6 ms·

Is there a good analysis somewhere of pragmatism in Chinese culture? It seems that there is a particular brand of ultra-pragmatism and rule-gaming that is over

Is there a good analysis somewhere of pragmatism in Chinese culture? It seems that there is a particular brand of ultra-pragmatism and rule-gaming that is overrepresented in China. Researchers are judged on published papers? Publish papers that appear just good enough to be published, ignore everything else. Products are bought based on looks on price? Make a cheap product that appears just good enough to be sold, ignore everything else. I don't mean to stereotype all of China negatively. I've worked with enough amazing Chinese colleagues to understand this is not all of China. I'm just curious if this pattern has some truth to it or if it's just a random racist stereotype, and how it can be explained.

chrischen 6y ago
There are a lot of people in China and everyone's place in society was recently (relatively) reset. Rapidly developing and everyone scrambling to get on top of one another. There's bound to be rough edges in the developing of a society basically from scratch. While China is an ancient country, the rules, regulations, institutions, people in power, basically all reset last century. Also what you described are characteristics of any poorer country. They'll try to get some money from wealthier places in the easiest way possible (Indian IT scams, Nigerian prince scams, etc). For most of the last century and even until today China is still a lot poorer than the US. It's also a massive country. It's easy to discount the 1.4 billion Chinese population because a lot of them are dirt poor still.
rrmm 6y ago
I've seen some good summaries in the past, but unfortunately can't find them at the moment. Some things that play into it are the damage from the Cultural Revolution/Great Leap(s) Foward, government corruption with many rules designed to move money up to party leaders, extreme hardship and poverty, as well as recent affluence. As with anything, it's complicated, and I don't understand things well enough to really synthesize it any better.
geraneum 6y ago
It’s possible that such a phenomenon (existence of paper-mills) could be caused by systemic flaws in policy making (in health care system in this case). As it’s mentioned in the article, such strategies are observed to be adopted by some in Iran and Russia. IMO attributing it to the “culture” of the people in those counties based on the facts presented in the article is far-fetched.
krona 6y ago
In China, the concept of shame [in contrast to guilt] is widely accepted due to Confucian teachings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fear_spectrum_of_cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fe... Translation: It only really matters if you're caught going something wrong by your peers or society at large. There are recent, but also ancient origins which define this culture. The west (western and especially northern europe, etc.) is broadly a cultural outlier anthropologically, which are guilt societies.
- the_af 6y ago
  > Translation: It only really matters if you're caught going something wrong by your peers or society at large. Let's not single out China though. I've read pretty much the same happens in Japan. It might be that the source of this ends up being Confucianism and historical influences of China, but it extends to other countries outside it. The whole "saving face" and outward appearances, etc.
  - 77pt77 6y ago
    Where in the world doesn't this happen?
- yongjik 6y ago
  That sounds rather Orientalistic, and at least partially based on mistranslation of what "shame" means in Chinese. Mencius said about what one should desire: > 仰不愧於天, 俯不怍於人 - Looking up, no shame toward the heaven; looking down, no shame facing others. That is, Confucian "shame" is not something you feel when you are found out. It's what you feel when you look inward at yourself, in front of the heaven. It's closer to what Europeans would call "sin".
- indeedmug 6y ago
  This is a guess but I am not sure if "Confucian" teachings is the right way to figure out modern Chinese society. Plenty of Western writers point to it to understand China but I can't help but feel like that's like pointing to George Washington to understand modern American society. Yes, history plays a role in modern society but it's not the entire picture.
scythe 6y ago
>Researchers are judged on published papers? Publish papers that appear just good enough to be published, ignore everything else. Products are bought based on looks on price? Make a cheap product that appears just good enough to be sold, ignore everything else. This is not often blamed on Leninism, which to me is weird, because of the frequency with which Leninist polities show cults of personality, multi-decade tenures of heads of state, micromanagement of media and public communications, and use of public shaming as a tool to control mid-ranking mopes. And of course, I don't need to explain what a struggle session is. If the governance and judicial practice consistently obeys the maxim that popularity = good and shame = bad, it doesn't seem surprising that that value system would reappear in the proletariat. Proponents of "radically democratic" systems would be wise to consider ways to mitigate this phenomenon.
AussieWog93 6y ago
I don't think this is something that's over-represented in China at all. For a start, many of the Chinese factories making low-quality, cheap goods are instructed by Western IP holders to do so. You see the same thing in many industries no matter where they're manufactured - textiles is the biggest example that springs to mind, but fast food would be another. Hell, I reduce quality to minimise costs in my business (second-hand games; we'll bundle third-party controllers with the console because the consumer doesn't care, and sell the genuine item separately at a premium). At the status-grabbing level, look at the number of Indian students graduating with CompSci/IT degrees that can't even write FizzBuzz. Look at all of the upper-middle-class white people in the West who get their below-average intelligence children into bullshit middle management positions just so they can boast about their child being high-status at dinner parties. Look at all of the "entrepreneurs" out there who take outrageous risks with their parents' money and are actively encouraged to do so "because at least they're doing something with their life". Look at your local members of parliament. Look at Facebook and Google. Look at your friendly neighbourhood OnlyFans thot. Everyone is gaming the system, not just the Chinese.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  "risks with their parents' money and are actively encouraged to do so "because at least they're doing something with their life" Well it does beat spending that money on drugs and hookers
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    They aren't mutually exclusive
- unishark 6y ago
  Indian education is based on rote memorization. That is why they think they can memorize their way to a degree in CS, and end up graduating while still not being able to program. So yes that one is another systemic problem. I live in the West and not sure I've ever even been to a bona fide dinner party. How does one get a grown child into a middle management position? You mean nepotism? Over-represented means more than elsewhere. Not something you can disprove with some examples. I have also worked with the Chinese, and yes in my experience they are much more likely to try and be "clever" by putting something over on you than others. Japanese are very different people to deal with. Part of it surely is that China is developing and the lines are still blurry in acceptable business behavior. But I think their history (of eliminating capitalism then having to rebuild a culture of it from scratch) plays a role too.
