----- 3 stars ----- My Week of Radical Transparency at a Chinese Business Seminar / Wired On a more intimate level, the class was also an opportunity to get to know a group of Chinese people who weren't related to me by blood. I'm a second-generation Chinese American, and I've always wondered about the other life I might have lived had my parents never emigrated, [...] For all our pretensions of being straight shooters, Americans don't really have the stomach for it. At least at the office. But encountering radical transparency in a Chinese setting seemed even more unlikely. In my reporting work, I'd spoken to many old-school Chinese laobans (bosses), where the communication had been ludicrously circuitous and involved numerous concessions to hierarchy and “face.” My classmates disproved my skepticism. They were chameleons, slipping easily between the opaqueness of traditional China and the unvarnished directness of modern China. [...] There were many moments like this, when my liberal Western sensibilities ran up against candid, Chinese ones. These moments left me confused. The comments often seemed misogynistic or callous; they also seemed to get at something real. [...] When I gave my self-assessment—I considered my education and family to be strengths, and my looks and wealth to be weaknesses—it was the first time in a very long time I'd said something negative about myself and not been told that I just had low self-esteem. No one said anything. There were no immediate protests or reassurances. And while initially the silence triggered something lonely and insecure in me, I also felt relieved. My insecurities weren't just in my head. They were real things that I could change or compensate for. In fact, if I lived in China, they were things that market conditions would force me to change and compensate for. [...] Like many American-born Chinese, I spent my childhood and adolescence holding my Chinese heritage in slight disdain. When I was in elementary and middle school, our trips to see the grandparents in Nanjing and Shanghai meant a number of physical inconveniences—air pollution, mosquitoes, dirty hospitals, squat toilets. Later on, as China developed, we saw its particular combination of gaudy consumerism and political centralization as gauche. My younger sister and I made fun of the fake Louis Vuitton bags, the sun umbrellas, the transactional nature of romantic relationships. We also viewed the government with suspicion. Our schools had taught us that liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of government, that anything else was evil and doomed to fail. We were haughty in our moral superiority. Yet China didn't fail. It thrived. [...] One would think that all these sea turtles, educated or at least exposed to the democratic tradition, would chafe under restrictions to speech, press, and assembly. Yet the impression I got at Zhen Academy, where roughly half of the class had spent some time abroad, and from talking to Chinese friends in the US, was the opposite. Some students, particularly from privileged classes, “come to this country and see how democracy works, and they actually become disenchanted,” says Yuhua Wang, a professor of political science at Harvard. “Part of the reason is that they see the problems, the inefficiencies, the gridlock of democracy. Back in China, everything seems to work very smoothly, because there's a very strong party.” In their eyes, the Chinese government is absolute but not arbitrary, and its decisions, while often harsh, nevertheless have a kind of logic.
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----- 3 stars ----- My Week of Radical Transparency at a Chinese Business Seminar / Wired On a more intimate level, the class was also an opportunity to get to know a group of Chinese people who weren't related to me by blood. I'm a second-generation Chinese American, and I've always wondered about the other life I might have lived had my parents never emigrated, [...] For all our pretensions of being straight shooters, Americans don't really have the stomach for it. At least at the office. But encountering radical transparency in a Chinese setting seemed even more unlikely. In my reporting work, I'd spoken to many old-school Chinese laobans (bosses), where the communication had been ludicrously circuitous and involved numerous concessions to hierarchy and “face.” My classmates disproved my skepticism. They were chameleons, slipping easily between the opaqueness of traditional China and the unvarnished directness of modern China. [...] There were many moments like this, when my liberal Western sensibilities ran up against candid, Chinese ones. These moments left me confused. The comments often seemed misogynistic or callous; they also seemed to get at something real. [...] When I gave my self-assessment—I considered my education and family to be strengths, and my looks and wealth to be weaknesses—it was the first time in a very long time I'd said something negative about myself and not been told that I just had low self-esteem. No one said anything. There were no immediate protests or reassurances. And while initially the silence triggered something lonely and insecure in me, I also felt relieved. My insecurities weren't just in my head. They were real things that I could change or compensate for. In fact, if I lived in China, they were things that market conditions would force me to change and compensate for. [...] Like many American-born Chinese, I spent my childhood and adolescence holding my Chinese heritage in slight disdain. When I was in elementary and middle school, our trips to see the grandparents in Nanjing and Shanghai meant a number of physical inconveniences—air pollution, mosquitoes, dirty hospitals, squat toilets. Later on, as China developed, we saw its particular combination of gaudy consumerism and political centralization as gauche. My younger sister and I made fun of the fake Louis Vuitton bags, the sun umbrellas, the transactional nature of romantic relationships. We also viewed the government with suspicion. Our schools had taught us that liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of government, that anything else was evil and doomed to fail. We were haughty in our moral superiority. Yet China didn't fail. It thrived. [...] One would think that all these sea turtles, educated or at least exposed to the democratic tradition, would chafe under restrictions to speech, press, and assembly. Yet the impression I got at Zhen Academy, where roughly half of the class had spent some time abroad, and from talking to Chinese friends in the US, was the opposite. Some students, particularly from privileged classes, “come to this country and see how democracy works, and they actually become disenchanted,” says Yuhua Wang, a professor of political science at Harvard. “Part of the reason is that they see the problems, the inefficiencies, the gridlock of democracy. Back in China, everything seems to work very smoothly, because there's a very strong party.” In their eyes, the Chinese government is absolute but not arbitrary, and its decisions, while often harsh, nevertheless have a kind of logic.