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Linking Chinese leadership theory and
practice to the world: leadership
secrets of the Middle Kingdom
GEORGE BEAR GRAEN
T
HISbook focuses on Chinese history lessons on leading
Chinese people and is a testament to the need for Americans
to understand our long-separated brothers at a deep level
and also a plea to reject the tempting alternative of surface-level,
national stereotypes and caricatures portrayed in the popular press.
Americans have discovered the hard way that Japanese lessons on
how to lead American people must be interpreted in terms of their
culture and history, as signaled by the failure of Theory Z. Just as the
Japanese Toyota system for manufacturing cannot be arbitrarily
applied piecemeal to American manufacturing (Graen and Hui,
1995 ), American manufacturing cannot do so to the Chinese system.
Post-modern Chinese managers working under Western manufac-
turing systems in China do not respond the same as Western
managers (Graen, Hui and Gu, 2005 ). What is needed is a deep
understanding of the critical disconnects between effective Chinese
and American leadership in Sino-American organizations in China.
We begin with a deep-level discussion of the significance of
Chinese leadership theories, from the various historical theories of
Confucianism to Farh’s post-modern version called ‘‘paternalistic’’
leadership.
Introduction
Confucianism and its several modifications guided past generations
of Han Chinese more or less adequately until it was turned upside
down on the mainland during the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to
- Although Confucianism had been weakened progressively since
the 1950s by Chairman Mao, the severity of the Cultural Revolution
forced a generation of Chinese to miss their socialization and educa-
tion into Confucianism. Today, many scholars of mainland China
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