Part III—Towards a Practical Tribalism: Human Nature and the Technosphere (Page 2)

Chinese Freedom: Creativity, Choice, and Innovation in a Closed State and a Global Economy

The American impulse in times of change is generally expansive. Yes, the United States has had periods of isolationism, but these are few and far between. Conversely, the Chinese impulse is contractive. Neither instinct is bad, but both must be moderated if either nation is to thrive individually or in overlapping segments of worldwide markets.

In this section, we will evaluate strategies to maintain China as a creative, dynamic nation within the confines of her ongoing cycle of closure. We will also consider how the Chinese can preserve and promote their culture through careful brand development at home and abroad. The Chinese should, with no great difficulty, be able to continue their economic and cultural advancement, improve their global presence, and maintain readiness for their eventual (in the 2040s or 2050) reopening.

As for practical tribalism—the theme of this essay—the Chinese people have not suffered from the same degree of family disintegration as the West, nor is the nation as diverse and subject to the same forces of fragmentation. I would argue that the Chinese cycles of closure are an already-established mechanism of cultural consolidation, reunification, and strengthening. That said, mass migration and increasing rates of divorce are having their effects. Relative to the proposals made for the United States, the strategies presented in this section will focus more on maintaining a national (rather than regional) identity, with some lesser emphasis on encouraging community/provincial/family bonds through changes in labor policy.

Disclaimer and Acknowledgement of Limitations

I am not Chinese, and my understanding of the culture is far less robust than my understanding of American culture. My ability to make meaningful suggestions for the development of a more prosperous and more stable China is limited. Nevertheless, an outsider’s perspective can be useful, not necessarily because it is better than that of someone more deeply connected to the culture, but because it is different. As for any anti-Communist readers, I advise them ahead of time that I will not advocate the replacement of the current Chinese government. To so advocate would be to do nothing more than indulge in fantastical and counterproductive thought.

I am not a cold warrior, and I am not confident that democracy is the best form of government for all people at all times and in all places. I absolutely believe that some form of democratic government—be it a representative republic, a direct democracy, or a system that ties national service and responsibility to franchise—is the correct choice for the United States. But the United States is not the world. Her culture, values, and traditions, are unique to her. I reject the omnipredatorial assumption that we must impose our values on other peoples to ensure our survival.

I am confident that the relative rise of China is inevitable, just as is the relative decline of the United States. This represents a shift in the global economic and cultural dynamic. For China—a nation of more than one billion people and thousands of years of history—to not become a power in the global economic and cultural spheres would be bizarre. I am not suggesting that the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) will (or should) show up on American shores. Nor am I suggesting that the United States Navy launch an attack on Shanghai.

We can expect both nations to become world leaders in culture, consumption, production, and innovation. We—the Chinese and the Americans—are destined to be coequals, assuming we can avoid killing each other in the meantime. But we are unalike peoples, and we require different circumstances within our nations to thrive. My radically different proposals for each country are based on this understanding.

Finally, my suggestions for China will tend more towards the abstract than the highly granular (with a few exceptions). This is a product of my uncertainty as to the boundaries of acceptable politics and policy in that country. And my suggestions for the Chinese people will be offered with occasional cautions of attendant risks.

Freedom Within Boundaries, Freedom Crossing Boundaries: Weighing Concerns

Measures of the extent to which a government permits unrestricted access to the internet are useful proxies for those of its attitude towards political and controversial speech.

Over the last few years, the Chinese government has taken an increasingly aggressive approach to monitoring internet and social media activity. China’s internet filtering scheme, the Golden Shield Project (described in the previous essay by its informal name—the Great Firewall of China), took root in the 1990s, not long after the introduction of the internet to the country. Originally developed as a gateway content filter—something designed to block specific websites—the system gradually evolved into its present form of a keyword scanner that interrupts certain searches and prohibits content from being posted on Chinese social media.

Hundreds, if not thousands (depending upon the day), of foreign websites have been made difficult to access by the Great Firewall. There are workarounds, such as the use of a virtual private network (VPN), but these are not without legal risks. The conventional wisdom until a few years ago was that one would not be punished for using a VPN so long as he did not draw excessive attention to himself or controversial issues. This appears to be changing, with there being at least one well-documented case of a VPN user being sent to a reeducation camp.

Assuming it works effectively, the ever-more restricted flow of information at the national level poses four potential (major) problems for the Chinese:

1. It turns foreign culture into forbidden fruit.
2. It works too well and too effectively diminishes interest in foreign culture and knowledge.
3. It makes cultural export impossible and destroys the Chinese potential for brand building.
4. It makes useful non-cultural business transactions impractical.

How much the first risk will affect China in one of her cycles of closure is difficult to ascertain. The other factor that will play a role in determining the effective pull of forbidden fruit is the strength of Chinese nationalist/patriotic sentiment, and the Chinese government has done an excellent job of cultivating such sentiment amongst the young. The desire to have that which is forbidden cannot be extinguished, but it can be managed and enervated. Less than a dozen years ago, Fang Binxing, the architect of the Golden Shield Project, was pelted with eggs and shoes. Such is nearly unimaginable today both because the punishments for doing so would almost certainly be severe and because fewer young people would be inclined to see his work as harmful.

This leads to the second risk, which is that the Chinese will become so good at closing themselves off from foreign culture and technology that they fall behind global industrial and artistic standards. A rational approach to mitigating this is to promote a pragmatic understanding of objective truth—a recognition that the physical world is not conditional on politics and that artistic techniques of quality are not exclusive to one culture. Another is to nurture China’s home-grown scientific and artistic communities with an emphasis on technical excellence.

The third risk is that of China disconnecting herself from the world to the point that she becomes incapable of marketing to it—that she loses the opportunity to develop a global (outward-facing) brand. This will not eliminate the ability of the Chinese to create a national brand within their country, but the lack of global brand presence weakens national pride and (indirectly) self-concept and may turn China into an international non-presence.

The fourth risk is that the Chinese isolate their economy to the extent that commerce with the outside world becomes impossible. The COVID lockdowns came at a massive cost to smaller businesses in many parts of the world (in Canada, China, and the United States, amongst other nations). And the locking of international borders posed major problems for foreign-connected businesses in China, driving many of them to collapse. Within reason, trade restrictions can be good (for both Americans and Chinese), but in their most extreme and abrupt form, massive disruptions to global commerce are destabilizing.

Both the third and fourth risks may be either amplified or attenuated by Galapagos Syndrome, in which a market is so far removed from that of other nations that it develops in a radically different way. This can yield some creative and unusual products (such as the Japanese kei cars). It can also isolate industries to the point that degenerate to Soviet-caliber mediocrity.

As is the case with many things discussed in this series, there must be a balance, depending upon the goals of the people making the decisions and the circumstances in which those decisions are being made. And who is making the decisions is not as simple a matter as one might think. No government can rule a people who do not tolerate it. This is not a political statement, but a mathematical one. Yes, this assertion reflects poorly on certain peoples—the Germans under Nazi rule, the North Koreans—but it holds true. A government may suppress a great many people in a great many ways, but if a critical mass of the population is unwilling to tolerate the government, it will fall. And yes, about as many people as not (if not an outright majority) will go along with anything. Such was demonstrated in the Milgram experiment referenced in the first essay in this series. With nothing more than a bit of coaxing from an apparent authority, many could be induced to eat their own children.

Still, the consent of the governed is not irrelevant.

Beyond the matter of how much censorship the Chinese will tolerate is the matter of how much censorship the government wishes to impose. The current status quo appears to be that of a Chinese people tolerant of ever-greater levels of closure and disconnect. The government would do well to not push censoring to its absolute limit. Extreme (or total) censorship may well have a paradoxical effect (Problem No. 1) or it may weaken the resilience of the Chinese people and government to new ideas and blind them to the opportunities for commercial and technological development.

