The Chinese 55Today, these traditions—the nationalist and the
internationalist—continue to coexist in creative tension
in China. As an internationalist nation, China is extremely
concerned with how many global bodies it joins and
deliberates in, in every field from sports to science to trade
to law. As a nationalist nation, China tends to send formal,
politically connected national-level representatives to these
global bodies, and to be very frustrated with countries and
groups that operate more flexibly.
As an internationalist nation, China claims full support for
global initiatives such as the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse
gasses. As a nationalist nation, China resists outside
attempts to dictate its environmental and other policies.
As internationalists, young Chinese are leading users of the
Internet, immersed in games and
music and other aspects of global
pop culture. As nationalists,
young Chinese tend to be deeply
suspicious of perceived attempts
to ‘contain’ China, and generally
more supportive than their own
parents of military and other
growth for China.
This combination can be
awkward for businesses to negotiate. In trade negotiations,
for instance, over information technology security standards,
China attempted to spur greater support for China’s home-
grown WAPI standard by contrasting support for WAPI
from the Standards Association of China, a national-level
representative to the relevant global standards-setting body
(the ISO-IEC), with support for the competing WiFi standard
from the IEEE, an industry association without national-level
status. This argument, put forward very seriously by China,
was generally ignored within the ISO-IEC, causing great
resentment and acrimony in China.
Pride in Personal and Gender Equality
One of the great ideals of the Mao era was for greater equality
for all than in China’s peasants-and-Mandarins past. This was
What should be clear, from this
simple overview, is that China
today is a fascinatingly complex
society: layers of Confucianism
peek through a rip-roaring market
mentality, robber barons work
cheek-by-jowl with both hold-out
Maoist ideologues and bright-
eyed young idealists reminiscent
of 1960s America