The Culture War
How people are with each other is of paramount importance in determining how they will handle the
circumstances that they jointly face, and the cultures that they have will be the biggest determinants of how they
are with each other. What Americans and the Chinese value most and how they think people should be with each
other determine how they will deal with each other in addressing the conflicts that we just explored. Because
Americans and the Chinese have different values and cultural norms that they will fight and die for, if we are going
to get through our differences peacefully it is important that both sides understand what these are and how to deal
with them well.
As described earlier, Chinese culture compels its leaders and society to make most decisions from the top
down, demanding high standards of civility, putting the collective interest ahead of individual interests,
requiring each person to know their role and how to play it well, and having filial respect for those superior
in the hierarchy. They also seek “rule by the proletariat,” which in common parlance means that the
benefits of the opportunities and fruits of productivity created are broadly distributed. In contrast
American culture compels its leaders to run the country from the bottom up, demanding high levels of
personal freedom, favoring individualism over collectivism, admiring revolutionary thinking and behavior,
and not respecting people for their positions as much as for the quality of their thinking. These core cultural
values drove the type of economic and political systems they chose.
To be clear, most of these differences aren’t obvious in day-to-day life; they generally aren’t very important
relative to the shared beliefs that Americans and the Chinese have, which are numerous, and they aren’t held by all
Chinese or all Americans, which is why many Americans are comfortable living in China and vice versa. Also,
they are not pervasive. For example, the Chinese in other domains such as Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong
have governance systems that are more like Western democratic systems. Still these cultural differences subtly
affect most everything, and in times of great conflict, they are the defining differences that determine
whether the parties fight or peacefully resolve their disputes. The main challenge the Chinese and
Americans have with each other arises from some of them failing to understand and empathize with the
other’s values and ways of doing things, and not allowing each other to do what they think is best. While the
openings up of both countries have increased their interactions and their increasingly shared practices (e.g., their
similar economic freedoms that produce similar desires, products, and outcomes) have made both environments
and their people much more similar than they ever were, the differences in approaches are still notable. They are
reflected regularly in how the government and the people within each country interact with each other and how
Americans and the Chinese interact especially at the leader-to-policy-maker level. Some of these cultural
difference are minor and some of them are so major that many people would fight to the death over them—
e.g., most Americans believe “give me liberty or give me death” while individual liberty isn’t nearly as important
to the Chinese as collective stability is.
These differences become reflected in differences in everyday life. For example, the Chinese government, being
more paternal, regulates what types of video games are played by children and how many hours a day they can
play them, whereas in the United States they aren’t government-regulated because it is considered an individual
parent’s decision to make. One could argue the merits of either approach. The Chinese hierarchical culture makes
it natural for the Chinese to simply accept the government’s direction while the American non-hierarchical culture
makes it acceptable for Americans to fight with their government over whether or not to do it that way. Similarly
different cultural inclinations affect how Americans and the Chinese react to being told that they have to wear
masks in response to COVID-19, which leads to second-order consequences because the Chinese follow the
instructions and Americans don’t—numbers of cases, deaths, economic impacts, etc. These culturally determined
differences in how things are handled affect how the Chinese and Americans react differently to many things—
e.g., information privacy, free speech, free media, etc.—which add up to lots of ways that the countries operate
differently.
While there are pros and cons to these different cultural approaches to handling things and I’m not going to
explore them here, I do want to get across that the cultural differences that make Americans Americans and
the Chinese Chinese are deeply embedded in them so one can’t expect the Chinese not to be Chinese and
Americans not to be Americans. In other words, one can’t expect the Chinese to give up what they deeply