Not all information about the outside world needs to pass through the internet. There is an older channel of information from China to the outside world and back again. And any interested person—those in the Chinese government included—would do well to take the behavior of those associated with this channel into account.

The Chinese Diaspora, the Digital Samizdat, and the Worldview of the Chinese People

The Chinese diaspora has played a powerful role in Chinese politics since at least the era of Sun Yat-sen, who spent much of his life outside his homeland and received political and financial support from overseas Chinese organizations. And unless the Chinese government altogether bans the inflow and outflow of people, the overseas Chinese population will continue to inform and influence the Mainland Chinese mindset.

This is where Chinese people with connections to the outside world can play a role in determining China’s future and the hardness of her closure. The Chinese who travel between two countries have a critical decision to make in regards to what they report of the outside world to their friends and family and what they bring back with them from the outside world.

Technology, designs, information, political texts—all of these are items that the more daring travelers can move into the country. And as flash RAM gets ever denser, the possibility exists for massive amounts of information being contained in storage devices no larger than the head of a pin. As of this writing, certain MicroSD cards, which are slightly smaller than an American postage stamp, can store up to one terabyte (TB) of data. If data density doubles every 18 months (a conservative estimate based on historical trends), a 4 TB MicroSD card should be commercially available by 2025.

This presents the possibility of the creation of a non-internet knowledge-transmission system—a digital samizdat. The original (Soviet era) samizdat consisted of informal publications established shortly after Stalin’s death and continuing until the collapse of the Soviet Union. New technologies could be used to transmit information created both outside and inside China at much higher rates than the paper-based system could permit.

The demand for a digital samizdat will vary as much on the desires of the people as it does on government demands for control. A relevant factor is how much gray- and black-market information flow the government is willing to tolerate. Depending upon the desires and insecurities of the leadership, a robust system of informal communication may be allowed or every person caught with a suspicious file may be mercilessly punished. The country will almost certainly be more stable in the case of the less-severe option: There are few better ways to rupture the pressure vessel that is civilization than to seal its relief valve perfectly and completely.

In a marginally restrictive society—one in which formal freedoms are limited but dissent is not completely forbidden in practice—there is room for non-standard thinking both online and in the digital samizdat. The internet can tolerate mildly incorrect thought and the digital samizdat can tolerate moderately incorrect thought. Together, they can allow for an unapproved (but unpunished) discourse that introduces new and novel ideas into the nation.

The interplay of these many factors thus mentioned determines how much the outside world will influence China’s culture. But more important to the nation’s development in the long term is the intellectual climate within China.

Intellectual Liberty and Political Captivity: Rebutting Gibson

In 1993, William Gibson (author of Neuromancer—the definitive cyberpunk novel) wrote an article for Wired magazine detailing his trip to Singapore. The article’s position can be ascertained from the title, “Disneyland with the Death Penalty.” Gibson saw the nation as sterile, conformist, and lacking in “the fuzzier brands of creativity.” The extent to which he was wrong is open to interpretation—an act best done by those who have both read the article and traveled to the city-state. He also unfavorably compared Singapore to the long-since demolished Kowloon Walled City.

Given Gibson’s literary style—elevating the messy and chaotic—for him to write anything other than an article critical of Singapore would have been surprising. But Gibson may well have been missing the point. He conflates (or implies) that a certain type of aesthetic disorder and social freedom are necessary for creativity. He is right in that creativity and innovation (of the sort that allows for radical shifts of understanding) require boldness of mind and spirit. It requires a willingness to take risks. It requires a willingness to be an outcast. It requires, as described at length in a previous section (“Innovation: Unstable Geniuses, Unstable Communities, and the Inventor’s Spirit”), instability. The mistake Gibson makes is to confuse style with substance. He is making the same error on the national level that others may make on the individual level—a variation of the error addressed in “Genius and Rebellion: A Caveat.”

Edwin Armstrong and plenty of other inventors have been quite conventional in their appearance and outward conduct (if not their opinions) as well. The Nazis—brutally intolerant of minorities and homosexuals—had their many inventions. And the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite less than a decade after the death of Stalin. Some inventions are the work of individuals, some of institutions, but none uniformly require quite as much in way of outward eccentricity as the fans of Tesla, Musk, or Einstein may care to believe.

If the Chinese are to develop technology at a rate equal to or greater than that of the West, they will need to cultivate a high tolerance for a certain type of independence—one more guided by an obsessive desire for physical truths than fidelity to creed. They will also need to develop a more generous and flexible system of grants—with them possibly using the same small-grant model I advocated for the United States. (In fact, small grants for innovators would likely benefit the technological development of any country.)

Finally, the Chinese will need to refine their ability to distinguish the harmless eccentricities of those too preoccupied with great ideas to be concerned with superficial conformity from demonstrated efforts to destabilize civilization.

Consumer Markets as Drivers of Innovation

When searching for the cause of the great technological advances of the United States when compared to those of the Soviet Union, one is struck by where the differences were not. The Soviets had their share of Nobel laureates. And their ideas for fiction—even approved fiction—were not lacking in innovation or sophistication, being every bit as creative as those of Gibson.

A well-studied explanation for the higher rates of innovation in the West is the presence of free markets. Command economies tolerate good enough performance. Consumer economies demand endless improvement, novelty, and marketing.

And this drives home another point—that there is more than one type of freedom. The Soviets implemented political openness (glasnost) about the same time they undertook market reforms (perestroika). Such an order of liberalization gave people the freedom to complain loudly and openly before they saw much in the way of prosperity. There were other factors at play in the rise of Soviet discontent (such as a lack of ethnic and cultural cohesion). But this sequence of events almost certainly accelerated the Soviet demise.

Free markets and prosperity give people a sort of freedom that purely political reforms do not. And a nation can continue to innovate technically so long as the government does not allow over-consolidation of major research and manufacturing groups. The forming of tech monopolies (or research monopolies) is a hazard to progress in any country.

Finally, however much the Chinese may relish their independence, however much they may take pleasure in demonstrating that nobody—Europeans, Americans, Russians—can push them around anymore, they should bear in mind their cycles of openness and closure. And they should remain forever mindful that tradition, while important, must be made to accommodate innovation if China is to rise above her centuries of Western and Qing oppression.

A Different Metaphysics, a Different Culture, a Different Perspective on Science

While the Chinese disconnect from the West should not be (nor is likely to be) complete, it may be deep and substantial enough to allow the Chinese an opportunity to refine our—all of humanity’s—understanding of the world. Yes, the Chinese should continue to respect the great accomplishments of empiricism, and yes, they should continue to learn from other peoples. But the Chinese having some time for removal from the dominant schools of academic thought may get them (and the rest of the world) out of several scientific ruts. And China’s distinctive metaphysics and cultural heritage add to this possibility.

The Chinese can look to wu wei as an alternative to the rigid, ideal-driven, Western theories of theoretical physics. They already do this in some of their arts. Applying the same thinking to science should be only incrementally more difficult.

For perspective, we can examine some distinctions between Western and Chinese music.

Western music relies on formal elegance. Chinese music is not so encumbered by this inflexibility. Instead, it is constructed and performed with a higher tolerance for controlled disorder, with the only musical style native to the West having an equal tolerance being jazz. This parallels the philosophical differences in these cultures.

And the evidence of these differences carries from philosophy to music and into gardening.

The formal gardens of 18th- and 19th-century Europe demonstrate a strong emphasis on geometry and structurally dictated placement and maintenance of plants. The living things within the garden were made to conform to predetermined rules, with heavy use of topiary being an excellent demonstration of this. Contrast this with the Chinese gardens of the same era. They are most certainly composed, which is to say that they are not constructed haphazardly; however, the intended effect is less one of imposing a view-from-above order than it is guiding the guest down a (seemingly) natural path.

