A week or so ago, Jason Patent wrote a three part series on incorporating knowledge of Chinese culture to better your business in and with China. I asked Jason to write these posts after having listening to Jason give the best talk I have ever seen/heard on the cultural differences between China and the United States as those differences relate to business. Jason’s first post was entitled (by me), “China Business. It Helps To Know The Culture,” his second post was entitled (again by me), “China Business. It Helps To Know The Culture. Part II. Dealing With The Ethical Gray Zone,” and his third post was entitled (yes, by me), “China Business. It Helps To Know The Culture. Part III. Stereotypes As Excess Baggage.“
All three posts generated a substantial number of excellent comments, both pro and con. Many of the comments raised issues to which I thought it would be helpful for Jason to respond. So I asked Jason to write another post addressing the comments and he graciously agreed to do so and here it is.
Audiences are often polarized by the claims I make about differences between Chinese and Western mindsets. It’s been no different here, in the comments left on my three guest posts. Most everyone falls into one of two camps: “This is great,” or “This is bunk.” The “bunk” camp has roughly four critiques, which I’ll address here.
Critique #1: (a) This abstract mindset stuff can’t possibly account for the dirty details of everyday business — (b) which makes it useless.
On (1a), absolutely. Mindset is one piece of a huge set of puzzles and challenges that have to be addressed in running a successful business anywhere in the world. Three brief blog posts are simply by necessity going to be somewhat abstract and vague. (And woe to the company that hires a consultant to write blog posts and do nothing else!) Any serious consulting engagement has to go way beyond mindset and into the organizational and operational nitty-gritty that real businesspeople face every day.
As for (1b), for the best chance at success you need both the abstract and the specific. To the extent that the day-to-day work of running a company can be informed by high-level principles like mindset, it is likely to be more effective. Unless one thinks the findings themselves are inaccurate, which is a separate conversation.
Critique #2: (a) Current political and social circumstances can explain all the relevant mindset differences. (b) Societies change over time (a form of evidence for (2a)).
I can’t do justice here to the volumes of statistically validated social science research that demonstrate the surprising stability of mindsets over time. For cultural issues generally, I’ll refer you to the work of Geert Hofstede and his team. For U.S. and China, pick up any of the 19th-Century works by U.S. missionaries in China (my favorite is Smith’s Chinese Characteristics. Or, better yet, read Lin Yutang’s 1935 classic My Country and My People, and see how well it’s held up over time.
Critique #3: Stereotypes may have some business use.
There’s a terminological distinction in the field of intercultural communication between stereotyping and generalizing. Generalizing is the act of making statements about a group of people, realizing that there is variation within any population. Stereotyping is taking a perceived characteristic of an individual and claiming, on the basis of this, that all people “like this person” share this characteristic (and probably other negative characteristics too). I simply don’t see the business value in this latter act. Generalizing, yes; stereotyping, no.
Critique #4: Don’t be too easy on the Chinese: they could in fact be out to mess you up.
True. No businessperson should act without a duly critical stance toward people with possibly competing interests. What I find disheartening is the certainty with which Westerners often attribute certain behaviors to this or that “Chinese characteristic,” which then often leads to broader, more negative generalizations, and ultimately to an unproductive, and ill-deserved, distrust.
There is no one best window through which to view the Chinese, or anyone. But the more possible windows we allow ourselves, the richer our set of cognitive tools for solving complex problems — intercultural and other.
