EPILOGUE

What China Can Learn from America

Human history becomes more and more a race between
education and catastrophe. —H. G. WELLS

SETTING ASIDE PROGNOSTICATIONS of the decline of the United States and the rise of China, everyone must not forget the enormous contributions the United States has offered the world, namely its model for liberalized thinking that has led to innovations in many areas. The United States is still among the most free of societies and has generated a lot of unconventional thinking that has propelled the world forward.

Respecting Uniqueness

Singapore stands in stark contrast to the United States. Although Singaporeans have enjoyed strong economic growth and live in a fairly wealthy society by most standards, Singapore has never generated a single Nobel Prize winner or has ever been the source of disruptive innovations. More tellingly, their society has become too conditioned to obey authority and lacks most vestiges of individualism. As an example, despite over 90-degree humid weather, Singaporeans dare not jaywalk across a street that has no cars. Instead, they wait patiently for the light to turn green at the crosswalk because they fear being punished for even small infractions. Most people walk with their heads down, another telling sign that depression has overrun a population whose freedom of expression has been suppressed for too long.

If China isn’t careful with its governance, Singapore may be a glimpse of the future face of China, one that is materially successful, safe, and boring. China must exercise vigilance not to suppress individual thought and expression. In order for humanity and creativity to thrive, the temptation to mold individuals to conform like bricks must be avoided at all costs. China should learn how the United States has made room for the infinite variety of stones to coexist—even the critical ones such as Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky—without feeling insecure about its power and legitimacy.

Simply putting people in close contact with each other also doesn’t guarantee breakthroughs in innovation. Cross-fertilization of ideas from people who think differently, however, increases the odds dramatically. Because the United States remains the melting pot of the world, it still has an advantage in generating creative and innovative ideas. By being more accepting of people dyeing their hair purple, painting their houses pink, and other non-conformist behavior, it allows for extraordinary breakthroughs; American society still tolerates relatively free expression and free experimentation.

I’ve explained this phenomenon to my students as the volatility rule. A society such as Singapore that restricts volatility or deviation from the norms of society will produce a society that is highly predictable and in some ways robotic. The United States permits much greater volatility, comparatively speaking. When there is greater volatility introduced, then there is greater opportunity for genius to surface. Of course, the society as a whole may also have to tolerate more disruptive behavior as a downside consequence of introducing more individual volatility into society, but that could be a price worth paying.

Okay to Fail

Many developed nations in both Asia and Europe suffer from the stigma of failure. For instance, entrepreneurism is not respected in Japan. NYU Professor Edward Lincoln recalls being surprised to see three men from Japan at a Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) meeting, given that YPO members are 50 or younger, and most Japanese CEOs are older than 50. He later learned that these men were all sons who replaced their fathers at these companies. He added that these Japanese men were the least cosmopolitan among the YPO members.

In contrast, many of the YPO members from the United States had started their own businesses, a sign that risk-taking is more acceptable here. This phenomenon is further supported by Silicon Valley venture capitalists who indicated in conversations that they almost unanimously preferred to invest in entrepreneurs who had experienced failure at least once with a previous start-up, an attitude that many Japanese and Koreans find strange because they go out of their way to avoid failure. But because U.S. culture is more forgiving of failure and has bankruptcy law to protect failed businesses, people here have been able to bounce back from economic setbacks more easily than in many other places in the world.

China should recognize this strength and choose to embrace it as its own, especially when it reaches a point where its economic growth no longer allows it to depend on modifying foreign technology to suit its own needs. If China is to continue being a strong economic engine for the world, it needs a culture that does not penalize failure in research or in entrepreneurial activity. Breakthrough innovations almost always happen by accident after years or even decades of repeated failures. Marketing new innovations can likewise require much experience, expertise, and even past failure in order to gain the necessary insights to make something a huge success. So for China to replicate this phenomenon, it needs to implement similar bankruptcy laws, ensure that the largest companies do not stifle new ideas from springing to the foreground, and remove any cultural stigmas attached to failures.

Aside from developing a culture that embraces entrepreneurialism, the PRC must be prepared to slow growth in the short term by investing more in people doing pure research, which is riskier than applied research from the standpoint of return on investments. Pure research can be far from certain in yielding anything immediately useful or commercial, but it can lead to quantum leaps in innovation. Most private companies do not have the financial resources to make such investments, so governments must lead the way on this front.