Nothing suggests that learning from and adapting foreign (including Chinese) metaphysics to American intellectual and creative pursuits would be impossible. The United States can actively encourage dynamic thinking by promoting and funding the tinkerer and independent creative. And to a certain extent, the integration of non-Western thought into Western art and science has already happened. Jazz—mentioned as being the only Western musical style with an equal tolerance for improvisation as Chinese music—has ties to Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, both directly and indirectly. (The latter is through jazz’s connection to beat culture and beat culture’s relationship to Buddhism.) Jazz was outside the cultural mainstream for quite some time and has been defined by a certain spongy ability to soak up good ideas, regardless of their provenance. But bureaucracies will forever be less porous and less absorbent, and the big-science funding system is intensely bureaucratic, putting them at an evolutionary disadvantage.

There is the additional matter of the American matrix of values development. Arguments and adversarialism favor either formal logic or appeals to emotion. They do not favor a process of organic exploration. It is easy enough to build an argument and move through it stepwise. But let us see where the path takes us is not so much a thesis as it is a suggestion. And suggestions, as tenuous as they often are, do not fare well under cross-examination.

Independent innovators and small-group collaborators—jazz musicians amongst them—can transgress cultural norms in a way those more deeply integrated into the mainstream cannot. But these people are the exceptions. For most, the matrix of values development determines much of what they can and cannot accept. And within the American matrix of values development, Chinese philosophy, apart from Chinese Legalism (distinct from American adversarial legalism), is a hard sell. Thus, the Chinese may well remain in a certain position of strength (at the institutional level) in the realm of non-Western metaphysics barring sophisticated and persuasive arguments being made for their adoption in the West.

Nothing thus stated about the United States establishes that the Chinese will face no obstacles when discarding theory-driven thinking and adopting practice-driven thought. One barrier that the Chinese face is the cultural emphasis on stability—the same emphasis that slowed the development of China relative to the West. Combined with the inherent limitations of bureaucracy and the Confucian respect for teachers and elders, stability-oriented thinking stands to slow scientific progress.

Let us keep in mind that the elder scholars in China are well-trained in Western theoretical models. Too much deference to these esteemed professors and academics may well lead to an unwillingness of the young to present new ideas, despite those ideas being based on an ancient and distinctly Chinese metaphysics.

One route to promoting a Chinese approach to independent-mindedness (without undermining China’s core values or traditions) would be to actively encourage the study of Daoism in the public sphere and the schools. This may seem like a fantastic proposition—a Communist government promoting the study of religious writings. But it is not. Remember that Mao Zedong was hostile to Ruism—seeing it as being a part of the Four Olds—yet the Chinese government now sponsors Confucius Institutes around the world to promote the nation’s culture and language. From a purely Communist ideological perspective, resurrecting pre-Communist beliefs is indefensible. From a pragmatic one, doing so makes perfect sense. And the Chinese approach to problem-solving is pragmatic above all.

Another route to embracing results over theory is the establishment of research contests. These contests should be open to anyone, regardless of credentials, background, or political status. All submissions should be judged blind (meaning creators’ names are hidden until after the winner is chosen) and purely on their effectiveness. It was an open competition—and the chance of winning prize money—that led John Harrison to develop the marine chronometer, which gave the British a massive lead in global trade. Such competitions are likely to benefit the Chinese state of the art no less. Regardless of where they draw their inspiration—Chinese flow-thinking, Western rigidity, or something else entirely—a certain number of contest entrants will demonstrate out-of-the-box thinking. And that can be enough to move a science or art forward.

The greatest threat to innovation powered by Chinese metaphysics is foreign thinking, but not the Ding-Dong-fed druggie decadence of the United States. Rather, overly rigid adherence to Communism and its emphasis on a theory-first worldview could stand to undermine China’s tremendous opportunity to improve upon stagnant, technologically relevant, and high-prestige fields of science. No one and no people, regardless of nationality, can see the world for what it is if their eyes are closed by ideology. How effectively Chinese leadership can learn from its nation’s past—accomplishments and missed opportunities—to learn for the future will do much to dictate the speed and success of China’s development.

Free Will, Fatalism, Privacy, and Social Science Research

Free will is an inherently anti-deterministic concept. If one can perfectly predict what another person is going to do based on an understanding of that person’s nature, present state, and the environment in which he lives, free will is meaningless. If one cannot perfectly predict what another person is going to do based on the aforementioned factors, science (at least in any conventionally deterministic sense) has met its point of failure. There is no phrase more poisonous to positivism than you just cannot predict.

The Chinese tend towards fatalism, which should render free will either nonexistent or irrelevant. Conversely, the Westerners are less fatalistic and have more confidence in the power of free will, yet they have traditionally subscribed to something closer to physical determinism—meaning that the world is very much amenable to reductionism and experimental control.

So who believes more in free will in practice?

Before answering this question, we must take into account the additional and confusing matter of who has more faith in the power of the individual to change himself. The Americans, who believe in a growth mindset and see ability as both innate yet malleable, have one view of the effects of attempted self-improvement. The Chinese, who see ability as innate and not malleable (but believe one can make the best use of what he has), have another.

In most circumstances, this distinction may make no difference, but the social sciences are the exception.

The new world of social sciences is not one individual discussion and interviews, but big data—data that is high volume, high velocity (accumulates quickly), and highly varied in what it measures.

The Chinese worldview appears less centered around free will. This does not mean that the Chinese functionally reject the principle. The average Chinese man or woman would almost certainly answer in the affirmative if asked whether people can make decisions. To make a decision (and being responsible for that decision) is a demonstration of free will. Holding people accountable for their conduct, their debts, and their words also demonstrates operational confidence in free will. The man who acts without free will can no more be fairly held responsible for his actions than can a rock rolling for down a hill.

But by centered around free will (as I am implicitly describing the West) I mean obsessed with it. A people obsessed with rights and responsibilities of the individual will face a crisis of self every time a behavior or emotional response proves highly predictable on the individual level—something big data research is bound to do on occasion. The Chinese lack of fixation on the nature of free will is a strength for applied researchers. They can refine their understanding of human nature without worrying to no end over existential concerns.

And the Chinese mindset, organization of government, and views on the individual afford them several other advantages in developing social science research in ways that the West would find challenging.

The Chinese government is working to consolidate and connect huge amounts of data for its social credit scoring system. We can debate the ethics of collecting this much data on the members of a population to predict and control their behavior (and if it is better for a government or a private company to do this). What is more difficult to argue is that advancements in information gathering will not lead to a more accurate (essentially quantitative) understanding of human nature.

Depending upon how one interprets the United States Constitution, there may (or may not) be a general right to privacy within the country. And the Chinese constitution affords certain protections against the unlawful search of a citizen’s home (Article 39) and privacy of correspondence (Article 40). Yet neither document enshrines privacy as a right per se.

The biggest difference in the matter of information collection is less statutory than it is cultural. The Chinese lack the same intensely individualistic concept of privacy had by Americans. This is not to say that the average Chinese man is inclined to divulge every detail of his private life to all and sundry. But in a collectivistic, densely settled, and (until very recently) desperately poor country, privacy has neither been attainable nor high most people’s list of priorities.

American businesses and government agencies likely have at least as much data as do Chinese organizations, and the American desire for privacy may be widely ignored by data-gathering institutions. Still, these institutions are inclined to make a show of pretending to respect the rights of the American people, and this charade stands to slow the development of the most powerful behavior-predicting systems relative to what the Chinese will be able to achieve.

