This is a chapter in a TFF anthology in the making – “If You Want To Understand China.”

Introduction

”Should the West see China as a threat or as an opportunity, a friend or an enemy? Are we heading for a third world war? Does the seemingly inexorable rise of China spell the doom of many values in which we have long believed? Might some form of communism prevail after all? Are China’s motives sinister? Is it trying to subvert us? Is it plotting mischief? Given the very bad press China has been getting in Western media, one might certainly think so. But the word ‘sinister’ has an interesting derivation. Its original meaning has nothing to do with wily orientalism. It means simply left-handed. Most of us are right-handed, using our dominant left-brain hemispheres which are wired to the right side of our bodies. But a few of us are left-handed, with that side of the body wired to the right-brain hemisphere. Such people are the opposite to us. They negate the way we are and given the archaic meaning of the word sinister, this once seems to have frightened us and aroused suspicion.”

This is the opening paragraph of the book Has China Devised a Superior Path to Wealth Creation? The Role of Secular Values (2022). It is completely based on the 7-Dimension (7-D) model of national culture developed by Fons Trompenaars, one of the authors of the book. It points to the fact that in terms of that model, Chinese culture is at the opposite end of almost all dimensions, compared to Western culture.

This is by no means a new finding. The differences can be found on the Trompenaars Hampden-Turner (THT) website (publicly available). It is, therefore, worrying that no one, not even most scholars familiar with the model, has ever attempted to look at all the criticism towards China from a cross-cultural perspective. Understanding that many of the conflicts are not of a political but of a cultural nature can depoliticise those issues and clear the stage for peaceful dialogue and future cooperation.

Following up TFF’s 2021 Smokescreen Report, the main aspect of this revision/expansion is that we attempt to incorporate the 7-D model to give the findings and arguments in the report a more solid academic basis.

We do not need all seven dimensions to make our point. The first section of this chapter will briefly introduce the entire model. This second section will pick up three dimensions and use them to establish a model to explain the most salient differences between Western and Chinese cultures and the consequences of those differences. That model will include a proper definition of ‘Western culture’. The West is not a single nation, and not having a working definition of ‘the West’ has always been a serious flaw in the arguments of both pro- and anti-Western narratives.

Dimensions of culture


How do you measure the cultures of different nations? Trompenaars has posed a series of dilemmas to tens of thousands of managers worldwide who have attended his company’s seminars to see on which side of those dilemmas they come down. The purpose of using dilemmas was to oblige the respondent to give priority to one of two propositions. The word ‘dilemma’ means ‘two propositions’ in seeming conflict. These dilemmas are very unwelcome, and nearly all managers tell us that they feel torn, but it turns out to be a good way to identify cultural biases.

For instance, most Westerners prefer freedom to community despite the fact that it requires a community to guarantee freedom and unless it succeeds as a community, freedom will be seriously curtailed. The explanations of the dimension below regularly use ‘we’ as the subject; that refers to the THT consultants.

Universalist – Particularist

Our first dimension measures whether we are more oriented to Universal laws or Particular and exceptional circumstances. We tell each respondent that s/he is a passenger in a car driven by a best friend who is breaking the speed limit and then strikes and injures a pedestrian. The friend is taken to court, where the respondent is the sole witness. Were the respondent not to disclose that the friend was speeding, s/he would likely get off. What right or reason does the friend have to expect the respondent’s help? This dilemma pits the value of a universal law requiring truthful witness in a court of law against friendship and exceptional obligation to a particular friend. Which side of this dilemma do you choose? Is it Truth or Love?

During these seminars, South Koreans have come up to thank the consultants for proving that Americans are corrupt. ‘They won’t even help their best friends!’ Americans have also come up to thank them for proving South Koreans are corrupt. ‘They even lie under oath!’

Yet the truth is that lurking within us are the values of the foreign culture. Let us suppose that we substitute for ‘friend’ the love of your life, the woman to whom you had proposed marriage just moments before. Are you going to drop her in it? What we choose to do depends on circumstances, and different nations have encountered different circumstances historically.

