The Other Side of the Cultural Divide

October 14th, 2008 | by This is China! |

I tried this month in my Eurobiz Magazine column Challenging China to look from another view at the cultural issues dissecting investment in China: What are Chinese employees seeing of Westerners in the workplace? I asked. Eurobiz is a publication of The European Union Chamber of Commerce. Typically, Westerners are pointing the finger at China workers as reasons for operational inefficiencies. But I’ve noticed these last few years that many times Westerners don’t make it any easier for businesses in China to operate smoothly, or for communications to range as openly as Westerners like to profess.

I write in the column:

“A manager of a Scandinavian home furnishings manufacturer once told me how when he was transferred to the China operation he was appalled to see the Western managers all sitting together in the canteen upstairs, while all the Chinese staff sat together eating in the downstairs cafeteria. ‘I tried several times to sit with the Chinese staff downstairs to converse with them while we ate, but I got the feeling they felt I wasn’t sincere about wanting to break down the separation. The company culture seemed to have a built-in divide between the Westerners and the Chinese that the Chinese seemed quite aware of.’”

Westerners tend to have a Hero mentality to living and working in China. And it shows. It’s not as bad as The White Man’s Burden that colonialists carried round with them like some great bat over which they clubbed many a society over the head in Asia; however, there is a fair share of hubris that hangs around the operations of some Western companies in China like soot from a coal-fired generator.

Now, with the meltdown of the financial system in the West and Western institutions coming to cash-rich Chinese organs, it may not be a bad idea to actually consider creating “a level playing field” between China and the West - culturally speaking, that is.

  1. 6 Responses to “The Other Side of the Cultural Divide”

  2. By Ron on Oct 14, 2008 | Reply

    Hi Bill,

    I think too many times people use “it is a cultural difference” as an excuse.

    How many exexcutives in the West actually sit with the workers in the factory cafeteria and vice versa.

    I see this as more of a authority-subordinate issue.

  3. By The tank man on Oct 14, 2008 | Reply

    Hi Bill
    “Westerners tend to have a Hero mentality to living and working in China.”
    This hits the point.

    But I doubt there’s going to be “a level playing field” between China and the west soon even the meltdown of the financial system in the west, and I believe that’s gonna take sth more than cultural recognition as well, sth political, ideological and economic.It’s pretty much like the white wouldn’t sit with the black at the end of a bus in last 50s in United States,which was not due to a cultural difference but a political treatment gab.

    The westerners’ Hero Complex I suppose is partly stems from that they assume they are providing millions of job opportunities to the chinese people(which I don’t think is the major reason for this) and partly they believe they are polically advanced back into their countries,since I’ve been working for an American owned enterprise with couples of Indian expats working there. They do have a high horse in front of chinese employees and I try to drag out what makes them feel so.They replied unanimously that Indian now is a DEMOCRATIC country but China is not.

  4. By This is China! on Oct 14, 2008 | Reply

    Tank Man, dude, you’re mellowing in your old age! ;-) Thanks for the insight; I have found it genuinely enlightening.

    Kind regards,
    Bill

  5. By This is China! on Oct 14, 2008 | Reply

    Hi, Ron;
    You could well be right about that. I think it is a matter of the character of the company’s leadership and the sort of corporate culture they want to cultivate. For instance, I have an American friend (once upon a time a client) who quite naturally would join his Chinese staff in the small cafeteria and eat the same Chinese box lunch as the rest of them with the rest of them. This as well as other natural shows of camaraderie really engendered in his group a strong sense of following him; even going so far as to help him and his family personally in China after he moved as GM to another factory.

  6. By James G on Oct 14, 2008 | Reply

    I found that trying to eat lunch with the Chinese staff made them nervous; few of them spoke English well enough to try to converse with me (or so they thought) and the ones who did were reluctant to converse with me out of fear of being labeled a “foreigner lover” or some such. One secretary confessed to me that she’d tried to talk to my (also male) predecessor and been labelled thusly. After a few awkward moments of them asking me perfunctory questions, like “can you use chopsticks?” and such, they went back to talking in Chinese, sometimes about me, though it was rarely rude.

    Then there were those who just couldn’t imagine inviting me to lunch, so what would often happen is we would wind up in the same restaurants, me eating alone and them sitting nearby, politely ignoring me.

    Funnily enough, in the office they would occasionally say hi and burst into conversation, then grow dormant again for long stretches of time. Good God, that was weird.

    I worked in an office with lots of young, fresh out of college Chinese, and lots of them were female. I was the only western foreigner, and my spoken Chinese wasn’t that good at the time, though I could understand a lot. During working hours I even left my office (well, they gave it to a guy who complained since he didn’t have one but I did) and moved to a cubicle, but it still didn’t break the ice.

    This was in Shanghai, roughly 3 years ago. I imagine (hope) a lot has changed since then!

  7. By This is China! on Oct 15, 2008 | Reply

    James;
    You may have a point there: Chinese in the canteen just may not want to be bothered with the trouble of communicating with a Westerner, especially if his Chinese is rudimentary (if it exists at all) and/or because they figure they’re doing things “the Western Way” the rest of the day and find lunchtime a bit of rest and recuperation for them, a sort of grounding.

    I am surprised you were able to work in a female dominated office in Shanghai and managed to escape unmarried! ;-)

    Cheers

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