sn41 6y ago
People have to fight for survival. University administrators who have not done any serious research in their lives impose unrealistic goals on academics, without realizing that academics is also a game of influence and networking. Sometimes rewards come slowly, over decades. It is no wonder that people will jostle for power and influence if the administrators insist that their very salary depends on it. (I'm not Chinese, this is a global phenomenon and all academics are subjected to this nonsense.) If anything, traditional Chinese culture has elements which are heavily anti-pragmatic. Tao-te-ching Verse 3 begins with not praising meritorious people, to prevent envy/fraud (depending on the translation). [3] https://www.taoistic.com/taoteching-laotzu/taoteching-03.htm https://www.taoistic.com/taoteching-laotzu/taoteching-03.htm
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  University administrators who make the rules are almost entirely published academics.
nimbleal 6y ago
I think the issue is less ultra-pragmatism and more a desire to (quantitively) measure everything to the nth degree. It starts with five year plans at the top and filters down to almost every level of society. Once everything is understood as a list of items with numbers attached, certain behaviours become incentivised. Society optimises for the map not the territory.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
"Poorly made in China" is a really interesting book.
dirtyid 6y ago
Quantity has a quality all it's own. IMO China can spam it until she makes it. Central government wants to incentivize innovation and research so huge Chinese (and homogenized) population starts spamming patents and research papers. The system generates expertise for 1 good patent or paper out of 10. But volume is so high that 1/10 is enough to be globally competitive. Refine quality to 2/10 to reach parity. Refine to 3/10 and China becomes industrial leader. It's not hard to go from 1-3/10 in a short span of time when you have a massive labour force spamming its way into maturity. This is how China went from having poor academic research capacity into leading research many fields relatively fast if one looks past the "culture" / incidental inefficiencies and evaluate based on metrics controlled for quality. Supercharge this with industrial policy and state coordination to target strategic sectors. It's the optimal development strategy that plays to PRC strengths - lots of people, somewhat competent ability to coordinate. In terms of fast, cheap, good, developing countries don't get to be good anyway, frequently poor governance = can't even focus on fast or cheap let alone both. Coordinating both = Deng model: poor China develops cheap and fast aka chabuduo. So Chinese population + spamming chabuduo + coordination = enough occasional, actually good outcomes to reach global competitiveness in ways that matter, fast. Though eventually need to reign in cheating and corruption via parallel improvements in coordination and culture to move onto next tier. Whatever you think of Xi, this is what he's been focusing on. Building premier institutions is also just hard and takes time to cultivate, especially if intellectuals previously purged, so need to spam out all the necessary components first anyway. Can't exactly have leading institutions without pool of experts first. The only place to cut corners for building institutions is to generate excess talent/components and assemble accordingly. Excess talent also necessary to mitigate brain drain (your amazing colleagues). Elsewhere, Chabuduo manufacturing with Chinese population means plastic hangers to iPhones in 10 years. Chabuduo construction means enviable transportation systems, tier1 cities from fishing villages, and ghost cities that eventually gets filled by the hundreds of millions still waiting to be urbanized. Perfect/Good is the enemy of fast development.
- magicsmoke 6y ago
  Sounds very much like a certain anecdote about a pottery class where one half was graded on a single final project and the other half was graded on the quantity of pots they made. At the end of the class, the half tasked with making lots of pots also ended up making better ones because they were constantly making and practicing.
toomim 6y ago
I lived in China for 6 months. This fits my experience, and is remarkably similar to a story I was told by a native Chinese: "We were taught in school about Mao, who rose to power on idealism. At first he showed us many great things that we could do, but eventually idealism led us to the great famine, and many people starved. Since then, Mao lost some power, and now in school they teach us that Mao was 2/3 right, but 1/3 wrong. And that 1/3 that was wrong was idealism. So now we practice pragmatism."
TeeMassive 6y ago
ADV China talk about this a lot. China is basically a low trust society where amoral opportunism is not only tolerated but also expected, as long its 'chabuduo' (just good enough). Putting an entire country through famines and encouraging paranoid political denunciations will squeeze out any concern to ethics and altruism out of any society. In their eyes, when someone gets scammed, the scammer is smart and the victim dumb and deserves what happened to him. I also wouldn't be surprised if it was facilitated by the PLA as a form of Unrestricted Warfare.
bjohnson225 6y ago
> Researchers are judged on published papers? Publish papers that appear just good enough to be published, ignore everything else. If there’s a cultural issue here then it’s a management/leadership one. I don’t think the average westerner would be any different if their future employment required that they have something published. And, I know it would never happen, but if FAANG companies were to all decide that the number of published papers would be key in hiring decisions then this place would be full of people looking for the quickest/easiest way to get the number up.
concordDance 6y ago
> Researchers are judged on published papers? Publish papers that appear just good enough to be published, ignore everything else. Products are bought based on looks on price? Make a cheap product that appears just good enough to be sold, ignore everything else. This is just the result of very strong competition. The only reason things aren't crap in other places is because things are less competitive (due to lower stakes) and people have a desire to make good things (particularly if they have strong cultural values relating to this) and do good work which can rise to the top of the priority list if competition isn't too fierce. The stakes in China are high and were even higher in the past. And values of quality have been sacrificed due to how high competition was back then and those who sacrificed quality are now successful, leading others to immitate them. Quality is likely to improve in the future once people become more secure and the people who were most ruthless in the most competitive times start dying off.
gspr 6y ago
> Researchers are judged on published papers? Publish papers that appear just good enough to be published, ignore everything else. This isn't particularly Chinese, though. Let me clear: by far, most researchers who "make it" in academia are very capable and very highly deserving of their careers. However, it is quite obvious that you can also advance your career by cynically focusing your research in exactly the way you say.