If Chinese industry and government desire to develop optimized behavioral models, they would be wise to do what they are doing at a larger scale and more intensively. Whoever is first to completely transform sociology and psychology from soft (subjective) domains into hard (mathematical) ones will have a massive economic and political edge at home and abroad. At home, this will allow for the consolidation of political control and more effective marketing. Abroad, the technology can be sold as a software/service to governments and private interests.

Americans may find the thought of a world of social credit systems, centralized storing and analysis of personal data, and the reduction of the human will to a variable subject to pushbutton control deeply dystopian and frightening. We may choose to avoid this market of behavior prediction and control for ethical reasons (although the American tradition of funding and arming tyrants makes this seem improbable), and such is our right. However, we should not assume that our corporate interests would not be happy to work towards the same ends, with the difference being that the Chinese may get there faster if they dedicate sufficient resources to the endeavor. In purely economic terms, there will be a market for advanced behavioral prediction and someone will come to dominate it.

Finally, the reduced emphasis on individual will and privacy in China puts the nation several laps ahead in the race to develop intracerebral implants and cognitive-enhancement technologies. There are few things more inherently intrusive than reading every electrical impulse in one’s brain, and there is likely no way to move these technologies past the most primitive stages without abandoning all pretexts of privacy.

How exactly the widespread deployment of implants with the capacity to extract and inject information into the brain would affect humanity is impossible to say. And without knowing the absolute limits of the technology, predicting how governments and businesses would use these systems and the data they collect is a challenge. More benign uses of such systems could include reversing paralysis, curing blindness, and enabling telepathy. Less benign uses might include mind control or government/corporate mindreading. There exists the distinct possibility that advertisement after advertisement will be zapped directly into the heads of consumers—possibly a more hellish prospect than having one’s boss lazily scroll through his every thought.

Either way, this technology will prove to be both politically and economically important. If the Chinese commercialize these systems before competitors do, they will have a head start worth billions (if not trillions) of dollars. They may also be able to give themselves a leg up in nearly every other related field, assuming the implant/mind-linking systems they produce allow for the more efficient use of human intellect and collective creativity.

On the contrary, these same systems might have the potential to extinguish novel ideas before they are anything more than a few sparks in the minds of the mentally controlled. In this way, these devices might become tools for a maximally interventionistic form of psychiatry—the stuff of Szasz’s nightmares.

What comes to pass depends on the state and limitations of the emerging art, the intent of the government, and the compliance or rebelliousness of the people. But if the Chinese government does not wish to suppress its people into a condition of economic backwardness, it had better start considering the relevant issues now. It must advance a comprehensive policy to prevent these systems from being used in such a way that suppresses the creative energies of the Chinese people or inadvertently foments rebellion. And it will need to establish mechanisms to prevent a leader and his cabal from gaining unrestricted control of the minds of the people. Such will be easier said than done, but that makes it no less critical.

With several potentially horrifying (or wondrous, depending on perspective) prospects out of the way, we turn to something simpler—the building of positive international relationships and a national brand that promotes peace and prosperity.

To anyone inclined to observe that mind-control and marketing and brand development have much in common, my response: You are correct! But the following section need not have too many cautions and caveats. In regards to international affairs, we shall assume that the Chinese want peace, regardless of what they intend to do to their compatriots. And for the sake of realism (and optimism), we will develop a model of goodwill building and branding that does not rely on drilling holes in anyone’s head.

Forging International Alliances/Preserving Cultural Integrity

This section is divided into five parts:

1. “With Friends Like These: Allies and Non-Allies”
2. “Stand for Something: Identifying and Promoting Operational Business Values”
3. “Just Do It: Building and Deploying Brand”
4. “When to Hold ‘em, When to Fold ‘em: An End to Moral Bickering”
5. “No Place Like Home: Keeping Family, Community, and Regional Bonds Alive”

With no further introduction, we begin.

With Friends Like These: Allies and Non-Allies

As China develops, she will inevitably expand her sphere of influence. The direction and extension of expansion will be governed by geopolitical realities and the resources the country needs.

But where the nation should not attempt to expand her influence is equally important. The United States will maintain a sphere of influence of her own. These two will overlap in a few places, but those places will be few indeed. Efforts to develop friendships, alliances, or influence in American-dominated countries and regions will prove either wasted or counterproductive. These countries and regions include:

1. North America and Central America
2. Western Europe and Central Europe
3. India
4. Israel

North America and Central America are substantially under the control of the United States. Pursuing anything much more than trade in North or Central America stands to raise the ire of the United States and achieve nothing else. There are no friends to be had here. Most of all, Canada is so closely and culturally connected to the United States that to expect her to risk serious condemnation from her larger, better-armed neighbor is absurd.

If anything, Canada is a perfectly reasonable relocation option for Hongkongers and Mainland Chinese who are no longer on good terms with the Mainland government. And if the Mainland government is inclined towards Machiavellianism, it would do well to encourage a certain flow of people from China to Canada, using Canada as a place of exile for those who are proving to be inconveniences. Such would not be the first time a Communist government shipped its problem children overseas—the Mariel Boatlift was Cuba’s attempt. But given China’s ability to assign those she ships off whatever paperwork and credentials she chooses, the Canadian government might not fully recognize the Chinese strategy for years. An action of this sort (assuming the Chinese government throws a fair number of criminals into the mix) could effectively spike the community and undermine the political cohesion of any overseas Chinese tending towards fomenting rebellion on the Mainland. It would also work to prevent the Canadians from getting too comfortable taking what alleged refugees, students, or workers say at face value, all while allowing the Chinese government to maintain plausible deniability. And the fact that this suspected action stands to frustrate the Canadian government is little concern. Canada and China share no goodwill to destroy.

Even the above community-spiking actions may not be necessary. There appears minimal risk of the Hongcouver overseas Chinese community working against the Mainland government. At present, there is no spiritual heir to Sun Yat-sen building an anti-Communist movement of gamblers, money launderers, and bears.

As for the other places on the list, the Central American states are desperately poor and of little geostrategic consequence, so building close relationships with them would be without value and risk angering the United States. India’s border dispute with China is ongoing. And Israel receives too much money from the United States to risk killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

Then there is Europe. Western and Central European nations are either members of NATO or closely aligned with it, with the one exception being Cyprus. These nations are so integrated into the American defense apparatus that anything beyond establishing business relationships with them and intelligence-gathering operations in them would be unworkable for the Chinese.

Now we should consider the nations and regions with which the United States and China will have overlapping spheres of influence:

1. Australia
2. New Zealand
3. South America

These nations and regions are on the periphery of the Western/American sphere of influence.

Australia, despite being an integral part of the Anglosphere, is close enough to China and has enough minerals to warrant massive amounts of trade. Additionally, a significant flow of students from China to Australia will likely continue for several more years. The Australians may have their reservations about China, but the nation is economically codependent on China to the point that ongoing cultural and resource exchanges are inevitable. Many Australian industries (including that of education) would be hurt tremendously, as would the Chinese steel industry, were these exchanges to not continue apace. That much said, Australia will remain connected to the United States through security agreements, and the Australian government will continue to make massive purchases of materiel from American manufacturers.

New Zealand is in a similar condition to Australia, with the biggest difference that she exports more food than minerals. China is now (2022) the nation’s largest trading partner, with Australia being a close second.

Finally, there is South America. The South American countries lack the strong cultural bonds with the United States had by Australia and New Zealand. However, they are close enough to the United States that they have been considered to be in the American sphere of influence since the days of the Monroe Doctrine. This is changing. The American grip on South America loosened during the Global War on Terror, leaving China will an opening to build relationships in the region.

