Eye on China: Age-old moral values face up to social climbers

Morality is one of the trickiest aspects of modern China. It is not just some fuddy-duddy philosophical concept but has vital business applications as well.

Trust is one of the most important manifestations of morality and trust is highly relevant in business as it lowers transaction costs. One advantage of the Japanese and Korean conglomerates is that the transaction costs between suppliers, customers and capital providers are fast and smooth due to the high level of trust that exists within the group.

Talking about morality runs the risk of making unhelpful blanket generalisations about a population. And it is true that one is in a stronger position to make criticisms when one's own business culture is spotless. That is not the case in the US.

Yet certain things happen in China which have fascinating repercussions on one's outlook on the country.

One of my wealthy, educated Chinese friends told me the other day about the problem in China with the huge gap in class and wealth. But she surprised me by saying that it was not the actual gap which was the problem, but new social mobility.

Social mobility is a relatively novel concept, despite the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Confucian and pre-modern culture did not encourage such mobility; rather it classified the population by occupation and status and tried to keep the situation static.

Things are changing now thanks to an increasingly merit-based business environment, but peculiarly Chinese problems seem to be emerging.

My friend, an intelligent and cultured investment banker, told me that two of her friends are being divorced by their husbands. Nothing unusual about that, you would think, only the women are highly intelligent, highly successful and bring in a far greater income than their husbands.

"But the men can't stand this loss of face. And nor can their mothers. It's that fatal combination of husband and mother against the wife, and in China, it's often the wife that loses," she says.

Her friends' problems, and the comment about "face", remind me of a striking murder case in the beautiful but undeveloped province of Yunan two years ago.

A young student from an impoverished rural home had managed to get a place in a local university, a highly creditable achievement. Yet he ended up bashing in the heads of five of his room mates, apparently because they were mocking his rural accent and habits.

My friends says that the boiling resentment at being perceived as inferior and the Chinese practice of internalising such resentment creates a highly volatile environment. It is also a reminder of the tremendous negative energy tied up with the Chinese concept of face.

This could be bound up with China's education system, where there is a clear lack of training in personal expression. Rote learning and conformity means, my friend estimates, that students find it hard to cope with new and different pressures.

"They don't have the toolset for self-analysis," says my friend, "because that is not considered important in a society where the primary values are conformity and duties to one's superiors."

For her part, she has concluded that engaging with people who are desperate to achieve high status but feel insecure about their ability to achieve it, is a dangerous game.

"Such people have a shadow in their heart," she says.

She will definitely only marry a man from her own class, especially after hearing that her friend's savings had been pillaged by her husband to study in London - leaving her to pay the mortgage.

Her concerns about the ambitions and fears in China's gigantic population of social climbers are widely shared. For many, the worst aspect of the Cultural Revolution during the 1960s and 1970s was the stunning cruelty exhibited by the new rulers of society, namely the peasant, worker and soldier classes.

Extreme violence was also unleashed in the early 1950s against the landlords by their former tenants.

This is interesting, as distrust of the lower orders tends to have a conservative impact. Thus, one Chinese commentator told me that the radical student leadership during the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989 ultimately lost the trust of the masses.

"As their demands got more extreme, people began to see them as inheritors of the mantle of Cultural Revolution radicals. And they got scared," he says.

To me, the Chinese fear of their own psyche presents a fascinatingly different view on human nature to the Western one. Remember the Renaissance? That was an exaltation of the boundless potential of the human being. A profound faith in liberating the capacity of the individual to do good and creative works is one of the underpinnings of modern capitalism.

Intriguingly, China's imperfect legal system means that trust is an important element in business - as businessmen know that enforcing agreements is difficult. Such a reliance on trust is a contradiction to the generally pessimistic view of human nature in China.

The problem won't be easily solved as there is a circularity to the arguments. Pessimism in human nature is reflected in an educational system which wants to help future leaders overcome their moral weaknesses through intensive drilling, that is, to make the right response automatic. It's that drilling which fails to develop the capacity for critical thinking.

Yet such pessimism will continue to be justified if people can't learn to assess and channel their most intense feelings. How this will impact China's emerging legal and regulatory environment is a fascinating question.

* Dan Slater is a journalist based in Beijing.