chrischen 6y ago

There are a lot of people in China and everyone's place in society was recently (relatively) reset. Rapidly developing and everyone scrambling to get on top of one another. There's bound to be rough edges in the developing of a society basically from scratch. While China is an ancient country, the rules, regulations, institutions, people in power, basically all reset last century. Also what you described are characteristics of any poorer country. They'll try to get some money from wealthier places in the easiest way possible (Indian IT scams, Nigerian prince scams, etc). For most of the last century and even until today China is still a lot poorer than the US. It's also a massive country. It's easy to discount the 1.4 billion Chinese population because a lot of them are dirt poor still.

rrmm 6y ago

I've seen some good summaries in the past, but unfortunately can't find them at the moment. Some things that play into it are the damage from the Cultural Revolution/Great Leap(s) Foward, government corruption with many rules designed to move money up to party leaders, extreme hardship and poverty, as well as recent affluence. As with anything, it's complicated, and I don't understand things well enough to really synthesize it any better.

geraneum 6y ago

It’s possible that such a phenomenon (existence of paper-mills) could be caused by systemic flaws in policy making (in health care system in this case). As it’s mentioned in the article, such strategies are observed to be adopted by some in Iran and Russia. IMO attributing it to the “culture” of the people in those counties based on the facts presented in the article is far-fetched.

krona 6y ago

In China, the concept of shame [in contrast to guilt] is widely accepted due to Confucian teachings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fear_spectrum_of_cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fe... Translation: It only really matters if you're caught going something wrong by your peers or society at large. There are recent, but also ancient origins which define this culture. The west (western and especially northern europe, etc.) is broadly a cultural outlier anthropologically, which are guilt societies.

