solarz
Brigadier
To be fair, the reverse is also dangerous: a junior pilot who doesn't listen to his senior and keeps making careless mistakes. I don't think we should be extrapolating these kinds of assumptions.
Chinese Culture: Tradition vs Law
- Thread starter solarz
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To be fair, the reverse is also dangerous: a junior pilot who doesn't listen to his senior and keeps making careless mistakes. I don't think we should be extrapolating these kinds of assumptions.
vesicles
Colonel
I don't think it is any different in any western countries. Try and see what happens if you deliberately disobey your boss' order. You will be on your boss' naughty list if you are lucky, but most likely fired/laid off when the chance comes.
Even in academia, where hierarchy and seniority are the least emphasized compared to other professions, openly challenging your superior is still one of the stupidest things that you could do to damage your career. Although we are on first name basis with the department Chairs and the deans, we usually address them as sir or madam.
And a lot of this is based on local custom, not western vs eastern cultures. Another example in academia, if you are in a university on the west coast in the US, your professors will mostly prefer you to call them by their first names. On the other hand, if you go to a university on the east coast, your professors will most likely want you to address them as Dr. so-and-so or Professor so-and-so. If you are an MD, your superior will most likely demand you to address them by their titles with no exception no matter east vs west coast. Same western country, same culture, but different local custom.
In industry, such hierarchy is even more clear. Superiority should be absolutely respected. I don't think anyone can survive if you constantly disobey your boss' orders.
As I've said many times before, the so-called cultural differences have been blown out of proportion. We are all human and we all think alike. And thousands of years of constant communication among different people also means that each culture has been heavily influenced by other cultures. After all those millennia of constant communication, we all arrive at similar values and expections for individuals and society as a whole.
And respect for superiors is engraved in our DNA, all the way back to our primate ancestors. In fact, wanting to be a leader is a shared goal among all animal species. There are so many benefits associated with being a leader. Plenty food, mating partners, which ensures your own survival and the passing on of your genes. To protect these privileges, leaders naturally demand a hierarchical structure, which is usually vigorously enforced among all species.
Just read this, even though this message was back in April. This is still true in some part of China, but it difference and change is hilarious once you see the police are enforcing it. My relatives lives near Jiangmen in "rural" area. The place is safer in driving than a lot of other areas in China, but they still drink and drive "not drunk", cutting lanes, and drive reverse direction. Once the police officer enforce the law and fine you, everyone start behaving. Hell there are HD camera's everywhere (sometimes with head light for night time) and the police just sent tickets from their office. They can even see if you are wearing seatbelts
Personally, I haven't been around long enough to assess the cultural shift you observe in China since the 1980s. I suppose Confucian values, through entrenching distinctions in class and identity, do embody a fundamentally different type of social contract than the one used to justify republican forms of government. Considering the fact that deference to paternal authority (孝）is one of, if not THE core virtue within the Confucian moral order, one could argue that Confucian ethics, at its center, is themed to promote establishmentarianism, paternalism and a strong regard for hierarchy. I would however remain wary of assuming firm causal linkages between a cultural notion as vague and general as Confucian ethics and concrete states of political affairs. If we do try to link these up, it would be useful to line up specific institutional and cultural behaviours.
That said, even if Chinese social life has become more hierarchical, perhaps it's not the case that it has become more Confucian. I believe that the deference you observe is simply a symptom of class reorganization resulting from putting capital at the command of private agents. Suddenly, there are very rich and very poor people again, there is disparity in economic and political power between repolarized classes, and once again the poor guys on the bottom have to brown-nose and grovel to their economic and social superiors who have so much power over them.
Recalling the establishmentarian quality of Confucian ethics, the unambiguous and deliberate attempts by the Chinese Government to reintroduce Confucian ethics to the public in recent years can perhaps be seen as a way to help maintain the political status quo, to bring the masses back from a revolutionary mindset (which is now dangerous to the state) to a more docile political mindset. In Marxist fashion, I believe that capitalist modes of production under the Reform Era's economic frameworks have returned Chinese society to a place of economic and class marginalization. In order to help keep people content with having an economically inegalitarian society, the state is revisiting Confucianism as a state ideology of sorts. Admittedly my own experience of Chinese society is limited, but I don't get the sense that Confucian ethics have a big impact in how most Chinese people think or make decisions in their lives these days, which usually seems much more opportunistic, ammoral, and driven by personal ambition.