The Chinese 53Chinese people’s lives remain powerful, which can bring
both advantage and disadvantage from the perspective of a
foreign employer.
At the same time, from a Western perspective, there is
generally remarkably little regard among Chinese people
for those ‘outside the courtyard’. Such phrases as wailairen
(‘outsider’, often used to refer to newcomers, whether to a
city or to a place of work) and waiguoren (‘foreigner’, but
literally ‘person from an outside country’) attest to this ‘us-
and-them’ sensibility. As many have observed, this has set a
low bar in terms of expected treatment of strangers. Chinese
people pushing and shoving their ways onto buses, ignoring
people who might appreciate having a door held for them,
and so on are partly results of China’s overpopulation and
scarce resources, but also partly cultural. Most Chinese lacks
any traditional phrase equivalent to the English expression
‘common courtesy’, though of course that idea has been
translated into modern Chinese.