group vs. individual consciousness
September 21st, 2004 stevel
(in case you’re wondering how I’ve found the time to blog twice in one hour, the server with my homedir is about to go offline to upgrade to the latest and greatest release of Solaris. this is convenient for the Menlo Park engineers, not so convenient for MPK engineers like Poorna and I working in Beijing. oh well.)
My Barron’s Chinese At A Glance phrasebook (which is ABSOLUTELY essential, and very very very handy for non-Chinese speakers visiting China) mentions the Chinese concept of ’saving face’ and that they emphasise the group consciousness vs. the individual consciousness.
This basically means that the Chinese culture is to give preference to what the group wants, rather than the individual. This is evidenced by how willing and eager your Chinese co-workers are to try and help you out (which is very true of my co-workers here, I might add). You can also see this in tour groups (i.e.: whatever the group wants, rather than the one individual in the back who insists on seeing every single jade shop along the way). Having grown in a Chinese family (despite my apparent language handicap), I can attest to this as well.
I believe, however, I have found the one aspect of their culture where this doesn’t hold true: traffic.
Somehow, the most polite, willing-to-bend-backwards-to-help-you Chinese person becomes an ABSOLUTE MANIAC in traffic. Just like my last entry, this is again, a HUGE generalisation, so please, no comments on why I’m a racist bigot or something. 
Traffic here is insane… it’s like every single person in a taxi/car/bus/truck has a pregant woman in the backseat about to give birth to triplets… oh, and yeah, they left the stove on, so they gotta run back home and turn that off too. Seriously, they all drive like madmen (and madwomen). There is no thought given to “group consciousness” here at all. People block intersections, run red lights, and they all look like they’re doing it with a very intense driven purpose.
[tags: ChinaBlog]
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