China – At least one generation off

So many assholes utter phrases like the following:

 ”China is going to be the next superpower!  The US will be China’s bitch in 15 years, once they develop!”

Mmhmm.  Most of these assholes don’t know any actual Chinese people.  They may know Chinese people who are ethnically Chinese, have Chinese parents, and maybe have even emigrated to the United States, but these people are a far cry from actual Chinese people who currently live in China and do not plan on leaving.  In otherwords, Chinese people.

If you spend 5 seconds thinking about it, even the most feeble minded among us could divine that perhaps the people who left China for the US did so for a reason.  The reason is usually because these people are smart, and having actually lived in China and actually know what it’s like, both culturally, economically, and politically, can appreciate the problems China has, and it has them in all three categories.  So these people leave China and come here – usually for better economic opportunities.

And ultimately, when people talk about “super-power” status, they typically mean economically, because everything follows from there.  The United States has a ridiculous edge on military technology over the rest of the world and it does because it has spent many trillions of dollars on research and development, much to the chagrin of whiney liberals everywhere.  If we didn’t have trillions of dollars to spend on research and development, we wouldn’t have spent trillions of dollars on research and development and we would not have the military might we have today.  Ipso facto, when we talk about the power balance in the world what we’re really talking about is money, because as is my mantra, money talks and bullshit walks.

People are simple creatures and they respond to stimuli.  They seek pleasure and avoid pain.  Money accomplishes both of those goals.  Since governments are staffed with people, it only makes sense to personify governments the same way.

Okay, tangent over.

I work with Chinese people in a professional business capacity.  In other words, I work with Chinese outsourcers directly.  90% of the e-mail I receive at work is correspondence with a foreign team of developers that I oversee as the project technical leadership.  I want to illustrate an aspect of Chinese culture that I have recently become acquainted with first-hand that will serve to prevent them from competing with American culture and therefore with America in any other capacity.

Recently, a young developer who I work with attempted to challenge me technically.  As you can probably imagine he was demonstrably wrong on every single point he tried to make from a technical perspective, and as you can also probably imagine, businesses cannot function unless the staff respects the authority hierarchy of the decision making process, namely, even if I’m wrong I am allowed to be wrong, because in our authority hierarchy, my boss holds me responsible for my work and their work, as his does his.  If I shoot myself in the foot by being an idiot, it’s my boss’s job to correct me.  But in the meantime, if he doesn’t support me and lets my junior walk all over me in public (i.e., in an e-mail chain privy to the entire team), then I can’t function as a technical authority.  Long story short, it’s a battle he could not possibly win.

So, he stepped on a giant land mine and was surprised when it blew up in his face.  Namely, he was publicly embarassed in front of all his peers.  Not only did I prove that he was wrong definitively, my boss got involved and called him out, again, publicly, to the tune of asking him how he could presume with a whopping two years of experience under his belt he could challenge the senior staff technically.

Nobody likes to be embarassed.  So he sent out an angry e-mail to his personnel manager (e.g., HR in China) declaring boldly that he quit.  We found this out, of course, because we have a spy on the States side who is also Chinese and speaks with the rest of the team from time to time in the native tongue and gets good gossip.

Two weeks later, he comes back with his tail between his legs, and acts as if nothing happened, pretending that he never declared that he quit and supposing that we would simply forgive him for going entirely incommunicado for two weeks while we’re busy facing a deadline.  My boss’s boss has already told HR over there to get rid of him.

Now, I’m not saying that an American would never have done that.  In fact I know people who have done things like that.  But there’s subtext to this story that my Chinese-American spy shared with us.  And that is this.

The kind of job my company offers to Chinese citizens is so desirable that in China they have declared workers in this industry to be “golden collar” – a step above white collar.  The guys on my team are not particularly attractive Chinese men.  Most of them are barely five and a half feet tall and are absolutely average.  But you should see the girls these guys score.  They are the hottest girls in Shanghai, which is the hottest city in China.  One of the more senior guys over there who’s actually a couple years older than I am recently married a solid 10.  I was impressed.

This guy who didn’t want to take my bullshit – a common attitude among young men in general – had to swallow his pride and make peace not because he wanted to score hot chicks, although I’m sure the thought crossed his mind; giving up a job that literally hundreds of people are lined up behind him trying to get is pretty damned stupid and unattractive.  He did it because quitting a golden collar job in China would shame his family.  I know what you’re thinking.  Intellectually you understand that and might even respect it a little bit.  But the idea of an American male submitting to another man for no other reason than because his family would make hiim feel bad about it when they found out is so emotionally repulsive to every successful man with testosterone in his veins that it would very rarely, if ever, actually happen.  If the American son gives up his job because, in his mind his bosses are all assholes, his family doesn’t shame him, they congratulate him for not putting up with bullshit and help him find a new job.

This is an example of the kind of cultural difference between the east and the west that will make it difficult for the east to compete with the west.  The cultural ideals over there favor holding people back and conforming while the cultural ideals over here favor independence and excellence.  In some respects the eastern cultural philosophy probably leads to more happiness overall since conformity is vastly easier to achieve than meteoric success, but as far as culture vs. culture goes, the culture that favors competition both within and without is going to be better at competing.

This stuff is so simple that even a child can understand it.  And this is why I am against socialism and “helping people.”  I prefer to live in a culture where we expect people to help themselves, because people are at their best when they are competing against the world and against each other.  Anything that motivates a person to work harder or better, with as few negative side effects as possible is a good thing.  We call this “healthy competition.”

Eventually, I see the world coalescing into a single dialectual culture, where it’s all mostly the same with slight variations - accents, if you will – kind of like Western Europe.  I think we’re at least a dozen generations away from that.  But as globalization increases and cultural exchange continues at the internet pace, we’ll see this effect occur faster and faster.  Humanity will pick the good traits from everywhere and drop the bad ones.  In that sense, while human biological evolution has probably reached its termination, human cultural evolution has just been rapidly accelerated.  And although it’s hard to observe at such a macro scale, we, as a species, are always trying to optimize our own culture by using what works and dropping what doesn’t.  As each new technological shift happens, new things start to work and new cultural patterns emerge.  We experiment.

So I say that China is at least a generation off because their traditional values will still hold them back.  This guy, if he does manage to stay employed with us, will always be in the back seat for as long as his career here lasts; if he didn’t have family pressures preventing him from taking a healthy risk and starting somewhere else with a clean slate, he might find himself in a position where he is the smartest one in the group and winds up a boss himself in a few months.  His potential is being stifled by his culture.  In time, this will change – these people that I work with are working for an American company with American values and some of them will rub off.  Their children will be raised more western than their parents.  This will continue.

But until it reaches critical mass, I think it will be hard for the Chinese, and therefore China, to truly compete until their culture catches up to the rules of the game.  In time, their communist government which exists only because of the cultural value of conformity will fail once it is no longer an acceptable reflection of their culture.  Watch for that.  A crack has already formed in the dam, but until it spills over, America is safe in its top position.

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