Tom Doctoroff, an ad man working in Shanghai, has good insights into modern Chinese culture. This
interview with Leonard Lopate is worth a listen:
ChinaSmack: ... After 13 years here, I am fundamentally convinced that there is a unifying “Confucian” conflict — between self-protection and status projection — that brands have a fundamental role in resolving. Unlike practically any other country (Korea and Vietnam come closest), China is both boldly ambitious (ladders are meant to be climbed and meritocracy is a cherished value) and regimented, with hierarchical and procedural booby traps for anyone who hasn’t mastered the “system.” This tension between upward mobility and fear-based conformism shows up everywhere, in every business meeting, in every struggle with a mother-in-law, in every new generation release on the internet.
Africa For The Chinese
ReplyDeleteLetter to The London Times
Francis Galton
June 5, 1873The natural capacity of the Chinaman shows itself by the
success
with which, notwithstanding his timidity, he competes with strangers,
wherever
he may reside. The Chinese emigrants possess an extraordinary
instinct for
political and social organization; they contrive to establish for
themselves a
police and internal government, and they give no trouble to their rulers
so long
as they are left to manage those matters by themselves. They are
good-tempered, frugal, industrious, saving, commercially inclined, and
extraordinarily prolific. They thrive in all countries, the natives of the
Southern
provinces being perfectly able to labor and multiply in the hottest
climates. Of
all known varieties or mankind there is none so appropriate as the
Chinaman to
become the future occupant of the enormous regions which lie between
the
tropics, whose extent is far more vast than it appears, from the cramped
manner in which those latitudes are pictured in the ordinary maps of the
world.