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.

On July 24, 41-year-old executive Mr. Chen Guojun was beaten to death by workers at a factory run by Tonghua Iron & Steel Group. The workers were fearing for their jobs in the wake of an announcement that Tonghua was being bought out by another, larger company, Jianlong Group, who employed Mr. Chen. Rumors had been spreading that Jianlong planned to cut jobs; Mr. Chen made an easy target.

The incident was reported in the Wall Street Journal on July 31, in a piece by Sky Canaves and James Areddy. The Journal quoted an editorial from China’s official Xinhua News Agency as saying:

“Wasn’t the Tonghua incident really a matter of failing to consider the interests of workers during the restructuring process?”

I was struck by the quote: it seemed pretty extreme to lay the blame for murderous behavior on some abstract “failing” of an unknown actor.

I decided to dig a little deeper. I took a look at the original Chinese version of the Xinhua editorial. What I noticed first about the quote from the Journal is that in the Chinese version there is in fact a named actor: “the enterprise.” I also noticed that the Chinese term translated as “consider” has some other connotations.

The term is zhàogu (照顾), and could also be translated as “care for” or “look after.” A host will zhàogu a guest, for instance. Parents zhàogu their children. The Xinhua piece, in using this term, is hinting that Tonghua Iron & Steel might not have met a fundamental obligation to care for its workers.

My American mind didn’t know how to handle this. On the one hand, I’m generally a believer in mutual and reciprocal care in the workplace, and that there’s too little of this in the U.S. So I was sympathetic. On the other hand, I was horrified at the complete absence of rage at the bad people who murdered a man. Where was the talk of justice? Why wasn’t Xinhua calling for the heads of the perpetrators?

Ah, righteous indignation. Such a familiar feeling. And so very American. A wonderful asset, and at times a dreadful liability. The American desire for justice is, in my opinion, a vital and necessary force in so many conversations, not just in the U.S., but worldwide. Taken to extremes, though — especially in cases of petty offenses — the consequences can be dire. Just look at the U.S. prison system.

Or take parenting. I have an internal battle every time one of my daughters commits an “infraction,” no matter how minor. I just feel there needs to be some form of punishment. Why? Because otherwise I’m “sending the wrong message,” or “rewarding bad behavior,” and I run the risk of my daughter becoming a person who doesn’t know right from wrong — the worst possible offense an American parent can commit. (I’ve taken a pretty deep dive into these issues in some of my research; I’ll take this up in later posts.)

If the “typical” American approach is absolute and moralistic, the “typical” Chinese approach is to look at the particulars of a situation, and to give more latitude in how to redress infractions. Per usual, a major consideration will be whether the redress will endanger any important relationships, and whether that’s an acceptable price to pay in light of other factors: how everybody looks publicly, what’s the influence on the effectiveness of future work…but not, generally, an abstract, moralistic, all-pervading, all-governing justice.

Now, I need to step back for a moment and note two things. First, the overall point of the Xinhua editorial was to lay blame at the doorstep of local officials, as Tonghua — named after the city of its location — had been majority-owned by the local government. Citing Tonghua officials as the latest example, Xinhua argued that local officials have a habit, in such incidents, of blaming “people with ulterior motives” (别有用心的人) who “seduce” (蛊惑) and “incite” （挑动) others who “don’t know the real situation” (不明真相). The Xinhua piece aims to point the finger back at local officials. Second, in doing so, Xinhua is following a typical political pattern of central-government-as-good-cop, local-officials-as-bad-cop. In other words, blame is not missing in the article, and “culture” can’t explain it all. What is missing, though, is any talk of punishment, or of any consequences at all for the perpetrators.

And that roils  my inner American, who desperately wants to punish. Needs to punish. Which brings me to why I’m going into all these details. There’s a lesson here, and it’s: Watch out! At times things will go wrong for you in China. There will be people to blame. All sorts of people to blame. Your American mind is likely to spiral off into that loop of righteous indignation. You’ll want heads to roll.

Fine. Just consider this a warning that it won’t do you one whit of good. At least not in terms of accomplishing what you want to accomplish in China. Success in China calls for a level of equanimity and detachment that doesn’t come naturally to most people — certainly not to me. It takes work. In my own life I have found that it is work worth doing.