For each dimension, we will show the world map view copied from the THT website.

The darker the colour, the more Universalist the nation. The site shows the actual percentages per nation.

Individualist – Communitarian

Our second dimension concerns why they do what they do in the first place. Is it to gain ‘as much personal freedom as possible’? Or is it to ‘continuously look after the needs of fellow beings?’ This dilemma illustrates the dimension: Individualism vs. Community. An interesting feature of these answers is the size of the minorities.

While Americans back freedom two to one, some 32% of them work for the community. China actually breaks 50/50 on this issue, suggesting that its entrepreneurial individualism has always been there. Even so, all Asian nations save Japan are in the bottom half of the chart where concern for the community looms much larger. Discrimination against the Chinese, present in many countries, may actually propel them into business as it did the British and American Quakers, Non-Conformists, Huguenots and Jews.

If you get on with a useful trade, you tend to be left alone, and governments are less oppressive. In order to survive, you need something more than your outer appearance. You need to entertain, excel in sports, provide money, heal and help people, excel in scholarship etc.

Going out to work is a form of freedom featured in the global drama over COVID-19. Should we lock down and save the Community or venture forth in Individual defiance? What happens when deaths spike and consumers choose to stay at home?

Specific – diffuse

Our third dimension is Specificity vs. Diffusion. Does a culture prefer to analyse and break things down, or relate, connect, and build things up? We asked respondents what their conception of a corporation was. Which of the following descriptions did they prefer? We have put words denoting specificity and diffusion, respectively, in italics. Is a corporation a set of things, or is it a web of relations?

‘A company performs a variety of functions or tasks. People are hired to do these things with the help of machines and equipment. They are paid for tasks performed.’

‘A company is a group of people working together. They have social relations with each other and that organisation. Their effective functions rely on those relations.’

Here are the results we got:

Preference for specific description over diffuse description:
USA 91% • Netherlands 86% • United Kingdom 83% • Canada 72% • Australia 69% Finland 65% • Sweden 64% • Turkey 62% • Belgium 58% • Germany 54% • France 51% • Denmark 50% • Malaysia 40% • Hong Kong 39% • Singapore 38% • South Korea 27% • Japan 25% • Indonesia 23% • China 17%.

These results put North America, the UK and Australia at the Specific end, Scandinavia and Europe at the centre and East Asia at the Diffuse end. The difference between the USA, 91%, and China, 17%, is huge and may help explain the current enmity.

No East Asian country prefers the specific description, and the nations eschewing it less are ex-British colonies Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

An important symptom of very high specificity is the belief that profitability tells us all we need to know about a company. Everything a company does can be distilled by the Bottom Line, a single statistic that says it all. We asked whether ‘the only goal for a company is profit.’

Here is what we got:

The only goal is profit
USA 40% • Australia 35% • Canada 34% • United Kingdom 33% • New Zealand 32% • Italy 28% • Netherlands 26% • Germany 24% • Finland 22% • Hong Kong 19% • Singapore 18% • France 16% • Indonesia 14% • China 9% • Japan 8%.

There is now no nation in the world that upholds this dictum by a majority. But the USA, the UK and the ex-dominions still give it sizeable support. The desire to boil everything down to a single figure is still irresistible for large minorities of managers and financiers among these. Five of the six most dismissive of profit-as-a-sole-indicator are East Asian. Five of the most profit-oriented are English-speaking.

Achieved status – Ascribed status

Our fourth dimension was about how a culture accords status. Does it do so based on what someone has achieved, or does it ascribe status to people on other grounds, such as their appearance, their class, their family, their potential, their gentility, their vocation, their ethnicity, or their humanity?

We suggested to respondents that they should act as really suits them, even if they did not get things done. We expected those oriented to achievement to reject this statement and they did. The results are presented below.

The surprise is how weak global support for achievement really is. The highest score is among Americans, but that is only 59%, and only three nations score above 50%, and nearly all save one below that. Achievement seems to be tied closely to public acclaim, succeeding in well-known, widely acclaimed contests and/or earning a lot of money so that people notice you. The latter kind of achievement depends on markets bestowing wealth on those that attract customers.