the_af 6y ago
> Translation: It only really matters if you're caught going something wrong by your peers or society at large. Let's not single out China though. I've read pretty much the same happens in Japan. It might be that the source of this ends up being Confucianism and historical influences of China, but it extends to other countries outside it. The whole "saving face" and outward appearances, etc.
- 77pt77 6y ago
  Where in the world doesn't this happen?
yongjik 6y ago
That sounds rather Orientalistic, and at least partially based on mistranslation of what "shame" means in Chinese. Mencius said about what one should desire: > 仰不愧於天, 俯不怍於人 - Looking up, no shame toward the heaven; looking down, no shame facing others. That is, Confucian "shame" is not something you feel when you are found out. It's what you feel when you look inward at yourself, in front of the heaven. It's closer to what Europeans would call "sin".
indeedmug 6y ago
This is a guess but I am not sure if "Confucian" teachings is the right way to figure out modern Chinese society. Plenty of Western writers point to it to understand China but I can't help but feel like that's like pointing to George Washington to understand modern American society. Yes, history plays a role in modern society but it's not the entire picture.

scythe 6y ago

>Researchers are judged on published papers? Publish papers that appear just good enough to be published, ignore everything else. Products are bought based on looks on price? Make a cheap product that appears just good enough to be sold, ignore everything else. This is not often blamed on Leninism, which to me is weird, because of the frequency with which Leninist polities show cults of personality, multi-decade tenures of heads of state, micromanagement of media and public communications, and use of public shaming as a tool to control mid-ranking mopes. And of course, I don't need to explain what a struggle session is. If the governance and judicial practice consistently obeys the maxim that popularity = good and shame = bad, it doesn't seem surprising that that value system would reappear in the proletariat. Proponents of "radically democratic" systems would be wise to consider ways to mitigate this phenomenon.

AussieWog93 6y ago

I don't think this is something that's over-represented in China at all. For a start, many of the Chinese factories making low-quality, cheap goods are instructed by Western IP holders to do so. You see the same thing in many industries no matter where they're manufactured - textiles is the biggest example that springs to mind, but fast food would be another. Hell, I reduce quality to minimise costs in my business (second-hand games; we'll bundle third-party controllers with the console because the consumer doesn't care, and sell the genuine item separately at a premium). At the status-grabbing level, look at the number of Indian students graduating with CompSci/IT degrees that can't even write FizzBuzz. Look at all of the upper-middle-class white people in the West who get their below-average intelligence children into bullshit middle management positions just so they can boast about their child being high-status at dinner parties. Look at all of the "entrepreneurs" out there who take outrageous risks with their parents' money and are actively encouraged to do so "because at least they're doing something with their life". Look at your local members of parliament. Look at Facebook and Google. Look at your friendly neighbourhood OnlyFans thot. Everyone is gaming the system, not just the Chinese.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
"risks with their parents' money and are actively encouraged to do so "because at least they're doing something with their life" Well it does beat spending that money on drugs and hookers
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  They aren't mutually exclusive
unishark 6y ago
Indian education is based on rote memorization. That is why they think they can memorize their way to a degree in CS, and end up graduating while still not being able to program. So yes that one is another systemic problem. I live in the West and not sure I've ever even been to a bona fide dinner party. How does one get a grown child into a middle management position? You mean nepotism? Over-represented means more than elsewhere. Not something you can disprove with some examples. I have also worked with the Chinese, and yes in my experience they are much more likely to try and be "clever" by putting something over on you than others. Japanese are very different people to deal with. Part of it surely is that China is developing and the lines are still blurry in acceptable business behavior. But I think their history (of eliminating capitalism then having to rebuild a culture of it from scratch) plays a role too.

sn41 6y ago

People have to fight for survival. University administrators who have not done any serious research in their lives impose unrealistic goals on academics, without realizing that academics is also a game of influence and networking. Sometimes rewards come slowly, over decades. It is no wonder that people will jostle for power and influence if the administrators insist that their very salary depends on it. (I'm not Chinese, this is a global phenomenon and all academics are subjected to this nonsense.) If anything, traditional Chinese culture has elements which are heavily anti-pragmatic. Tao-te-ching Verse 3 begins with not praising meritorious people, to prevent envy/fraud (depending on the translation). [3] https://www.taoistic.com/taoteching-laotzu/taoteching-03.htm https://www.taoistic.com/taoteching-laotzu/taoteching-03.htm

alisonkisk 6y ago
University administrators who make the rules are almost entirely published academics.

nimbleal 6y ago

I think the issue is less ultra-pragmatism and more a desire to (quantitively) measure everything to the nth degree. It starts with five year plans at the top and filters down to almost every level of society. Once everything is understood as a list of items with numbers attached, certain behaviours become incentivised. Society optimises for the map not the territory.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

"Poorly made in China" is a really interesting book.

