This is, according to China expert Janet Carmosky, one of the fundamental differences between China and the U.S.: the “domain of scarcity” in the U.S. is time; in China, it’s money.

In my experience the starkest example of the Chinese time-versus-money calculus is the behavior of Chinese drivers at certain points on toll expressways near urban centers. One such place is the Badaling Expressway in Beijing.

Driving north-northwest from the center of Beijing, the Badaling Expressway becomes a toll road right around the Fourth Ring Road. Just before the toll booth is an exit, where drivers can choose to travel on the frontage road and pay no tolls, or to stay on the main road and pay tolls. The first toll exit is about two and a half miles north of the toll booth. Exiting there requires a payment of five yuan, which is less than a dollar at the current exchange rate of 6.7.

In normal traffic the travel time from the toll booth to the exit is just under five minutes. Contrast this with the travel time along the toll-free frontage road covering the same stretch of the expressway. Late at night it might be five extra minutes. But during normal traffic it could easily take an hour or more to cover those 2.5 miles.

If we factor in living standard differences, it is not a stretch to say that to your average Beijing driver, 5 yuan is roughly equivalent to $5.00. In the U.S., how many people do you know who would not pay $5.00 to save an hour on the road?

This difference might partially explain the contrast between the American and Chinese emphases in responses to the rock band question. To an American, whatever religious or quasi-religious ideas she might have about life and talents, her sense of the preciousness of time is likely to compound the urgency even further: time is wasting, so Tom had better get on with his rock career. Money will come somehow, but time is running out. In the typical Chinese view, time will take care of itself somehow, but money must be struggled for and held onto.

The differences in American and Chinese interpretations do not and cannot boil down simply to the difference between “time is scarce” and “money is scarce.” Besides, both time and money are scarce in both cultures. And yet, seeing things through this lens helps, I think, understand better the moment-to-moment calculus of members of one culture versus the other.

Another way of looking at the differences in Chinese and American perspectives is one of pseudo-ethereal idealism versus hard-nosed pragmatism: the Americans, with their abundant resources, have the luxury of pursuing dreams, while the Chinese, with their enormous population and worn-out natural environment, must struggle for everything they can get. This too is an oversimplification, but also gets at something fundamental — something we will take a look at later.

Money is, of course, valued the world over, and I have yet to meet a person who would walk away from it in any quantity under anything but the oddest of circumstances. The difference, though, is in the singularity of focus on the need to acquire and conserve money.

China’s history is epic, and doesn’t lend itself to easy summarizing — except for one persistent theme over the past 3,000-plus years: it’s one disaster after another. If it’s not a devastating flood, then it’s an earthquake. If it’s not an earthquake, then it’s a drought, followed by a famine. Human beings, of course, can wreak plenty of havoc: internal rebellions and external wars have caused untold devastation over the centuries. Various parts of China have been invaded and occupied dozens of times. Natural disasters, human misrule, and hostile conquerors have conspired to make China a notoriously unstable society, persistently, century after century.

It is also easy to forget that just 50 years ago, 20–30 million people starved to death in China. Tens if not hundreds of millions of Chinese still remember this, and surely their children and their children’s children have been duly reminded.

On top of all this — and partly a cause of China’s woe over the centuries — when compared to the United States or Canada, China is relatively lacking in resources, most notably arable land. Vast swaths of China are taken up by mountains and deserts which make farming impossible.

Over time this has yielded a pervasive mindset, so pervasive that it could be called a cultural instinct: do what you must to get money, and, once you have money, keep as much of it as you can.

This focus shows up all over Chinese society, but perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the persistently high savings rate in Chinese households, which as of late 2010 has for years been holding steady at around 50%. It also shows up in the willingness of workers to switch jobs for even a modest increase in pay. And many, many other places, including negotiating.

In her classic, Negotiating China: Case Studies and Strategies[1], Carolyn Blackman begins by introducing readers who are unfamiliar with China to what she calls the “haggling society.” She tells personal stories of how far people would go, just in the local markets, to ensure that they didn’t spend any more money than they needed to:

When I lived as a Chinese person in a Chinese household, I watched the bargaining that went on around me every day. My landlady, Mrs. Zhou, bought her fruit from the fruit seller who pedaled his bike and tray past our place about 10 a.m. every day. They started by exchanging a few words of banter, then she began to pick up the fruit and have a good look at it. To my way of thinking, Mrs. Zhou was unbelievably thorough. She would examine just about every piece of fruit on the tray.

She would accuse the fruit seller of charging too much. She would say the bananas were too thin or the apples were not red enough.[2]

And so on, until, after much time and energy, a bargain would be struck. Sometimes things can get extreme:

Down the road at the free market I used to see the same kind of thing go on. A plump grandmother shopping for her extended family went to the pork stall and chose a piece of pork.…When the pork butcher told her the price, she disputed it hotly. She offered him much less, grabbed the pork and went to put it into her basket. The butcher…grabbed the other end of the pork. A tug-of-war began, the lady pulling on one end of the piece of meat, the butcher on the other, neither willing to let go, and each shouting prices and evidence to defend his own point of view. The battle only ended when they noticed that the other shoppers were helping themselves to the pieces of pork lying under the counter — and to some of the items in the woman’s shopping basket.[3]

While this example is a bit more slapstick than most, scenes like this, in which emotions between buyer and seller get heated, are common in Chinese marketplaces. Often it is self-conscious theater, but the point remains the same: don’t mess with someone’s money.

