Greetings from Asia - 6 May 2011

Sorry, readers: it's been a busy spring, and somehow April flew by without a posting here. We can blame a few days excursion to Thailand (riding elephants, which is wonderful -- at least for the riders, probably less so for the elephants), and other adventures. We've been in some discussions recently, with some other expats here, about what it is, exactly, that makes the Chinese (and that includes the Taiwanese in this case) so different from us. Of course, yes, we are all people, but as we've argued elsewhere, in our business writings (see the papers on culture at www.s2r.biz), cultures can be profoundly different in their ways of thinking.

We've spent some years now trying to articulate this in a precise way, and it's eluded us. There are some books on the subject, and we often recommend Michael Harris Bond's The Psychology of the Chinese People and the harder-to-find Harmony in Conflict by Richard W. Hartzell, as well as the inside look provided by Bo Yang's The Ugly Chinaman.

But there always seems a deeper level to reach, some more philosophical foundation that can explain everything. Not long ago, we penned the following notes, in our attempts to achieve some greater clarity on the subject of the Western-Chinese difference...


The Jews and the Chinese: The Same... Only Different

There’s an old joke that goes like this: “What do Jews do for Christmas? They eat dinner in Chinatown and then go to the movies...” It comes from the fact that on Christmas Day, the only things that were open, at least in the old days, were the restaurants in Chinatown and movie theaters.

This is part of a larger connection between Jews and Chinese. It’s a complicated relationship, though, as we’ll see. There were Jewish merchants and traders in China who came to China centuries ago, and many even intermarried, leading to a very old Chinese-Jewish community in the city of Kaifeng (開封). These community has been well researched; see, for example, “The Kaifeng Jews: A Reconsideration of Acculturation and Assimilation in a Comparative Perspective” and “Jews in Kaifeng, China: A Brief History”.

Jewish religious history is quite complicated, but a trend in the past century or so has been the growth of a large demographic of secular Jews. They became secular for a wide variety of reasons (some, such as those in this author’s family, became secular as part of their drift into socialist and progressive movements). A significant number of secular Jews, however, began looking for new spiritual options, and turned to Buddhism. Buddhism was attractive because it had no history of anti-semitism, it was pacificist, and it was exotic. In fact, there is a least one book about this Jewish-Buddhist connection, The Jew in the Lotus (the title is a play on the Buddhist term “jewel in the lotus”).

Today, there is a marked degree of intermarriage between Jews and Chinese. Here in Taiwan (where your humble author is currently posted), there is a small community of Jews (mostly Israelis) who have married Taiwanese women. Most of these women have converted to Judaism.

More generally, however, in other parts of the world, Jews marry “out” with Chinese. The common conclusion is that these are secular Jews, and that they marry Chinese (or, similarly, Japanese) women because these women are essentially secular, too. But importantly, because they are of Buddhist (or Daoist) background, they don’t carry any “Christian baggage”. In other words, for a secular Jew, it’s fine to marry a secular non-Jew, but better to marry one who doesn’t even have a trace of Christian background!

More pragmatically, some Jews will tell you that they marry Chinese because “the Chinese share the same values as the Jews”, namely, hard work, education, and family.

But, like many such observations, it’s a gross simplification. In fact, the Jewish-Chinese connection is a very complex one. For one, Jews have a long tradition involving the “exotic”. Indeed, Jews are often considered to be in the mainstream in America, but all the way up into the 1920’s, they were considered be “from the East”. A 1998 book about the history of Jews in the U.S. has the wonderful title of How Jews Became White Folks. Just like the panic about Chinese immigration, for decades in the U.S., there was a panic about other exotic peoples flooding in. At places like Dartmouth and Penn, there were quotas on the number of Jews let in. In fact, a 2006 story in the Dartmouth News recounts how in the 1930’s Dartmouth’s Dean of Admissions stated that the school’s “Phi Beta Kappa societies are getting so swarthy that it is well to lighten things up a bit.” The “swarthy” was a clear reference to Jews, who were considered “not white”, and who had begun to be come to Dartmouth in greater numbers.

On a more mundane level, perhaps because they were marginalized (or because they were worldly), Jews themselves often were attracted to the exotic: an interesting article some years ago noted how in the early twentieth century the first non-Chinese to enter into Toronto’s Chinatown to eat were Jews.

And so, the connection between Jews and Chinese has almost become a cliché — both peoples are industrious, lovers of learning, and family-oriented. But in fact, there is a very fundamental difference, as any Jew who becomes involved in Chinese culture discovers. The entire Jewish faith, and even the secular Jewish mindset, is based on law, and again whether theologically based or not, it is has a deep, transcendental foundation.

Recall that Moses receives the law; the Israelites don’t invent it on their own. Compare that to the Chinese model: it is Confucius who established the rules for conduct in the society. Certainly, there is a nod to the idea of tianxia (天下) — that is, “under Heaven”. There was also the idea that the Emperor — the head of society — only ruled with the “mandate of heaven”. But really tian (天) is better translated as “cosmos” or “universe”, since there is almost no theological content in the term. Chinese concepts of “right” and “wrong”, and how humans should conduct themselves is based on pragmatism rather than any kind of universal law. It is all relationship-based, and there is even a special word in Chinese for these relationships, guanxi (關係). “God” has nothing to do with it.

In the Jewish tradition, by contrast, laws have to come from somewhere, and they are transcendent, irrefutable, and non-negotiable. However, there can be debate, since humans can interpret the law, and this is part of a great Western tradition of moral questioning, arguments about principles, and ideas. And certainly, later Jewish thinking adopted elements of Platonic thinking (through such figures as Maimonides), which, despite its pagan origins, also builds a very similar idea of a transcendental realm, from which all law (and beauty, and other key values of civilization) are derived. Similarly, too, humans can use dialogue (a Greek word, in fact) to explore and interpret this divine realm and its meaning for society.

This is a highly complex and profound model: in it, human society always has a “level beyond this one”, a perfect place, a transcendental realm that it can look (up) to. Society can use that realm as a goal, to push itself forward, and to try to build a more ethical society.

But it also leads Jewish people, in their dealing with the Chinese, to a huge gap in understanding. That is because their model encourages Jews — and Westerners generally, it must be said — to argue things on principle. This simply doesn’t exist in Chinese thinking.

So, despite some superficial similarities, Jews and Chinese are very different in their fundamental mental framework. And since much of Western thinking is influenced by this kind of Jewish and Platonic principled idealism, it means that we are heading for deep trouble as we try to negotiate with the new world power — China.