In all of these overlapping spheres, China must act with care. She stands to benefit from well-designed exchanges in these countries that would allow both their people and the Chinese people to improve their standards of living. But the Chinese must remain acutely aware of how any heavy-handed action on their part, such as engaging in overtly political activities on or around college campuses, could backfire. Unlike when dealing with Canada and the United States, the Chinese government should make an effort to maintain authentically friendly bonds with the members of this peripheral group. After all, there are relationships to be gained or lost.

These nations know that China is a Communist country and that the laws and social norms in China are different from their own. And however much higher educational institutions and businesses in these countries may profess loyalty to higher ideals, they are not so wedded to their beliefs that they are not happy to prostitute themselves for a fair price.

That said, there is a difference between meeting a woman at a cheap motel, having your way with her, and leaving 200 dollars on the nightstand and doing the aforementioned and then sending a video of the event to her father. The old man may have his suspicions that his daughter is not paying for his multiple sclerosis medication and gambling debts by working as a barista, but there are some realities one would rather not face.

The Chinese would do well to remember that discretion, if not truly the better part of valor, is the better part of diplomacy. And no matter how much they are feeling the part of wolves, the Chinese should avoid being too obvious when snatching fat Australian academic sheeple from around the station.

The last group we should consider encompasses those nations and regions in which China may consider herself to have no great competition for influence. They are:

1. (Much of) Eastern Europe
2. (Most of) Africa
3. (Parts of) Southeast Asia

Eastern Europe is in a curious position. Many of its states have established relationships with NATO under the Partnership for Peace program, and one—Georgia—has been nominally on track for full NATO membership since 2008. Yet these nations cannot rely on the United States to help them. American support for Ukraine has been restricted to arms and limited training, with the American government seemingly willing to fight for Ukraine down to the last Ukrainian. And Russia’s future and role in the region are up in the air. This provides a major opportunity for the Chinese people and government to build strong relationships with these countries, not necessarily in the realm of defense, but in regards to improving trade and cultivating strong international alliances.

The position of the African nations is different. They are not sandwiched between a NATO rock and a Russian hard place. Rather, they are very nearly forgotten. The United States military does have a command center for Africa—AFRICOM—but it is based in Germany. And the United States has limited involvement in the region. This, combined with Africa’s massive mineral reserves, makes Africa the best continent for an expansion of Chinese geopolitical and business interests.

And select nations in Southeast Asia—Myanmar, for example—have needs that are not much different. All of these nations could benefit hugely from infrastructure improvements and increased access to low-cost goods.

This is where the Chinese plans and planners have excelled. The Belt and Road Initiative stands to benefit many of these countries if it has not yet done so. If the people and leadership of these countries come to see that the Chinese bring growth and fair practices to their regions, Chinese businesses and the Chinese government will have a regional advantage over their Western counterparts. European colonial powers were not a benign force in much of Africa, and they remained uncharitable towards Africans until the very end. This is not ancient history. Zimbabwe did not achieve independence from White rule until 1980. And Western businesses have carried on their exploitation of the African people in different ways, from conducting poorly regulated and dishonestly conducted clinical trials in Africa to exploiting child labor for cocoa farms.

For Africans to feel ambivalence towards Europeans and American concerns would be nothing short of miraculous. China, however, has never seriously dirtied her hands in the region. The perception of the Chinese as allies (or at least neutral parties more interested in business than domination) should not be wasted. Unfortunately, this is what the Chinese risk doing if they do not carefully manage the conduct of their citizens and representatives in Africa and the treatment of Africans in China.

We begin by considering the treatment of Africans in China.

Not long after the imposition of COVID controls in China, Africans living there began to face both official and unofficial discrimination. Guangzhou, where more than 100,000 Africans lived and worked (often as traders), has gained infamy as a place where Africans were abruptly kicked out of their apartments and hotels. This became a common enough occurrence that the Nigerian Consul General made a complaint to Chinese officials. In a curiously xenophobic twist, this discrimination was due to Chinese officials and citizens fearing (or claiming to fear) that Africans were bringing COVID into a nation that is indisputably the disease’s place of origin.

The desire to place the blame on others—outsiders—is human. The desire to see one’s group as innocent is no less so, but the deflective instinct must be controlled or it will remain uncontrolled. And these irrational responses on the part of the Chinese government and people sabotage by small measures international relationships the Chinese have spent decades cultivating. No, these actions are not of the same magnitude as the enslavement of a people, the exploitation of their bodies for medical purposes, or the theft of African land. But the era of colonialism and empire is over, and the age of the smartphone is upon us. The Chinese must treat their African allies fairly and maintain more consistent image discipline if they are to prosper on that continent.

Then there is the matter of the behavior of the Chinese in Africa. There are more than 10,000 Chinese-owned companies in Africa, most of them private. China now conducts far more trade with Africa than does any other nation and invests seven times more money in African infrastructure. The extent to which Africa has modern roads, rail, and telecommunications systems in the 21st century will largely be determined by how much Chinese engineering and construction resources are invested in the continent.

The United States may express her concerns over the Chinese model of the internet and may urge African countries to spend more for unrestricted access to information, but the Chinese are the ones on the ground. Chinese companies are building cellular towers, installing routing equipment, and selling phones—all at prices the Africans can afford. Something like 70% of all 4G infrastructure in Africa is Chinese. This—the construction of foundational systems in developing economies—is a profoundly wise move on the part of the Chinese. It paves the way for Chinese maintenance and upgrade contracts and establishes Chinese technical standards and business practices as the norms in China for generations to come. In the realm of information technology, it affords Chinese companies an even bigger advantage, with Chinese software, Chinese web services, and consumer products all establishing brand dominance. This is a boon to technology companies that will allow them to become trusted players in the region, which can translate into faster regulatory approval for new technologies (such as Baidu’s self-driving taxis). It is no less a boon to the Chinese government. If Africans use Chinese apps and Chinese search engines, what they see can be filtered using whatever criteria the Chinese government deems appropriate.

Building trust is difficult. Destroying it is easy. The Chinese have invested heavily in their relationships with the African governments, businesses, and people. Allowing unscrupulous businessmen and charlatans to slow or reverse China’s progress in Africa would be the height of carelessness. Race is a sensitive topic, and the claims of racism may be leveled against the Chinese whether they are intentionally racist, unintentionally racist, or acting in a non-racist way that can be seen in a bad light.

The Chinese need to proactively consider and construct policies that prevent the fearful, the malicious, or the greedy from slowing China’s long and steady march towards being the dominant modernizing force in Africa. These pro-African policies should include:

1. Restrictions on racist or defaming social media/internet posts directed at Africa or Africans
2. Regulation of Chinese schools, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and private business interests in Africa, with clearly articulated punishments for fraud or misrepresentation
3. Strict food purity/product labeling/quality control laws for exported products to prevent substandard/mislabeled products from being sold in Africa
4. Restrictions on the manufacture and export of counterfeit goods, even if such goods are not found to be harmful or otherwise distinguishable from the original product
5. Restrictions on abuse/mistreatment/sharp practices towards African visa holders in designated free-trade cities in China
6. Extensive regulation and oversight of private security firms operating in Africa

We should note that some of these policies affect Chinese people who are not living in China at the time they are committing a violation. Practically, enforcement of such laws is easy. Chinese authorities can gather evidence of crimes (with much of the evidence coming from online postings) or send non-arresting investigators to foreign countries to monitor the behavior of overseas Chinese. The Chinese government can then either request that the offender is extradited to China or wait for the offender to return of his own volition. As for those who argue that the Chinese government would be acting contrary to international law by enforcing laws outside of China’s borders, I refer you to the PROTECT Act of 2003. The Act, formally called the “Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today Act,” allows the United States government to investigate and prosecute Americans who commit sex crimes against children, regardless of where the crime occurs. For the Chinese to codify long-arm statutes and establish an investigation system similar to that of the United States Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) would not be an assault on the sovereignty of any other country.