But there are also many talents that markets do not reward. Those who take on the toughest challenges, solve problems few comprehend, help and sustain other people, show compassion, fight injustice, and sustain our environment do not ‘achieve’ in the conventional sense. Indeed, they may have little to show for lifetime struggles on behalf of the environment, social justice, prison reform, female equality, human rights, and so on. Nevertheless, there are reasons for being grateful to them and bestowing admiration upon them.

Moreover, there is a question of equality. If we give status to others, regardless of their track record thus far, then they are more likely to achieve in the future. We give them the confidence to ‘have a go’. They are important to us before they set out to achieve. Should we not educate this way?

Deng Xiaoping was much praised in the West when he announced ‘it is glorious to be rich’. China had at last understood what the West was about, even if the admission was belated. People are enriched when their friends and colleagues seek to engage them and ascribe status to this opportunity. What matters is not a dirty, great pile of loot but joining yourself to others and fusing your fortunes with theirs. China envisages a sharing economy. It is not as if Americans do not know this. At the climax of the film ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ the hero is reminded that ‘no man is a failure who has friends.’ It is instead that we do not care sufficiently.

Internal control – External control

Our fifth dimension has to do with being inner-directed by one’s own convictions versus outer-directed by the social and physical environment around us. Those who pioneered capitalism take pride in having shaped the whole system and being authorities on its proper operations. The self-made man created himself through sheer willpower and is largely responsible for his own greatness. Like Frank Sinatra singing, ‘I do it my way.’

If you thank God at all, it is for my ‘unconquerable soul’. You are ‘bloody but unbowed’ in the face of misfortune. The problem with inner-directedness is that our present climate crisis owes much to it. Our take-make-waste culture is largely the consequence of exploiting our planet with no thought for its ecology, of believing that whatever we want, we should get – no matter the cost to our habitat and other people.

The belief that there is no logic of importance except our own limitless desires has led us to chronically underestimate the wonders of evolution. We impose upon nature the thinking of the factory.

In this study, we measured inner versus outer direction using statements like, ‘What happens to me is of my own doing.’ ‘There is no such thing as luck.’

What we found is described below:

That we are or should be, in control of our own destinies is a powerful appeal in English-speaking nations, five of which top the graph above and the seventh of which is the UK itself. It was key to Britain’s decision to leave the EU and beat its own path into the future. The idea is that you forge your future through an indomitable determination and ‘rule the waves’.

Being slaves is for Africans, not the British. Spain has a long tradition of being macho, in which men thrust their will on the opposite sex. Whether it’s possible to be independent in a global system rather than interdependent is an open question. Once again, we see that East Asia is much more outer-directed. Among the bottom nine, five are in East Asia, and China is near the bottom. It responds to externalities, like COVID-19, more readily.

Nations that did not invent capitalism but are now catching up are much more likely to see themselves as tossed on turbulent seas amid world forces to which they must adapt. Senior Japanese managers call themselves ‘white watermen’, shooting the rapids while trying to avoid rocks. Luck and good or ill fortune play a significant part in Chinese narratives, witness the pandemic which started there.

Another problem with inner direction is that assertive people are tempted to talk more than listen, heedless of the Japanese proverb that we have two ears but only one mouth so that we may hear more and sound off less. One problem with our talking so much is that East Asians learn from us much more readily and quickly than we learn from them.

We accuse them of copying, but this is a response to our readiness and eagerness to lecture and to express ourselves. East Asia has been designated a Listening Culture compared to the West’s Talking Culture. When you are trying to catch up, outer-directed listening is a necessity and will lead to learning faster. Dr Fauci was asked by Republican lawmakers whether China was stealing American ideas on vaccines. He said he doubted this since, in a week or so, the results would be published anyway!

Sequential – Synchronic

Our sixth dimension concerns how a culture thinks of time. Since time cannot be seen or touched save through various instruments, it is very much a matter of cultural interpretation. Nation cultures tend to see time as sequential, as a passing train, ‘time and tide waits for no man’, or synchronic, like ‘synchronize your watches’ or ‘seize the time.’

