Mr. Lee charged such criticisms as “a conspiracy to do [Singapore] in” because Singapore was viewed a threat by those critics.
Explaining why these groups regarded Singapore as a threat, he said it was because they saw that the Russians and Chinese have been coming and studying Singapore’s success story and picking up pointers.
Culture, Society and Business
The principles of business transactions are based on cultural values. To define culture we must first know where culture comes from. Culture comes from a mutual interaction between individuals, groups, subcultures and societies. Values, ideas and ideology are passed down from one generation to the next. Gradually over time they adapt to change and outside influences.
A more sociological technical definition of culture is as follows: “the total, generally organized way of life, including values, norms, institutions, and artifacts, that is passed on from generation to generation by learning alone”. Thus culture includes tangible and non-tangible things where are passed down through the years.
What exactly is the experiment? It’s not Western democracy, but it’s also not business as usual. A CCTV report (video below) explains the process:
The reality of culture stress applies to any kind of foreigner anywhere, though obviously different people have different experiences. I have no doubt that Mainlanders in North America are just as easily annoyed by Western culture as Westerns living in China sometimes are by Chinese culture. I assume they could easily whip up a list based on their own experiences of how culturally annoying different things are, and provide lots of personal examples. In fact, that’s what I’m hoping some of our Chinese readers will do.
Here is a case of individual experience with cultural identity for Chinese living in the West. After years living and working in the environment, you acquire the language, behavior structures and subtle mannerism of the people you work with, simply out of necessity. In my line of work, you can’t survive a week if the students do not understand what you are talking about; they tear you apart limb by limb. Many Chinese individuals in America have encountered this type of situation. Your acquaintance looks at you and gives you a compliment: “you are quite Americanized.” My reaction depends on the way he or she puts it. Most of my acquaintances deliver this compliment out of innocence. I just have a vacant feeling of irrelevance and let it pass. Once in a while someone gives me this compliment in a patronizing and condescending manner, awarding me an alien identity that is supposed to be better than my original. Then I am quite pissy about it. As a Chinese, how would you react if an American tells you that you are “quite Americanized”?
While no Chinese political leader can point to penmanship as being the source of power, it’s no exaggeration to say cultivated writing attracts attention and admiration, while poor writing form invites suspicion and scorn. Here is a collection of calligraphy from notable Chinese leaders of the 20th (and now 21st) century, in chronological order:
Sun Zhongshan, founder of the Chinese republic (here with his earlier name, Sun Wen). “Everything for the public.”
It is often said that we have one mouth and two ears for a reason, which is we should listen twice as much as we talk. It is great that our first ear is working well (we have got over 4,000 comments so far), but we want more feedback from our readers. Moreover, sometimes readers may have topics they want to discuss but we have not covered. So, in order to become better listeners and to let readers speak out more, we just added our second ear to this blog-Open submission for everyone.
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