notable exceptions, has been severely restricted in terms of growth by
its inherent risk aversion. No head of a Chinese family business wants
to be the one that bankrupts the family. Chinese business must learn
to blend the effective business technology of the West with the cultural
forces of China to find a workable leadership theory. In addition,
China is growing at such a rate that she will soon be the largest
economy on the globe and she will need effective theories of inter-
national leadership to avoid becoming the world’s greatest factory
and largest polluter without attendant leadership on the global stage.
It can be hoped that ingredients in the Chinese philosophies will
contribute to developing such international leadership theories.
China and America must find the ‘‘third way’’ (Graen and
Wakabayashi, 1994 ) and leap-frog the process of becoming sophisti-
cated in international business partnership networks. The first step is
to be knowledgeable regarding the lessons of Chinese leadership from
the ancients to the present. This book is directed toward that goal. The
next step is to integrate this understanding with that of foreign leader-
ship to be capable of true cultural bonding with foreigners. This
book’s contributors are preparing for this next step.
Competing social structuresand political ideologies
A brief outline of the major social structures used by mainland China
from its early development as a feudal system to the present is pre-
sented in Table 9.1. As shown, the stages of development begin
with the Confucian (about 600 BCE) dual system (A1 and A2) under
which the people served the hierarchy up to and including the emperor
and the nine classes of nobles served both the emperor and the people.
In addition, the value systems of A1 and A2 differed in that the
A1 values were directed at harmony in interpersonal hierarchical
relationships and A2 values were directed at scholarly pursuits. Equity
struggles between people and nobles were frequently based on the
two-class system of privilege. Leaders emerged under the two classes
differently, with seniority, birth order, and gender for families, and
testing and seniority for nobles. The dark side of the heavenly system
of Confucius and Mencius was proposed as a missing component of
the complete social system by Xunzi (about 285 BCE) and his Legalist
student Hanfei (B). The system of Legalism moved the favored nobles
back under a common law and introduced the struggle with A2.
276 George Bear Graen