The difference is most clearly seen in the US versus Japanese manufacturing. The Americans specialized in doing things fast, in Time and Motion studies and Scientific Management. The trick was for workers to keep up with the speed of the conveyor belt or machine, even where this shrank the job to twisting a bolt twice as it moved past you. Speed by itself can lead to gross job simplification and people as mere handmaids to the machinery that will soon replace them.

In contrast, the Japanese invented Just-in-time. This takes a number of sequences and joins them up so that they work in harmony. The Japanese still study Taylorism assiduously but synchronize his sequences just in time to create an ‘ever faster dance’. Those managers who can harmonize one sequence with another are enabled to think long-term, while those who think only in terms of sequences want to ‘make a quick buck’.

Long-term self-control – short-term self-indulgence

We asked managers about the length of their time horizons and although the East had greater long-term thinking than most Western countries, the differences were relatively small. A more successful set of distinctions was found by Geert Hofstede, who created a long-term versus short-term scale and found that this correlated highly with short-term Self-indulgence and long-term Self-control.

Here are his findings:

Short-term (West) > Long-term (East)
UK 75 • Kenya 75 • US 71 • Greece 69 • Australia 68 • Switzerland 67 • Netherlands 56 • South Korea 25 • Taiwan 13 • Hong Kong 4 • China 0.

Self-indulgent (West) > Selv-controlled (East)
Australia 71 • UK 71 • US 68 • Canada 68 • Netherlands 68 • Hong Kong 61 • Finland 57 • Norway 55 • Greece 40 • South Korea 29 • China 24.

Note that between the Netherlands and South Korea, there is a ‘cliff edge’ with the first scoring 56% and latter 25%, some 31 percentage points lower. Four East Asian countries are substantially thinking longer term. It very much looks as if part of this is due to the Self-control needed to wait, and the Self-indulgence needed to enjoy oneself right now.

China’s long-term attitude is displayed in its willingness to invest in renewable technologies and electric vehicles, its leading world role in building infrastructure between itself and the rest of the world and making health part of that infrastructure. The savings rates in East Asia are also substantially higher, while many Western countries are deeply in debt.

China also borrows – some would say excessively – but it does this to build industry long-term, not to indulge consumers. We may note that the long term includes the short term and that, after an interval, this pays off every day.

But short-term gains, especially financial speculation, make long-term industry-building impossible. You can lay 1,000 exciting bets with the money needed for patient investing. Almost everything worthwhile takes time and patience. It is widely acknowledged that neither Wall Street nor the City has much appetite for building up industries. The likes of Rolls Royce and ICI, Imperial Chemical Industries, could not get started in Britain today. The penchant is for extracting money from industry, not putting it in.

Using our positive-negative differences, we are now in a position to summarise all six dimensions, or seven dimensions, if we include Hofstede’s Self-indulgence – Self-control.

Combining dimensions

Thus far, we have considered our dimensions one by one, but real life is not that simple. In actual practice, two or more dimensions combine, and moral positions and actions result from these fusing together. For example, universal laws will take the shape of very specific instructions applying to each individual, bringing three dimensions together.

Take, for example, the last two dimensions we considered, Short-term – Long-term and Self-Indulgence-Self-control. If we cross these dimensions, we get two quite different phenomena.

The West seems fixated on consuming and indulging short-term so we have run-away consumption and debt. For many years, we have been trying to boost demand by slashing interest rates, which have been near zero since the 2008 Recession. We seem terrified of taking money out of the economy via taxes lest people stop buying. The international balance of payments shows that the US and the UK import far more than they export, and for years, the high level of American consumption kept the world going.

In contrast, China shows a pattern of patient production and savings, brought about by a combination of Long-term orientations and Self-control. The Chinese rely heavily on manufacturing for export markets and expanding their world market shares. The Chinese people traditionally save and exercise self-control. China invests in plants and equipment and less in credit cards.