[2] Blackman, p. 5.

[3] Blackman, p. 6.

After the trip my friend was on to other clients and never found out what became of the exec and his venture. But my friend wasn’t optimistic. As is so often the case, Westerners — especially Americans — depersonalize business in a way that sets them up to fail in China. Goodwill matters. It matters a lot. It makes no difference how tired or energized you are, how hopeful or hopeless things look, how cut and dried things seem to be. Without goodwill, you’re swimming upstream, if not entirely sunk.

I turn again to Jack Perkowksi’s experiences, told of in Managing the Dragon. His company, ASIMCO, invested vast amounts of time and money in establishing goodwill with their brake-manufacturing partner in Langfang. In recounting what this accomplished for ASIMCO, Mr. Perkowski writes:

In the end, despite all of our changes in management and export focus, the Langfang joint venture will probably never be a big moneymaker for ASIMCO by itself. But because of the strong relationship we’ve built with our Chinese partner there, we’ve since spawned two wholly owned businesses.

(pp. 175-6)

Mr. Perkowski goes on to detail successful, moneymaking businesses that sprang from the Langfang success — which was founded upon goodwill.

Goodwill alone won’t get you far. Business will always to some extent still be business: you have to deliver quality goods and services that your customers want, and do so cost- and time-effectively. But if you’ve got the business practices down, goodwill can multiply itself, along with time and money, to create truly enduring, successful businesses in China.

The West, and especially the U.S., worships logic and rationality. Our economic and political institutions are founded upon it. In the context of public life, we speak of feelings in mostly derisive terms. To be “emotional” is to be weak. This makes sense in the context of American universalism: emotion is subject to personal whim, and could endanger the Platonic perfection we seek in our institutions. And relationships based on positive feelings could divert our attention from what is “true,” and have us make bad decisions. There’s plenty of psychological evidence that all humans, including Americans, make decisions based on emotion anyway. But Americans still see ourselves as a people who privilege rationality.

Logic and rationality don’t hold the same sway in China. Relationships, including business relationships, are based on many factors; personal feelings are one important factor. You’ll hear Chinese people talk about how they have a “good feeling” (hǎo gǎnjué 好感觉) toward someone, and that they’re willing to do more things for this person because of it. It used to drive me crazy at markets when people told me they’d give me a better price because I speak Chinese (and that they therefore had a better feeling towards me). “What in heaven’s name could my speaking Chinese possibly have to do with how much you charge me?” I would ask myself indignantly. Whether or not the actual price was lower doesn’t matter. It’s enough that it was advanced as a reason for a discount.

In his brilliant book Managing the Dragon, Jack Perkowski writes the following on the importance of trust — a form of goodwill — in business relationships in China:

I learned how strongly and favorably the Chinese react when they realize that you trust them.…The fact that I could set up a wholly owned facility to manufacture higher-technology compressors…would never have been possible if a certain amount of trust didn’t exist between the two shareholders.…Everybody feels involved, like we’re all part of the same family.

(pp. 177-8; I also recommend that you persue Mr. Perkowski’s Managing the Dragon Blog)

Of course trust and goodwill matter in the U.S. too. But when push comes to shove in the U.S., we rely on public institutions like the courts to arbitrate. In China, where such public institutions are unreliable, building and maintaining goodwill must be a top priority for you and your organization.

It’s easy for “intercultural communication” to sound like an abstraction, or some sort of fancy extra, or window dressing, to what organizations “normally” do. Yet every time I witness the sort of, for lack of a better term, shenanigans that American organizations try to pull in their dealings with China, I go a little nuts, because what could be more important to an organization than money, time, and good will? Yet these most prized of resources are what go down the tubes every time when intercultural savvy is missing.

In the present case I can safely say that there is no ill will on the part of the American organization. There rarely is. In their eyes they are merely “doing their job.” It’s up to interculturalists to make the business case for our services. What gets my hackles up here is that overtures have been made multiple times over the years about the advantages of entertaining other perspectives — overtures which have been rebuffed time and again. And over these years this organization has spent literally hundreds of thousands of dollars and untold hours of precious human capital, all in service of angering or alienating exactly the people most crucial to the long-term success of their venture.

The way I see it, ultimately we are responsible, individually and collectively, for honoring what we have been given. Among other things, organizations are in possession of limited resources with which to accomplish something in the world. Like any form of organizational consulting, intercultural consulting aims to help organizations make the very most of their resources, so that they can go about their business and get things done. The ongoing challenge we face as interculturalists is to bring our work into the mainstream of business practice. When you have a legal problem, you call a lawyer. No one thinks twice about that. What if, every time you dealt with someone from another culture, you called an interculturalist? We’d get more done with a lot less, and we’d all be happier for it too.