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REPORT ON CHINESE CULTURE

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INTRODUCTION

In the last G20 summit, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French president of the FMI has was told by the Chinese finance minister that the “occidental parenthesis is now close” .Anyone can feel the strength of that sentence and of the use of such ameaningful word. Actually, even if this declaration seem to be really arrogant, it is true that China is a growing power, all the economists agree on the fact that China is already and will become even more the major actor of the international trade scene. The country is the world factory for a majority of manufactured goods and its workforce is, at this point, one of the cheapest in the world.
Theactors who want to establish direct business relationships with Chinese partners are increasing and dealing with China is now vital for the economy of several countries. However, Chinese culture is far different from our Western culture, therefore, it is fundamental to know and understand its specificities in order to communicate properly and establish long term business relationships. Integrating thecultural differences of this “continent” will be a real strength for countries, companies, entrepreneurs and individuals.
As the world culture will be used lots(ss) of time in this paper, it will be helpful to properly define it. Quoting the anthropologist R. Preiswerk “culture is an ensemble of values, behaviors and institutions of a group which is socially learnt, shared and imparted”. Inorder to identify the different aspects of Chinese culture and try to understand it as well as possible we will use the dimensions of culture that Geert Van Hofstede defined in his study of national work related values. In his work, he identified Power Distance, Individuality or collectivism, Masculinity, Uncertainty avoidance and Time Orientation as the five main dimensions of cultures. Analyzinghow much a country score on each dimension helps to identify many aspects of its culture. We will try to do so for China.
In parallel, we will constantly be approaching the Confucean values to explain some aspects of Chinese culture. Confucianism is a school of thoughts issued from the reflection of Confucius 2500 years ago. It is very important to understand Confucianism if you want tounderstand how China thinks.
The key principles of Confucius teaching are:
- The stability of society is based on unequal status relationships between people: He distinguished five basic relationships: ruler-subject, father-son, husband-wife, older brother-younger brother, and senior friend-junior friend. These relationships are based on mutual and complementary obligations.
- The family is theprototype of all organizations: A person is not primarily an individual rather; he/she is a member of a family.
- Virtuous behavior toward others consists of not treating others as one would not like to be treated oneself.
- Virtue with regard to one’s tasks in life consists of trying to acquire skills and education, working hard, not spending more than necessary, being patient, and persevering.Everything should be done with moderation.
In this paper, we will try to demonstrate how the following scores of China in the different cultural dimensions of Hofstede are strongly influenced by these principles.

A) The power distance index ( PDI ).

This criterion shows the way how inequalities of all kinds are perceived (physical, familial, intellectual, power), but also the degree ofacceptance of authority and distance towards it. It shows that this criterion is very high for China (80). This means that the Chinese society is characterized by a very high level of inequalities in power and wealth, and that these are accepted by the individuals. The higher the index presented in a culture, the less equal the power is distributed. It also means that the person who has the authority (in...