General Motors is a good example of what ails the US. For many years its profits come less and less from the cars it makes and more and more from customers going into debt to afford a car initially and paying interest on that debt. In contrast China produces and exports and has a huge balance-of-payments surplus. It occupies the bottom right quadrant of the cross-axes above. Many economists do not see this division of labour between America and China as a disadvantage. Exports and imports will balance each other in the end. China needs America to buy its goods. But to have one country descend ever further into debt and borrowing, self-indulgence and desperate urgency for funds amounts to a decline of national character. It reduces us from creators and producers to alimentary canals and in-taking mechanisms. We become anxious, timid, needy and enslaved to our creditors.

We could cross our Short-term – Long-term dimension with our Individualism – Community dimension to get two more quadrants. When we consume as individuals, this is all too often short-term, as in an impulse purchase. When we produce as a community, this is almost invariably longer-term. We do not know whether what we produce will satisfy buyers and must await the outcome. Our satisfaction is contingent on having first satisfied others. The Shopping Mall is the ideal of the Consuming Society, while the Creative Workshop is the ideal for the Producing Society. But note that the Creative workshop includes the Shopping Mall while the Shopping Mall excludes the Creative Workshop and has no time for its prolonged efforts, its need for persistence and its gradual mastery of its product.

One major difference between the West and the East is that the West believes that a Free Market should steer the economy and that the choices of consumers register ‘dollar ballots’ for what is needed and what is not. It is not for governments to say what we should be buying but for market places to serve citizens.

Interesting too? China unleashes the Health Silk Road against the Corona Pandemic

In the past, we have seen the state attempt to decree what people should buy, only for such systems to fail miserably. The sheer complexity of detail is enough to overwhelm even the most astute government officials. Thousands of tractors rust in the fields because some functionary omitted to order a number 3 lug-head bolt. What has not been tried until China did it is governments working with market forces to choose the best that world markets throw up and which governments wish to use, like renewable energy.

The West versus The Rest

We love to point out the mistakes and misbehaviour of the ‘West’, ‘Western’ media, etc. The weak point of that criticism is the lack of a definition of ‘West’ as a political block. Fortunately, the 7-D model allows us to formulate such a definition. A common trait of the cultural profiles of the Western nations is that they are characterised by the Universalist, Individualist, Specific, Achieved status and Sequential; some, like the English-speaking nations and the Northwest European nations, are strongly so on all these dimensions.

There is an interesting example to corroborate the value of this definition. I have posted an analysis on TFF’s site about the cultural aspect of the choice of nations to participate in the sanctions against Russia – see Is participating in the sanctions against Russia a cultural matter? When we compare a world map with two colours, the nations that participate (green) and the others (grey) with the map of the dimension Universalist – Particularist, we immediately see the striking similarity.

The strongly Universalist nations participate. South Africa seems to be the most conspicuous exception. However, it is possible that the dark blue colour is caused by the fact that the respondents in that nation are (still) overwhelmingly white South Africans.

Here is a map indicating nations that criticised China for its policies in Xinjiang during a UN vote (red) and those that defended China for the same (green). The other nations abstained. A salient detail is that many of the defending nations are Muslim states.

And here is the map of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM):

With the exception of Russia, all Particularist nations are members or observers of NAM.

The Western nations like to criticise emerging non-Western nations for harming the ‘rules-based world’. We can now recognise that expression as linked to a high Universalist inclination. The Western nations, among which all former colonising countries, are used to draw up rules and enforce them worldwide. Non-Western nations, however, are less and less willing to comply, as this concept of a rules-based world does not align with their cultural profiles, which are highly Particularist, Communitarian and Diffuse: the generic non-Western culture. (I’ve written about this in an article on The Transnational, Western policy towards the non-Western world – From development cooperation to development obstruction.)

When we plot groups of nations like BRICS or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), we can see that they all fall into the non-Western cultural region. In fact, a considerable part of the conflicts in today’s world are between these two generic cultural profiles.

I also published an analysis on the TFF site of the Chinese version of democracy and about multiple interpretations of human rights. In both, I use the 7-D model to provide an academic foundation for the findings. More generally, the 7-D model can help us set up an academic model of a multi-polar world.

