Why does the west fear China?

Over the past decade, I had the chance to travel to dozens of countries and work with people from different cultures and backgrounds. During my MBA at IESE Business School, I also had the chance to talk to and to learn from talented peers from all over the world. I spent time observing, contemplating on, and talking about what made us different and what could cloud our judgement when it comes to cultural conflict. I benefited tremendously from this journey, and I want to give my thanks to those who were willing to talk to me.

In this article, I will try to share what I learnt by presenting my observation from my interactions with people from both sides in a concise summary and hope it helps readers get to know more about China and Chinese.?I will try NOT to overly generalize the situation so correct me if I am wrong. But if I did, there's always room to talk. My opinions are based on my daily observations, not academic research. Any feedback and discussion are welcome.

China in the making

If we take P.R.C as a startup, it might be the most successful startup ever since the industrial revolution, economically. I believe what made this startup successful were exactly what made the west fear it.

First of all, it has a super powerful strategy planning department (politburo) composed by the CEO (chairman) and the C-suites (state council) that ensures long-term strategy (20 five-year plans) is developed and implemented with correction along the way. In a startup, democracy might NOT be the best practice for decision making, especially when it comes to long-term strategy. We might be better off with a decision-making body that is authoritarian and that thinks ahead of time.?

One interesting number, of the most powerful 9 people in China (politburo) of the last administration, 8 hold engineering degrees, with only 1 having a law degree.

Second, it has a super effective communication and evaluation system. Government officials are responsible for the KPIs assigned to them by the central government and there’s no conflict of interests among different provinces or divergence of goals, at least not on the strategic ones. This mechanism ensured that a well-planned strategy is clearly communicated through all departments of a company (from state level to county level) and that everyone knows where to go, when to do what, how to do, and how the results are measured.

And lastly, it has a result-oriented team to carry out the mission – 1.4 billion people. People believe in central government, follow its lead, and get things done even if it means they need to sacrifice their personal wellbeing, at least this was what happened to our last two generations. People were really giving back to the country without asking much back from it, a living example of asking not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. A successful startup needs its employee to believe in its long-term strategy, know what they need to do and get things done before anything else.

This is P.R.C. after since 1949. Yet, economic achievement didn’t convince the world that our system works, in contrary, it provoked more doubts.?

So, why is China so scarily different?

1, The fundamental difference in our cultures made us think and act very differently. While western society value free will and democracy, Chinese value harmony and unity.

The two cultural cornerstones of western society are freedom of speech (or free will) and democratic decision-making mechanism, which almost don’t exist in Chinese culture. Chinese tend to place more emphasis on harmony and unity, while the west recognizes opposition (or diversity) and individuality.?

In governing the country, western governments are formed through universal suffrage and voters have the rights to criticize the government. Government officials elected are responsible, fundamentally, for the voters and the system, which gave them power, not their supervisors (at least it appears so).

Therefore, when faced with questions and inquiries from voters, whether at the institutional level or at the individual level, they know that they are obliged to answer the questioning, in a good attitude, with convincing reasonings. Authority doesn’t work that well in western countries.

But in China, authority works, or is even worshiped.

Government officials are selected through standardized tests first and then and appointed by interviews with superiors. Good thing about this approach is that senior people are more experienced in selecting competent successors so that you could never see actors got elected to hold important positions in government (sometimes actors do a good job though). The bad side about it, beside nepotism, is that government officials believe they gain power because of their IQ and their superiors. Some of them become ghastly arrogant because they think they are smarter and better than the public. But they are grateful to the superiors who chose them and have the propensity to obey to their will, breeding corruption and nepotism.

So, we will not see what we usually can see from the TV that some prime minister from a western country is publicly responding to a social incident or apologize for what have happened. In China, I never heard any kind of apology from state level, very rarely from provincial level, but more common on the city level if something goes wrong.

This is not unique in China, this kind of governing philosophy exists in the whole east Asia, including in developed countries like Japan, Korea, and Singapore.

In corporate world, the contrast is also stark. In western companies, people tend to value critical thinking and democratic decision-making process. People ask why you make this decision and how the agreement is achieved. People are encouraged to be critical about every decision they make or made by others, to speak up when they disagree, and to challenge authorities with solid arguments. This is the way to harness the power of diversity, which ultimately nurtures creativity and innovation.