We should elucidate the function of each of these proposals.

Racist social media posts are a nearly certain way to promote ill will. Restrictions on them would do much to prevent harm to Sino-African relations. And investigations of these posts could be done from China using the government’s existing social media monitoring technologies and infrastructure.

Schools are highly visible and often entail interaction with children. By imposing regulations on school operations overseas, the Chinese government could address a potential source of reputational harm for the Chinese people.

The sale of products that are harmful to human health (toxic toothpaste, for example) does much to engender fear and mistrust. Everything from mouthwash to wheels for high-speed trains—anything directly connected to human safety and wellbeing—should be subject to inspection and quality control.

Counterfeit products are inadvertent advertisements for their legitimate namesakes. Their ongoing manufacture and distribution are a tacit admission that we are not as good as the real company, and the best we can hope to do is copy the original. In the short term, the sale of counterfeits may be highly profitable. Bad counterfeits can be almost pure profit. Good counterfeits are less so, but they still allow the counterfeiter to piggyback on the reputation (and advertising budgets) of established companies. In the long term, however, every sale of a counterfeit good constitutes a missed opportunity to build an original brand.

Thus, the Chinese government should aggressively enforce trademark law for Chinese and non-Chinese interests alike. This will encourage Chinese companies to invest in building their own brands. The more Chinese brands gain a good reputation throughout the global market, the more Brand China gains a good reputation. Additionally, consistent trademark enforcement will give the Chinese more credibility when asking that their trademarks be protected in other countries.

The matter of fair and sensible treatment of Africans in China is commonsensical. Reports of abuse, discrimination, or violence against African traders and businesspeople in major Chinese cities (Guangzhou, et cetera) can both make Africans more hesitant to enter business relationships with the Chinese and feed a general sense of grievance. Fair housing, rental, and trade practices do not need to be evenly enforced throughout all of China. If foreigners experience some poor treatment in smaller cities and towns, they may well be willing to write this off as a sign of a rustic mindset. But the major cities are different. Regulatory and law-enforcement agencies in trading hubs can and should be trained to interact with foreigners impartially and professionally.

Finally, there is the matter of private Chinese security firms in Africa. Little evidence of abuses by these firms exists, but they are growing increasingly common in Africa. With much of their work dedicated to protecting high-value targets—executives, construction sites, and ships off the African coast—they are narrower in their range of operations than are major Western groups. Nevertheless, there is the potential for a security or defensive action on the part of one of these organizations to become an international incident. The Chinese government should dedicate however much effort is required to seeing that Chinese business and governmental interests cannot be portrayed as cavalierly disregarding the lives of Africans.

Many of the actions suggested herein should help the Chinese to establish a reputation for honesty, integrity, and anti-imperialism—values that will help the Chinese stand in contrast to the West. But for values identification and promotion, this is not enough. In the next section, we will look more closely at the operational values China should endorse at home and abroad.

Stand for Something: Identifying and Promoting Operational Business Values

We have already considered China’s major values systems—Daoism, Ruism, and Buddhism—and her matrix of values development. We have also identified the sources of American values—Christianity, individualism, and the omnipredatorial drive. The American way of thinking and acting has spread across much of the globe, sometimes in imitation of the American way, sometimes as a reaction to it, and sometimes as a mixture of the two.

The omnipredatorial mindset of the United States, her institutions, her ideology, and her people have accelerated the internationalization of American norms. The Chinese people and culture are not guided by the same principles, nor should they be. Chinese culture and values are not impelled forward by the grow-or-self-destruct function of American culture. But the Chinese will need to develop a consistent values framework for interacting with the outside world. This relates to brand, but it is not identical to it. A national brand gives a people and the rest of the world a simplified, streamlined concept of a culture and nation. Values play a part in this, and values can be said to be a part of a brand. But operational business values are distinct in that they tell the world how to interact with and what to expect from the people of a certain country when doing business with them. These are the rules of business that are important but not quite so important that they have been incorporated into statutes.

For comparison, let us consider some of the operational business values of Americans. They are:

1. Time efficiency. Do not be late. Do not sponsor or attend needless social events. Keep your small talk brief and predictable. Get down to business.
2. Superficial friendliness. Smile and be pleasant but do not form lasting bonds at the workplace. Workplace friends are not real friends.
3. Privacy. Do not ask personal questions. Leave your personal life at home.
4. Optimism. Offer two positive comments for every negative comment. Keep things upbeat.
5. Obedience to rules. Follow formal guidelines and manuals as closely as possible. Remember that procedure generally matters more than people. Treat everyone in accordance with policy and law. Make few exceptions.

Anyone who intends to work with Americans needs to know these operational business values. They can be ignored without violating the law or necessarily destroying a single deal. But for those who desire to have anything more than a one-off relationship with American businesses or businessmen, the need to learn these and be willing to abide by them is real.

How do we distill the complex cultural norms of China into a series of operational business values? There is more than one way to go about this, but I will propose a five-point model roughly analogous to the sample American model. Our tentative list of Chinese operational values includes:

1. Time flexibility. Work hard, but be flexible with the schedule. Sometimes, you may face a time crunch. If so, stay late. Sometimes, a meeting or a dinner runs long. If so, do not leave before you can do so politely. And sometimes, you may have a slow day. If so, relax. Focus on critical goals, but do not be a slave to the clock.
2. Deep friendship. Do not feign being a friend when you are not. Be polite but circumspect when dealing with strangers. Once someone enters the circle of friends or family, be honest, even if doing so hurts his feelings. Help your friends, and they will help you. Remember that friendship should be earned.
3. Discretion. Do not assume that you should talk about something publicly just because everyone knows about it. Privacy is rare, and secrets are hard to keep, but that which is known need not always be spoken. Do not be so indiscrete that you cause someone to lose face.
4. Performance orientation. If a product, person, or service does not meet standards, say so. Do not do this in a way that causes the person to lose face, but do not be indirect either. Point out people’s mistakes often and immediately. This is how you help them improve.
5. Obedience to relationships and circumstances. Rules matter, but be willing to adjust them as needed based on context. Remember that relationships generally matter more than procedure. Apply rules as relationships, circumstances, and pragmatic thinking dictate.

One cannot market the operational business values of a nation as he would a bar of soap, but the government and businesses can promote a certain standardization of these norms and a better understanding of them through education. For example, business schools in the United States have done much to propagate a normalized, standardized set of implied standards and operational business values.

The top 20 Masters of Business Administration (MBA) programs in the United States admitted slightly less than 3,000 international students every year before COVID-19. Given the total number of foreign students in the United States, this seems minuscule. But the programs referenced are the most select of the select in the nation and amongst the most select in the world. The people who graduate from them often return to their homelands and introduce the policies and thinking they learned to thousands of subordinates. If the Chinese wish to help other peoples learn Chinese operational business values, opening more Chinese MBA programs to international students and working to improve the reputations of these programs would do much good. On a lower-cost/lower-status level, corporations and provincial governments might do well to open short-term business academies to help non-Chinese learn the Chinese language and about Chinese operational business values.

None of the above should be taken to suggest that the Chinese should try to set their operational business values as the global norm. And in any educational program, the non-universality of any set of operational business values should be stressed.

The goal of such education should not be to convert. The Chinese should not proselytize the Chinese way. The goal should be to reduce confusion and potential sources of ill will. As China enters her cycle of closure, keeping educational institutions open to foreigners will require some resistance to the pressures of the age, but this is worth doing unless the Chinese intend to altogether stop engaging with the outside world.

