think that China must find a new and inspiring ideology such as the
one that Singapore developed to inspire her people.
Leadership theories based on almost five thousand years of Chinese
recorded civilization have a way of making humble even the more
knowledgeable senior scholars of modern leadership. China had a
civilization when most of the rest of the world was populated by
tribes of hunter-gatherers. China has reason to be proud of her many
contributions to human advancement. She has been the mother of
Asian culture from the early years and has taught her children to
think, read, write, count and live together peacefully in spite of being
one of the most diverse nations on earth. Of course, Chinese history
included many wars to maintain political unity; however, it appears
somewhat more peaceful when I compare its history to that of Europe.
Although I am neither Asian nor European but American, I was
educated cross-culturally in Japan during my formative years as a
scholar. The dramatic experiences of being allowed ‘‘deep inside’’ the
hermit culture of Japan drove home to me the many fundamental
differences in national strategies, operations and tactics between
‘‘Nippon’’ and ‘‘America’’.
Similar differences make extremely difficult, and often impossible,
the task of adequately translating Western leadership concepts into
Chinese thoughts and vice versa. What Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed,
or your favorite moral leader would do in a given situation does not
help because each leader’s thoughts have been filtered by these cultural
differences. The words may be translated the same, but the connota-
tive meanings are different in East and West. Before this East–West
transfer of connotative isomorphic meaning can take place cross-
culturally, experts on both sides must be trained for this task (Graen
et al., 1997 ). Most of the contributors to the present volume are at
the level of expertise in leadership that is called ‘‘Sino-American
transculturalist’’ which indicates that they understand their Chinese
and American culture and history well enough to validly offer their
understanding of Chinese leadership to the West. As the deep-level
reader can see, they did wonderful work.
My role in this presentation of Chinese leadership thoughts offered
to the world is to comment as a Western leadership scholar on the
contributions of Chinese leadership philosophies covered in this book
and point out new directions for cross-cultural leadership research
and practice. I plan to accomplish this by commenting on the Chinese
Linking Chinese leadership theory and practice to the world 273