Member-only story
The Chinese Logic Puzzle
How Cultures Think, a Cross-cultural Tour; Part II
Here’s the second part of a chapter from my next book, How the World Thinks.
“A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Winston Churchill’s famous remark concerning Russia may apply equally well to China. To Western observers, China and Chinese behavior certainly has appeared confounding over the centuries, but we can be sure that Western behaviors have been equally confounding and challenging for the Chinese to understand. In many ways, there are no two cultures more different than China and the US, and it’s a wonder that Western and Chinese business, government and social relations actually succeed to the degree that they do, given the significant cultural challenges. In fact, most individuals involved with China and the West, on either side, will tell you that the cultural differences are ultimately the biggest challenge for any interaction.
A seasoned “old China hand” (an experienced Westerner working with the Chinese) once stated that “it’s really easy to work with the Chinese … all you have to remember is to do everything the opposite of the way you would do it in the West.” Simplistic, perhaps, but not unwise. Consider, for example, the fact that Chinese culture has been around for over 5,000 years; US culture has been around for about 350 years. For almost the totality of those 5,000 years, China viewed itself as “The Middle Kingdom,” meaning that it was the center of world, with the rest of the world revolving around China. It wasn’t until 2001 that the leader of China actually left China to meet with other world leaders: for 5,000 years, up to that point, if you wanted to do business with the Chinese, you went to the emperor — the emperor did not come to you. 90 percent of the Chinese are ethnically homogeneous Han Chinese, and China, approximately as large as the contiguous continental United States geographically, has one unifying time zone. The contiguous US has four time zones, and 99 percent of the population of the US is made up of people who themselves, or their parents or grandparents, came from everywhere else. China has more than 15 cities with a population of over 5,000,000 people — each! — and just the statistical deviation used when measuring the population of China is itself equivalent to the entire population of…