Just Do It: Building and Deploying Brand

In the last essay, we reviewed several national brands, and I proposed a national brand model for China. While one may take issue with my suggestions, what should be more easily agreed upon is that a marketing strategy/brand design scheme is of little relevance unless it is put into practice. But how can this be done?

In the United States, brand deployment strategies are diffuse. Major marketing interests come to a general agreement as to what constitutes an element of the American brand, much as a population organically agrees as to what a word means without a centralized authority providing a definition. The brand element is then propagated (with variations). This process is slow and haphazard. In China, the government will have a considerably larger role to play. We now consider what steps the government should take (or guide Chinese brands/media groups into taking) to globally propagate Brand China:

1. Impose and aggressively enforce the pro-African policies suggested in “With Friends Like These: Allies and Non-Allies.”
2. Develop a variable taxation rate for films/media content. Provide tax breaks to film/media groups that produce on-brand content.
3. Establish a regressive tax structure for on-brand media content (the more successful the content, the lower the tax rate).
4. Likewise, incentivize film franchise and restaurant franchise growth with a regressive tax structure.
5. Promote brand synergy. Provide taxation/funding incentives for companies that produce merchandise affiliated with successful on-brand media content/encourage product placement.
6. Engage in global market testing and sales analysis. Establish market-research groups to analyze global consumer preferences and determine what on-brand media content has international appeal.

The reason for the first suggested step is obvious: Discriminatory policies towards trading partners and the sale of poor-quality manufactured goods promote distrust, harm the health and wellbeing of people both inside and outside of China, and harm the Chinese brand. Without a connection to an established baseline of quality and demonstrated respect for other peoples, the Chinese brand will remain a millstone around the necks of anyone wanting to succeed outside of the motherland.

The second suggested step is not much more difficult to explain. I do not advocate that the Chinese government ban off-brand-target films, but providing tax incentives for creating content aligned with the Chinese brand model would speed its diffusion.

The third suggested step is intended to minimize perverse incentives—a Springtime for Hitler scenario in which producers make intentionally unwatchable films for money laundering or tax-fraud purposes.

The fourth suggestion is based on the realities of the modern film and food markets. Film franchises rely on heavy brand building and cumulative brand development. Marketing for a standalone movie is marketing for a standalone movie. Marketing for a film in a franchise is marketing for the entire franchise. And each film in the franchise is an advertisement for the one that follows. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, which consists of more than 20 movies, has grossed at least $26 billion. The Chinese have attempted to develop film franchises, but as of yet, they have had little international success (with the possible exception of the Detective Chinatown film series). This is a deficiency the Chinese should work to eliminate.

The lack of a highly successful Chinese film franchise may well be explained by the country’s late economic development and censorious media policies, but the lack of a major China-based Chinese food franchise is befuddling. There are several successful Chinese food chains started by Chinese based in North America. But there is no Chinese global equivalent to KFC—an American franchise started in and named after an American state (by a man from another state, but that is neither here nor there). And if anything, KFC should have served as a source of inspiration for the Chinese—there are more than 5,000 of them in their country.

Some of this may have to do with the reputation of the Chinese for questionable food safety. But it is likely no less the result of a lack of understanding of brand power. Such also likely reflects a failure to take into account the power of restaurant presence in shaping mental associations. Scent—and by extension, taste—ties closely to memory formation. Well-designed restaurants with popular food and a positive (but not overstated) message could be both profitable and do much to improve China’s national brand.

The fifth suggestion takes into account the dynamics of the modern media market. Effective merchandising of popular media content can be highly lucrative. As of 2015, revenue from Star Wars merchandise was $17 billion, and over the last seven years, this number has certainly increased. As for product placement, it is a well-established marketing strategy that is relatively inexpensive. While the cost of this marketing strategy is relatively low, the cost of the product being placed need not be. Consider the James Bond series of Omega watches. The Bond/Omega relationship was established in 1995. Before that, the movies featured a range of watches, including some surprisingly inexpensive digital models. Exactly how much money either the various film studios behind the Bond franchise or Omega made from this relationship is difficult to determine. But if Omega sold even a modest number of watches, it likely more than recouped expenses while keeping its brand in the public eye.

The final (sixth) suggestion addresses the elephant in the room. Thus far, the Chinese have not done a good job of brand development. Given the size, cultural assets, and history of the nation, this is inexcusable. Building and marketing a brand requires that one understand his own culture and the cultures in which the brand will be deployed. It is in the latter part of this imperative that the Chinese have fallen seriously behind.

While the Chinese may be closing to the outside world, doing so completely would be a critical mistake. In the war of the brands, China is now lacking in critical intelligence—how the Chinese brand is perceived outside the country. How others perceive you can be every bit as important as what you are and what you know yourself to be.

In a culture in which face plays an integral part in determining one’s role in the community, the power of perception should be taken as self-evident.

There are few brand-development strategies less revolutionary than market research. That makes it no less useful. Conventional brand perception study techniques (focus groups, et cetera) have their place, but they are relatively primitive. The best and most advanced techniques will require the use of big data—the utility of which was already mentioned. By leveraging their growing control of the search-engine market in the developing world and the expansions of their streaming services, Chinese content producers can come to a more robust understanding of viewing patterns than would otherwise be possible.

If they can get a firmer grasp of how Chinese culture is perceived and how different Chinese cultural products are received, the Chinese will be able to improve their global brand.

Thus, several good decisions with positive outcomes can reinforce each other. This is the virtuous circle of market success:

1. The greater market share the Chinese have in the developing-world telecommunications sector, the more they can promote Chinese search engines, apps, and services.
2. The more customers in the developing world rely on these apps and services, the more data Chinese companies can gather.
3. The more data Chinese companies can gather, the more they can refine their understanding of foreign markets and perceptions of the Chinese brand and Chinese media products.
4. The better understanding Chinese media groups have of these perceptions, the more they can tweak their products for global appeal.
5. The more appealing these media products become, the more effectively they can be used for product placements.
6. The more effective these product placements become, the more consumer and information-technology goods the Chinese companies can sell in developing markets.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat. And that is how a nation takes an underdeveloped market—one that wealthier nations and premium product markets ignore—and peacefully dominates it.

American companies are unlikely to seize this opportunity. First, they lack long-term thinking skills. Second, they may find that antitrust laws restrict the ability of major companies to unify and diversify in such a way that they can maximize market growth. The ideal company for improving telecommunications access in the developing world is a one-stop shop, providing smartphones proven to be compatible with the tower infrastructure and pre-installed localized apps that are integrated seamlessly into the smartphone operating system. Google, with its range of products and services, is the closest the United States can offer to this. But this is limited. Google is not a manufacturer of consumer products. (Its branded phones are made by other companies and are far too expensive for the average middle-income consumer.)

A final point to all of this is that the Chinese will almost certainly be building better quantitative models of human behavior as a part of their national social credit scoring system (previously mentioned). The American government is almost certainly developing similar predictive models, but they may well be classified such that they are of no use to commercial interests. The closer relationship between Chinese businesses and governments makes this point moot. Models built by the government to predict the behavior of the Chinese in China will almost certainly have some applications outside of the country. And models built to predict international consumer behavior will likewise be of some use within China. In both cases, the models will need to be adapted to account for cultural and external factor differences. But given enough time and resources, the Chinese government and Chinese businesses may well be able to work together to build a reliable universal system for human observation, prediction, and control.

This possibility is something the American people and government may wish to keep in mind when deciding how much software and hardware production they wish to outsource to China or keep within their country.

Interesting brand development, deployment, and refined models having been examined, we now turn to the matter of China picking her moral battles and battlefield.