But in China, or maybe safe to say in east Asia, except in MNCs, most people tend to follow the lead more than taking the lead. How the decision is made is not as important as where the decision comes from. Managing up is almost impossible in SMEs and is a big taboo in state-owned enterprises and government departments. Critical thinking is allowed in a safe environment, say, within your own responsibility. There's a saying in China that goes like “枪打出头鸟”, which means the bird that sticks out get shot first.

In MBA classroom, Asian students tend to be quieter as well. We tend to think deeper and speak less because we don’t feel the urge to speak unless there’s something truly constructive. However, I have also experienced the power of open discussions, ones that led to great outcome, sometime, better than what professor had presented. Another interesting thing I observed was that it seems most overseas Chinese, at least those born in China and educated in another country, might be super brilliant in academic work, but cannot ascend to the top in corporate environment. Try to name top CEOs in the western companies and see how many Indian and Chinese there are. Of course, there are many reasons for this dilemma, but one reason could be the different ideology in thinking and acting in corporate environment.

In family life,?Chinese, or eastern culture, tend to form a closer bond among family member across generations and this bond is formed by having family members behave more or less to what other family members what them to be – conformity.

For example, Chinese parents have a say as where their children to study, who to marry, and what to do. I am not saying we don’t have the right to choose, it’s more how the family factor can influence our choices, especially in rural area or less educated families. During COVID, 1.4 billion people put mask on overnight, less because we are forced to, but more because we know we don’t want to cause trouble for others.

We are a big family as Chinese. This is also why people live in mainland will never understand why Taiwan wants to separate. We are a big family, speak the same language, and live the same way of life. Why would you side with the US against your own kins? This is also why, if you attack China or China’s government, Chinese tend to take it personally because most of us don’t separate government from nation. We believe we share weal and woe with the country. ?So, next time, maybe watch out the language when talking to Chinese.

In the west, it’s much easier. I guess people are happy with being independent to each other if we don’t see eye to eye on certain things. In family life, individual choices (or free will) outweigh all other factors, I presume.

A very simple example, in China, if girls are harassed, only very few brave ones will take to the court, most will choose to remain silent to avoid being talked about or linked to this “shameful experience” since they are worried what others will say about them or about their family. While in the west, most girls, or their families, I believe, will do all they can to pursue justice. People judge less and are more tolerate of individual choices and experience in the west.

In 2008, when naked photos and sex videos were leaked online, a celebrity in Hong Kong cried and apologized to the public in front of camera for the trouble she caused and for the shame she brought to the family (which was not her fault), while a celebrity, at the same time, in the US publicly condemned the perpetrator and took the legal weapon, not feeling shamed or sorry about what happened.?

This is the first reason why we are so different and what made the west think some values in Chinese culture are not acceptable. It’s hard to say which one is better. I think it’s important to understand the fundamental differences among cultures in order to form a more well-rounded opinion, thus making a more balanced decision.

2, Media takes a major, if not full, responsibility, in shaping the ideology of people and international images of countries, in both good and bad ways.

There was a time that the west is the paradise for the east. Our aim was to catch up with the UK and to eventually take over the US as the world leader, at least economically. We learn everything from the west, adopt their cultures, and speak their slangs. But nowadays, the west is living in hell on Chinese media, so is China on west media.

China has been portrayed as a monstrous evil that will eventually devour all the precious values on which the western democracies are based. We don’t have freedom of speech (free will), we don’t care about human rights, we threaten the world with our economic lever.

No, we don’t enjoy the same level freedom in everything we do, something I don’t like; we chose to sacrifice individual human rights when it comes to national interests (collectivism vs individualism); we do tend to exert influence through economic power, not military intervention. But is that a bad thing, especially when compared to what some countries did around the world?

I have been reading a lot of negative narratives about China in the past two years and I have been fed by MBA peers with similar information as well. Some of these stories were true, but I am comfortable to say, most of them, were not. They were merely attention-seeking exaggeration. Media knows how to catch your attention.

