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.

Money doesn’t get wasted either. Many have talked about how the Chinese consumer is the great hope for pulling the world out of recession, yet savings rates remain around 50%. In local markets, buyers and sellers haggle over every last fēn.

I could give other examples. The point I’m driving at is that one fundamental difference in default modes of Chinese and American thinking is scarcity versus abundance. I like this frame because it seems to explain quite a few otherwise mysterious differences between Chinese and American culture.

For instance, in earlier posts I addressed what seemed to be an extreme form of individualism in China, compared to a more collectivist bent in the U.S. — exactly the opposite of what we’re usually told. If instead we view those differences through the lens of scarcity and abundance, the mystery disappears: in an unpredictable, harsh, and crowded world, it’s best to keep your head down and hold on to your stuff. And to make use of every opportunity to generate resources for yourself. In contrast, an open frontier of limitless possibility means people can afford to be a little looser in how they disburse their treasure.

The scarcity-versus-abundance frame also explains a lot about guānxi, with the resource in question being goodwill. Americans tend to see goodwill in almost infinite terms: “what goes around comes around.” The default Chinese mindset is a zero-sum affair: I do something for you, you owe me — and vice versa.

I remember well my first lesson in this. It was my first year in China — academic year 1991-92, in the industrial Northeastern city of Qiqihar. I was teaching English at what was then Qiqihar Light Industry Institute. One of my classes consisted of all the Institute’s English teachers. Sitting in my apartment one day, I heard a knock: Cecilia, one of the English teachers. She had told me she wanted to be published in the U.S.; I had mentioned to her that my mother was an author.

When I answered the door the first thing I noticed was that she was holding a fancy box. She led me down the hallway and into an empty room. Out of the box she gingerly lifted a pure white nightie. She said it was for my mother. I could see the writing on the wall: accept the nightie and be duty-bound to get her published.

I said I couldn’t accept it. She replied bluntly: “That means you won’t help me.” Which launched me into a meta-discussion about cultural difference which, while I didn’t think of it this way or put it this way at the time, was all about the abundance of goodwill in American culture. I would definitely help her, I explained, and didn’t need anything in return. A bit stunned, and skeptical, she seemed to be willing to accept this possibility. (I now think back on that conversation as my first as an intercultural consultant.)

As with any useful-seeming “explanation,” we need to be careful about assigning the scarcity–abundance frame too much importance. At the same time, it’s a good one to add to our toolkit in puzzling through what makes Chinese and American culture what they are.