Chess versus Weiqi/Go

An article in Asia Times of 3/11/2023 – Louise Low, Face-off on the grand chessboard – offers a highly interesting perspective to the ongoing tech-war between the West and China, that is also applicable to all Western accusations against China.

Louise Low projects the war as a game of chess, but one in which the two players, the West and China, are playing different games. While the West is playing chess, Low contends that China is playing Weiqi, better known by its Japanese name Go. The difference is best explained by quoting two entire paragraphs from Low.

“In their book A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari offer a succinct explication of the difference between the two games. They note that in chess, the conflict is institutionalized and regulated with a front and a rear battle line, whereas in weiqi, there are no battle lines. It is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, they note, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point.

Chess is played in a structured space. Each piece is assigned a specific role in the hierarchy, with a clear differentiation between the pawns and the elite pieces, such as knights, bishops, kings, and queens. Each piece moves in its designated way.

In contrast, weiqi is played in a fluid space where the pieces are identical, and their roles are ambiguous. It is the strategic context that matters. The strategic orchestration of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There are as many moves in weiqi as atoms in the observable universe, offering infinite flexibility and manoeuvring room to an astute player. The ambiguousness and fluidity of their roles augment the potential importance of every piece on the board, bewildering those who do not understand the weiqi game.

China plays weiqi by radically expanding its playing field and its global political-economic space.”

The expansion of BRICS and BRI are notable examples of this strategy.

This analysis is indeed brilliant. However, we can try to rephrase it using the 7-D model. The institutionalized and regulated nature of chess indicates that it has roots in a Universalist culture. Weiqi is played in a fluid space, and the roles of the pieces are only determined in a concrete situation; typical phenomena of a Particularist culture.

Chess is played in a structured space, with each piece having its typical hierarchical role. This points to a Specific culture. In weiqi, each piece can take on any role on the basis of its relation to others in a concrete position; typical for a Diffuse culture.

We can now draw a graph:

The US was playing chess during the war in Indo-China, while the Vietcong and neighbouring allies were playing weiqi. We know the outcome of that war.

Currently, Israel is playing chess, while Hamas and other Palestinian organisations are playing weiqi.

Worldwide, the non-Western nations are playing a game of weiqi with the West, but the latter is interpreting this in terms of chess.

The cultural basis of extremism

The 7-D model also shows that many forms of extremism are culture-based. When the culture of a certain nation scores close to one of the ends of the dimension, that culture is prone to lose sight of the other end. This is the basis of extremist thinking.

Dimensions are usually depicted as horizontal lines for convenience’ sake. However, in reality, they are circular in nature. Universalist people are aware of exceptions, just as Particularist people appreciate the value of rules. The difference is where you start:

Extremism on this dimension starts when highly Universalist or highly Particularist people start losing sight of the other end.

The idea of a rules-based world as something that we all should wish for is an excellent example of how a normal aspect of a culture can drift off and become extremism. It is expected that this concept has emerged in Western culture, led by the world’s most Universalist nations. It becomes problematic if those nations, who are still in charge of most global organizations (like the UN or NATO), try to enforce it on more Particularist nations.

Particularist people perceive such an elaborate set of rules as stifling. While they used to be willing to try – in the belief that Western nations were a good example to follow – they are less and less willing today.

First and foremost, China is showing that a highly Particularist nation can become the world’s second-largest economy while defying Western rules-based thinking.

Extremism can also occur in non-Western nations, of course. A good example is China’s Cultural Revolution. Mao Zedong and his followers envisioned a world in which people would place all community needs before their own personal needs. This extreme Communitarian world outlook almost wrecked the nation. It also had an aspect of extreme Diffuseness, seeing the ideal human being as a universal person, a farmer, worker and soldier in one. This broke down the entire educational system.

Pol Pot and his allies in Cambodia were inspired by similar ideas.

Extremist Particularism may also have been the problem behind China’s decreasing ability to cope with COVID in 2022.

While the Chinese and Cambodians recognised the problems and were able to repair the damage, the West stubbornly still believes in the extreme (reified) idea of its rules-based world.