But what of other foreign companies and foreigners living and working in China? For the individual foreigner living in China, it can be fairly easy to get over the Great Firewall. Meanwhile, it appears that so long as the foreigner is not a reporter, and so long as his activity on the Internet is not in the Chinese language or does not involve heavy interaction with Chinese people, more often than not the Chinese government could care less what he does. However, only a fool would press his luck. Chinese government policy can change without warning, and sometimes the government feels a need to make an example of someone, and foreigners make easy targets.
Foreign companies and businessmen face a very different problem in China, however. For years the US State Department has warned businessmen travelling to China that they should take elaborate steps to protect their digital devices and records from the prying eyes of the Chinese government. While some people scoff at such warnings, knowledgeable insiders suggest that if you have important trade secrets on your work laptop, you should not take it on a trip to China, but bring a fresh, clean laptop that contains only the necessary information for the trip. Laptops, cell phones, and U-disks should always be closely accounted for while you are in China, and you should assume that your Internet activity will be closely monitored. Any company operating within China has to assume that the Chinese government either already has access to all of their digital property, or can gain it quite easily, and so should take suitable countermeasures to keep its data secret if this proprietary information is deemed valuable.
Many international companies have reported problems accessing their overseas servers or the overseas clouds where they keep all of their data and communications. In the past, the way around this was to set up a VPN. However, the Chinese government is cracking down on VPNs, as they are currently the primary way of getting over the Great Firewall. While thus far corporate VPNs have been largely spared, it is by no means certain that this will be true in the future. Any company or businessman wanting to do business in China should consult a reliable tech person to ensure that communications with home can be adequately maintained, and that digital devices, data, and communications can be safeguarded.
At the same time, it appears that the Chinese government may soon be requiring foreign companies to be in complete compliance with their new cybersecurity laws. If this is the case, international companies doing business within China may find using overseas clouds or servers out of the question entirely, and they may have to hand the government access to the encryption keys to their systems as the price of doing business in China. Everyone is now holding their breaths to see how the new cybersecurity laws will be implemented.
Chapter 3
Cultural Influences on Chinese Etiquette
Confucius still lives in the hearts and minds of most older Chinese, and the social values he taught remain the bedrock of mainstream Chinese society. The family is still the pre-eminent institution in China, and most individuals see their first duty as attending to their family’s welfare. Working family members still pool their resources for the economic gain of the entire family.
Within families, courtesy, sincerity, humility, loyalty, respect for parents, and obedience to superiors are still the quintessential essences of Chinese culture. The obligations children have to their core family groups do not end with marriage, and this has been one of the enduring strengths of the Chinese.
Another inherent weakness in Confucian philosophy is evidenced by the “nonstandard” kind of etiquette discussed in the previous chapter; the Confucian emphasis on harmony applies only to one’s inner circle of family, relatives, friends, guests, and so on, and not to people outside of it. However, this is one of the traditional cultural factors that is slowly but surely changing in today’s China. As people have become individualistic and more independent, they have also come to depend on a wide range of people outside their inner circles— including businesspeople and government officials, as well as other strangers and foreigners.
Naturally, older Chinese people are more likely to still believe in and follow traditional ways, while younger ones are more likely to be modern and trendy in the Western fashion. There are also significant culture gaps between those who live in the interior, rural regions of the country and those who live along the eastern seaboard in the larger cities.
There is no possibility that all of the characteristic mindsets and behaviors that have distinguished the Chinese people for five thousand years will disappear in the foreseeable future. They are reflected in integral parts of the various languages of China, and language is the primary carrier of culture. Furthermore, much of the culture is embedded in the educational system and, in particular, in the government bureaucracy.
But Chinese who were fully programmed in the traditional culture as youths are disappearing at a significant rate each year. Those who came of age during the reign of Mao Zedung (1949–1976) tend to be less traditional than those who came of age earlier. Those who came of age during the 1980s or later tend to be even less traditional with each passing year.
The following sections discuss some of the most important cultural factors that will continue to impact Chinese thinking and behavior for the foreseeable future.
The Yin-yang Principle
It is, I believe, impossible to fully understand Chinese behavior without comprehensive knowledge of the ancient yin-yang concept. The terms yin and yang are generally known around the world as relating to such opposites as hot-cold, sweet-sour, male-female, and positive-negative. But this understanding of them is incomplete.
The concept of yin and yang is, in fact, an explanation of the nature of the cosmos, the behavior of all organic and inorganic material in the universe, and the invisible energy that infuses the cosmos down to the level of quantum physics. Yin-yang incorporates the creation and extinction of all things in an unending cycle.
Looking just beneath the surface of Chinese behavior reveals that the yin-yang principle applies to relationships between males and females, between seniors and juniors, and between the government and the private sector. In fact, it applies to virtually all relationships and activities.
Chinese scholars and philosophers have been writing about yin and yang since around 1400 BC. Even before this they were acutely aware that yin-yang relationships were not fixed but rather in a constant state of flux, waxing and waning in inverse proportions between hot and cold, strong and weak, and young and old.
Traditional etiquette in China is built around keeping all of these yin-yang relationships in harmony. Having said this, modern China has by and large eschewed many traditional ways of thinking. While modern Chinese might sometimes tend to categorize things in terms of yin and yang, in daily life the need to balance yin and yang is thought of mostly in terms of the food that is eaten and the order in which the dishes are consumed, and China’s traditional medical and therapeutic practices. If anything, someone applying the principles of yin-yang might think that modern China is a country very much out of balance, with too much yang and not nearly enough yin.
China’s Dragon Culture
China has long had what could be called a dragon culture. Colorful images of Chinese dragons, creatures much more fanciful-looking than Western ones, are common throughout the country.
There are four kinds of dragons in Chinese mythology: celestial dragons that guard the heavens; spiritual dragons that are in charge of the weather, and can cause havoc when fighting or angered; earth dragons that rule the waters and live in seas, lakes, rivers, and ponds; and treasure dragons that are in charge of the precious minerals in the ground.
According to myth a celestial dragon brought the first emperor down from heaven to the Middle Kingdom, and thusly became the badge of the imperial family. The beds emperors slept on were called dragon
