morality, and a day-to-day, problem-solving approach from the Chinese.

One way this difference can play out for Westerners in China is what I noted last Wednesday: a thirst for “justice” that can be blinding and counterproductive. “Justice,” though, is just one aspect of the broader moralistic system of American thinking that can cause problems for us in China. It’s just too easy for Westerners to make snap judgments about behaviors we see in China, labeling them “wrong” or “immoral,” without understanding — or, sometimes, even trying to understand — the broader cultural context for contrasting frames of reference.

We’ll keep digging into this as the week goes on.

The fact that Daily Show host John Stewart is parodying Tom Bolton is of course a sign that the “make them pay” approach is just one American approach. Many Americans either don’t believe in punishment, or believe it should be used much more selectively, favoring restitution, with the ultimate goal of learning how to be a participating, contributing group member.

One of the deepest thinkers on the subject is my old mentor George Lakoff, whose landmark book Moral Politics transformed how many saw the conservative–liberal divide in the U.S. The gist is that there are two dominant child-rearing-models-cum-moral-systems — Strict Father and Nurturant Parent — that are mapped metaphorically to U.S. politics via something Lakoff calls the Nation-as-Family metaphor. Not surprisingly, Strict Father morality correlates with conservative politics and Nurturant Parent morality correlates with liberal politics.

Lakoff’s model has been criticized for being overly reductive and simplistic. And while I generally agree with those critiques, I do think there’s a lot of validity in the model.

The reason I’m addressing it here in this blog is the same reason I wrote the Car Talk post on face: cultures are not monolithic, and we must guard against to temptation to paint in strokes that are too broad.

There’s another reason, though, for thinking these things through a bit more carefully. Not only is each individual in a cultural group unique; each individual is, I believe, in fact several people. Among linguists, it’s the socioloinguists who have led the way on this one, demonstrating through study after study that each of us speaks many “social languages”: we use different language with our parents than we do with our peers than we do with our bosses…and so on. American college students, when learning of this, are often resistant to not having one single, consistent “self,” immutable across space and time. But there is much evidence that each of us in fact “many different people.”

To me, that’s fantastic news. It means that we’re not bound to any beliefs we think we might be bound to, and that we have a much richer repertoire of ways of thinking — more arrows in the quiver — than we might have thought we have. That helps anyone in any unfamiliar culture; it will certainly help Westerners in China, and vice versa.

Later I’ll take up some specific ways in which this plays out in Chinese and American culture: ways which show that, despite all the differences, there’s no shortage of common ground to work with.

To a “typical” American a contract serves two purposes. First, it helps ensure that something gets done, regardless of who the parties are and what feelings they might have. Second, the contract ensures that my organization’s interests are protected: should any dispute arise threatening my organization’s well-being, the contract can stave off damage.

A key assumption, far off in the background, underlies this: the deep-seated belief in the ability of human beings to mold the world as we see fit. This is central to the founding myths of the United States: a new land waiting to be created, intentionally, by human beings. Bending the world to our will requires planning, and a key part of the planning process, designed to maximize the probability of success, is the contract.

Given these beliefs, the contract is a way of saying:

“We all know what there is to be done. It’s up to us to do it. And we need a plan to get there. Here is a breakdown of who’s responsible for what in order to get the job done. We know we may want to change things, but we know we can’t, because this is what has to be done, and since we’re all strangers here we’re not really sure we can trust the other guys, and we need a guarantee that they’ll uphold their end of the bargain and not put our organization at risk.”

The Chinese cultural mindset operates from different basic assumptions. If the key unit in the American mindset is the “project,” or “getting something done,” in the Chinese mindset the key unit is the relationship. And if the world is at the whim of humans in the American mindset, in the Chinese mindset humans are at the whim of the world. These two aspects are related: what gets people through hard times is relationships. Things might be going well today, but tomorrow could hold disaster. It’s best, then, to maintain equanimity and keep relationships solid.

These beliefs create a fundamentally different frame of reference for hétong than for contracts. In an inherently harsh and unpredictable world, we must be ready to change our approach on the fly, and to maintain alliances, possibly at the expense of short-term “self-interest,” for the sake of mutual support, even survival, through difficult times. We might “translate” the above statement as:

“We all know what there is to be done. Here is a breakdown of who’s responsible for what. We also know that this is an agreement among people, and as we get things done together we want to be sure we don’t ruin any relationships, because we may need each other later. We also know that circumstances are always changing, and we must adapt. So if we run into trouble we may have to reconsider what we write down here. These are guidelines; what’s more important is that we work together when there are problems, adapting appropriately to changing circumstances, and making sure that relationships stay intact.”

One crucial thing to see about this is that it has nothing to do with what we call “honesty.” Nothing whatsoever. Both views of the contract/hétong are perfectly “honest” in their own ways. But because of all the cultural baggage Americans bring along with our views of contracts, it’s very easy to go from “my Chinese counterpart wants to rework the contract” to “the Chinese are dishonest.”

Will your organization have to deal with cultural differences when it comes to contracts/hétong and their enforcement? Most likely. But it doesn’t have to go down the familiar and unproductive road of finger-pointing and crying foul. Know what you’re dealing with. Expect it and understand it. If you do you’ve got a leg way up on your competition. While they’re busy complaining, you’re working things out and moving forward, solidifying your partnerships, and laying a foundation for a productive and successful future.