A hilarious example here. Sometimes those anti-China people in the west spread rumors even without checking the basic facts. I saw that a tweet showing a bunch of Chinese standing with banners celebrating something was translated into protesting against the government (I couldn’t find the picture). These constant, organized acts of smearing China made western media just as unreliable as ours.

Few people had the chance to travel to China to see with their own eyes how people live in China and media are constantly feeding them with what they want them to believe. A little bit critical thinking would help here.

However, there’s a good side about the media in the west.

We do hear different voices on media, while on Chinese media, we rarely hear about anything dissent from the government. I know this is unbelievable for most westerns. When we don’t know about something, we want to research and find it out, but all you can find is the same kind of narratives. When everyone says the same thing, it’s either because it’s fake or because it’s the only truth they know of.

China is not doing really well in talking to the world either. One thing is the language barrier, and another thing is that we don’t explain that much as the westerners do, leaving people wondering as you like. Maybe you have experienced, when scandal concerning government officials happens in China, especially in high level, what you can get from the press conference is usually equivocal answer that cunningly fielded all major issues. You never know what’s going on.

It’s a long way for China to go in terms of western-like free press given the complicated domestic and international environment, especially with the disturbing power of internet. Nobody likes censorship on information and the violation of freedom of speech caused by it. Censorship filtered the noise when the central government wants the strategy to get well-communicated through different levels and hold the team stable, but if it was carried away, it stifles critical thinking, which will be very important as startup reaches plateau of growth.

We Chinese can learn to substantiate information from multiple channels and accept the fact we have a lot of problems to work on. Westerners can also learn to study more about China rather than just accept what BBC or CNN feed them.

What’s the best way? I don’t know. But once upon a time, a wise MBA student told me: read more books, not news.?

3, People in different countries have different priorities when in different development stages.

China had been a super power multiple times in history, read this article to find out more (https://www.newgeography.com/content/005050-500-years-gdp-a-tale-two-countries). But after the Opium war around 1840s, the west got rich, and China fell sharply behind. One reason was the civil and foreign wars that plagued China for a century, another reason was that the complacent emperors refused to adopt to modern political system and technologies when we had the chance. After the foundation of P.R.C, every Chinese was told to fulfill a mission and that is to make China great again (sounds similar?). We were taught how great we were, what made us poor now, what we need to do to restore the glories of our ancestors.

For the past several decades, what we all wanted was to make China great again. Before getting there, we need to feed our people. In 1980, there were 770 million people were living under poverty line and who had all been lifted out poverty by 2020, of course, by different standard. Yet, there are still more than 600 million people making 1000 CNY (150 USD) a month by 2021. So, a large number of people don’t care about freedom of speech, universal suffrage, democracy in governance, let alone ESG, D&I, Carbon footprint, or climate change. It’s not because they don’t want to, but because it doesn’t make sense for them. They are result-oriented, and the result that matters to them is how much money they can make to support their family, which school their children will attend, and how to talk care of the elderly.

More numbers to share. More than 80% of internet users in China doesn’t have college education, more than 1 billion people never traveled by air, about 5% to 7% of 1.4 billion people have traveled outside China, and only 5.85 million studied in another culture, a merely 0.4% of total population.

I am not sure how much they can understand about diversity when majority of them never meet people different from themselves; how much they care about ESG when they need to figure out how they are going to pay for their kids, or what universal suffrage means for them when they cannot even decide or don’t know what to do with their lives. A lot of them, I presume, as some westerners do, read and follow whatever news or contents that make them feel comfortable, sometimes, fueling hatred and hostility between west and east.

When people are united, it’s a good thing, but it can be a dangerous thing as well if they took the wrong direction, especially in a startup environment, where they could lead the business astray. So, better not to expect that people in China care about what westerners care about and not to judge them by the moral standard that westerners may hold either.

If there’s any assertion I can make about China, I would say that, over the course of the 2000 years, China and Chinese people have developed one of the most adaptive cultures and it had helped us out-survived all other ancient civilizations. I am sure we will continue to adapt to make China great again.

Even if we are great again, we are not going to sell or force our system or values to the whole word. We have never done so in history and will not do so in future. This is something I firmly believe in.

So, fear not, and let’s work together.