dirtyid 6y ago

Quantity has a quality all it's own. IMO China can spam it until she makes it. Central government wants to incentivize innovation and research so huge Chinese (and homogenized) population starts spamming patents and research papers. The system generates expertise for 1 good patent or paper out of 10. But volume is so high that 1/10 is enough to be globally competitive. Refine quality to 2/10 to reach parity. Refine to 3/10 and China becomes industrial leader. It's not hard to go from 1-3/10 in a short span of time when you have a massive labour force spamming its way into maturity. This is how China went from having poor academic research capacity into leading research many fields relatively fast if one looks past the "culture" / incidental inefficiencies and evaluate based on metrics controlled for quality. Supercharge this with industrial policy and state coordination to target strategic sectors. It's the optimal development strategy that plays to PRC strengths - lots of people, somewhat competent ability to coordinate. In terms of fast, cheap, good, developing countries don't get to be good anyway, frequently poor governance = can't even focus on fast or cheap let alone both. Coordinating both = Deng model: poor China develops cheap and fast aka chabuduo. So Chinese population + spamming chabuduo + coordination = enough occasional, actually good outcomes to reach global competitiveness in ways that matter, fast. Though eventually need to reign in cheating and corruption via parallel improvements in coordination and culture to move onto next tier. Whatever you think of Xi, this is what he's been focusing on. Building premier institutions is also just hard and takes time to cultivate, especially if intellectuals previously purged, so need to spam out all the necessary components first anyway. Can't exactly have leading institutions without pool of experts first. The only place to cut corners for building institutions is to generate excess talent/components and assemble accordingly. Excess talent also necessary to mitigate brain drain (your amazing colleagues). Elsewhere, Chabuduo manufacturing with Chinese population means plastic hangers to iPhones in 10 years. Chabuduo construction means enviable transportation systems, tier1 cities from fishing villages, and ghost cities that eventually gets filled by the hundreds of millions still waiting to be urbanized. Perfect/Good is the enemy of fast development.

magicsmoke 6y ago
Sounds very much like a certain anecdote about a pottery class where one half was graded on a single final project and the other half was graded on the quantity of pots they made. At the end of the class, the half tasked with making lots of pots also ended up making better ones because they were constantly making and practicing.

toomim 6y ago

I lived in China for 6 months. This fits my experience, and is remarkably similar to a story I was told by a native Chinese: "We were taught in school about Mao, who rose to power on idealism. At first he showed us many great things that we could do, but eventually idealism led us to the great famine, and many people starved. Since then, Mao lost some power, and now in school they teach us that Mao was 2/3 right, but 1/3 wrong. And that 1/3 that was wrong was idealism. So now we practice pragmatism."

TeeMassive 6y ago

ADV China talk about this a lot. China is basically a low trust society where amoral opportunism is not only tolerated but also expected, as long its 'chabuduo' (just good enough). Putting an entire country through famines and encouraging paranoid political denunciations will squeeze out any concern to ethics and altruism out of any society. In their eyes, when someone gets scammed, the scammer is smart and the victim dumb and deserves what happened to him. I also wouldn't be surprised if it was facilitated by the PLA as a form of Unrestricted Warfare.

bjohnson225 6y ago

> Researchers are judged on published papers? Publish papers that appear just good enough to be published, ignore everything else. If there’s a cultural issue here then it’s a management/leadership one. I don’t think the average westerner would be any different if their future employment required that they have something published. And, I know it would never happen, but if FAANG companies were to all decide that the number of published papers would be key in hiring decisions then this place would be full of people looking for the quickest/easiest way to get the number up.

concordDance 6y ago

> Researchers are judged on published papers? Publish papers that appear just good enough to be published, ignore everything else. Products are bought based on looks on price? Make a cheap product that appears just good enough to be sold, ignore everything else. This is just the result of very strong competition. The only reason things aren't crap in other places is because things are less competitive (due to lower stakes) and people have a desire to make good things (particularly if they have strong cultural values relating to this) and do good work which can rise to the top of the priority list if competition isn't too fierce. The stakes in China are high and were even higher in the past. And values of quality have been sacrificed due to how high competition was back then and those who sacrificed quality are now successful, leading others to immitate them. Quality is likely to improve in the future once people become more secure and the people who were most ruthless in the most competitive times start dying off.

gspr 6y ago

> Researchers are judged on published papers? Publish papers that appear just good enough to be published, ignore everything else. This isn't particularly Chinese, though. Let me clear: by far, most researchers who "make it" in academia are very capable and very highly deserving of their careers. However, it is quite obvious that you can also advance your career by cynically focusing your research in exactly the way you say.