When to Hold ‘em, When to Fold ‘em: An End to Moral Bickering

The concept of human rights is neither ancient nor immutable. One may trace the concept back to ancient Greece or Rome, but this is a tenuous bond. Freedom is a new concept. Ancient Greece and Rome both had various forms of slavery, some of which were decidedly brutal. The Western world did not eliminate slavery by birth until the 19th century, and slavery is still perfectly legal in the United States today under certain specific conditions.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

13th Amendment (Section 1) United States Constitution

Notice that slavery is still permissible as punishment for a crime. Granted, the 13th Amendment eliminates hereditary slavery, but it neither fixes a maximum term nor dictates the conditions in which a slave is to be held. Assuming one was duly convicted of a crime when young, an American could spend almost the entirety of his life as a slave.

Other notions of human rights—universal suffrage, freedom of speech for all, right to freedom of religious practice (or freedom from religious practice), and the right to travel within his country or to leave his country—are also relatively new. Propagation of a universal standard and definition of human rights (and the translation of the relevant text into different languages) did not begin until after the Second World War.

The original language and concepts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are fundamentally Western and individualistic. This puts China—a more collectivistic country—at a disadvantage. So long as the Chinese tacitly accept these Western-dictated terms, they will be playing according to Western rules. And the West will exploit this advantage to the fullest, producing ever-longer lists of alleged violations of human rights. The Chinese can counter these lists and reports with lists and reports of their own. There is no harm in calling attention to the hypocrisy of others, but to do nothing more than that is missing a critical opportunity. Rather than simply attack the United States for her shortcomings, the Chinese must develop a comprehensive statement of rights and responsibilities. The authors should acknowledge the Chinese heritage and sources of this document while keeping it simple enough for those with little understanding of Chinese culture to understand.

This Chinese undertaking would serve two purposes. The primary purpose is to establish to the Chinese people and the world—this is what we believe. This is our view of justice, rights, and responsibilities. A secondary purpose would be to demonstrate to people everywhere that there is more than one way of thinking about a problem. Until the Western paradigm is challenged, it will be taken as a given—one to which nations must hold themselves to varying degrees, with those who choose not to do so being on the defensive. Stated another way, the purpose of the Chinese Declaration of the Rights and Responsibilities of the Individual, the Family, the Community, and the State would be to demonstrate that the Western yardstick is not the only measuring tool.

The global effect of constructing this document will not be to force Chinese values on other nationalities but to encourage them to think critically about what they believe. And the local effect (in China and for Chinese people) will be to give the Chinese a document of reference that they can use when engaging with their government and with people outside of their country.

The Chinese constitution serves some of these purposes, but it is both too legalistic and too particular to provide a general outline of Chinese philosophies and beliefs. Here is a summary of what the Declaration should contain:

1. An introduction and statement of purpose of the Declaration, including an advisory passage establishing that the Declaration is intended to be applied specifically to China, the Chinese people, and those who wish to better understand them
2. Identification of parties to which the Declaration applies—China, her people, her government, her families, et cetera
3. A statement of the social goals of rights and responsibilities in China—the ideal society according to Chinese standards, the types of and nature of the relationships that are to be preserved and cultivated, and the Chinese understanding of social harmony
4. A list of terms and definitions
5. A complete statement of the rights and responsibilities of the relevant parties
6. A model for resolving conflicts of rights and responsibilities, both for a given party and between two or more parties of differing social ranks (person versus community, et cetera)
7. A history of the concepts and criteria used in the Declaration, including whatever Daoist, Confucian, Buddhist, Communist, or Western ideals are applicable and how these were synthesized into a cohesive set of principles
8. A call for other peoples to develop Declarations based upon their own principles and values

A Chinese Declaration of Rights could stand to serve as a template for the declarations of other peoples. These declarations would allow them to argue more effectively for their distinctive ways of life. And if everyone calls the West’s likely bluff—the threats and efforts at coercion into abiding by a set of values that no one takes seriously—the West will be forced to fold or show. My money is on there not being so much as a flush under all the bluster.

No Place Like Home: Keeping Family, Community, and Regional Bonds Alive

Now we will briefly review a few ideas for strengthening family and regional bonds in China.

We should begin by assessing the role of language in Chinese regional identity. Benedict Anderson noted the role of standard forms of language in developing the imagined community of a nation. An inverse principle of this is that the loss of regional dialects weakens regional identity. The Chinese government and the Chinese people both have a rational and compelling interest in the promotion of Standard Chinese, and education in Standard Chinese should continue; however, this does not establish that regional dialects should be abandoned.

It is not enough for the Chinese to be Chinese, lest they become as disconnected from a concrete sense of place as have Americans. Rather, Chinese young people should be encouraged to have a geographical connection to somewhere in particular. Knowledge of a local dialect and customs can help to make this so. Ideally, students would learn the dialect and customs of the hometown/region of at least one of their parents. But if such not is feasible—a distinct possibility given how many Chinese families have relocated (not always willingly) to major cities—students should learn the dialect and customs of where they are raised.

There are distinct benefits of urbanization to national development and the environment. But overly aggressive urbanization—that which produces indistinguishable unplaces—may produce a generation of Chinese who are deeply invested in no place and nothing. As James Howard Kunstler noted, the United States has excelled in creating a geography of nowhere, and I would suggest that the Chinese leave this win for the Americans. The loss of dialects contributes to a national sameness in which only the climate differs from one location to the next.

Beyond preserving dialects, the Chinese government should work to maintain a sense of locality by preserving landmarks and historically significant districts. If a community has a distinctive layout or interesting features, city planners should strive to maintain these while modernizing and improving the infrastructure.

As for family bonds, the Chinese must work to avoid the highly sentimentalized, romance-driven approach to family dominant in the United States. American-style sexual romanticism leads to serial monogamy (quickly moving from one relationship to the next), which itself leads to less stable environments for children. The optimal approach to maintaining functional families is to focus on conserving extended-family relationships and the role of grandparents in raising their grandchildren without too much concern for love between husband and wife.

In the United States, raising one’s grandchildren is often categorized as an imposition—one that grandparents may do, but that is a fundamental infringement upon the grandparents’ time. In Chinese culture, raising one’s grandchildren is widely accepted and seen as a task of value that can help the family succeed. For economic reasons alone, this Chinese model is the stronger one. It allows working-age parents to hand the duties of childrearing to people they trust (enabling those in their prime working years to be more productive). And when working-age people pay their parents’ expenses as compensation for childcare, it affords the elderly a much-needed source of income.

Changes to the tax structure to incentivize the continuation of the grandparent-caregiver tradition (such as allowing working-age adults to deduct from the taxable incomes the amount they pay their parents for childrearing) might be useful. And changes to employment law to give younger people more time to care for their elderly parents/assist their elderly parents with tasks they are no longer able to do on their own would also be valuable.

As the West faces a growing pension crisis, it should also consider implementing some of these suggested changes.

Modest Objectives, Imperfectly Achieved

This essay was written with the intent of promoting thought and engagement regarding the obstacles—some unique to each country, some common to both countries, some common to almost all countries—that China and the United States face. It is a decidedly flawed document. I have neither the technical expertise nor the time to develop anything much better. Yet I do not regard this effort as a failure. I have identified problems as I saw them. I have offered potential remedies to the best of my abilities. If I have done nothing more than inspire someone else to write something better—to find more fundamental truths, to devise and articulate means of realizing greater good for a greater number—I have succeeded. One need not always be right. It is sometimes enough to show that our present path is not the only one.

With that in mind, we draw this essay series to a close.

(Continue to the conclusion)

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Brant von Goble is a writer, editor, publisher, researcher, teacher, musician, juggler, and amateur radio operator.

He is the author of several books and articles of both the academic and non-academic variety. He owns and operates the book publishing company Loosey Goosey Press.