Girl Power

China should also continue emulating America’s and Europe’s more progressive attitudes toward women holding positions of power. Women are discriminated against in most of the world, and to under-utilize talent in half the world’s population is a terrible waste of human resources. Although Japan passed the Employment Act and thus raised the number of Japanese women in management roles from 1.4 percent of the population to 3.1 percent, the number is still far less than the 40 percent figure in the United States. China has shown that it has overcome a lot of gender inequality since the PRC came into power, but the bias to prefer sons over daughters still exists, particularly in poorer rural areas. China must continue working against deeply entrenched sexual prejudice so that more Chinese women can live up to their potential of running corporations and taking seats at the pinnacle of government.

One result from this policy of gender equality is the dramatically declining birth rates among women with education, which has affected developed countries, including China. Part of the reason is that women postpone marriage and pregnancy when they have careers to pursue, but the phenomenon also stems partly from the lack of compatibility between men and women in China’s modern age. They also won’t tolerate male chauvinist behavior to the same degree that their mothers did. Additionally, some men do not value women’s education and are more comfortable with a spouse less educated than themselves. A way to help the transition into new gender realities is to provide more educational and support resources for Chinese males who need help adjusting their behavior and values.

Brand Awareness

Another thing China can learn from the United States is sales, public relations, and branding. The U.S. culture has a worldwide reach. Its fast food restaurants, movies, celebrities, consumer products, and even politics have attained global recognition through mass marketing. The effectiveness of the United States to sell the world everything it has to offer is a skill, the importance of which cannot be underestimated. While a couple of Chinese brands, such as Huawei and Haier, are gaining recognition in overseas markets, China has a great deal to learn in this regard.

The Chinese have historically been biased against salespeople and sales as a profession since they have always believed that actions speak louder than words. The Chinese, due to their Confucius upbringing, abhor boasting about their accomplishments, while Americans rattle them off at every opportunity they get.

But in order to compete in a globalized world, where everyone is faced with innumerable choices and everything can eventually become commoditized, the ability to stand apart from the crowd is a necessary survival tactic. If China wants to go global with its own brands, rather than just accept outsourcing orders, it must learn not only how to break into new sales channels, it must also learn how to create brands that can compete against American brands, such as Apple and Nike, which have won widespread customer loyalty.

Taken to a national level, China can learn a thing or two from the United States about improving its public relations. The United States maintains the strongest media presence throughout the world, and its messages often penetrate the most homes and thus influence the most people. Becoming media savvy and understanding how to craft and manage public messages is crucial to becoming a world leader because effective communications will affect the world’s opinions and politics.

The fact that the Nobel Committee awarded the 2010 Peace Prize to a locked-up dissident, Liu Xiaobo, instead of Hu Jintao for leading a billion people to prosperity in a peaceful way is testament to the huge failure of public relations on the part of the Chinese to communicate their position and present their image to the world. Even if the award was politically motivated, China still should not have responded the way it did by pressuring other nations to boycott it. By doing so, it gave Western critics even more firepower to accuse it of bullying. Instead of shying away from the media, China needs to learn how to manage a hostile media. China can learn from the art of framing the conversation—or more colloquially, the American art of spin—if it disagrees with the West’s version of the issues. China is still being perceived as undemocratic and antiliberal by the West, but the problem can be easily corrected with more astute public relations training.

Similarly, when Western analysts comment that Obama is far more charismatic than Hu Jintao during a state visit, the Chinese should respond by finding ways to present their leaders with more appeal on the world stage. While it is natural of the Chinese to dismiss these observations as shallow and disregard them when other issues seem more pressing, China must realize that perceptions can heavily influence reality. Granted, integrity and accomplishments should carry more weight than mere showmanship, but when humans are easily swayed by powerful orators, as we have seen with Hitler and others, the power of image often reaches further than it first appears.

And Justice for All

China should also continue to reform its judicial system to emulate the standards of fairness found in the United States. While the jury system exists on paper and has been tried in China, its use is still not widespread for reasons unclear without further research. However, the time will come when the Party cannot deliver the same extraordinary growth that China has enjoyed in the last few decades. When that happens, China’s citizens will not sit idly by as injustices mount. They will want satisfactory retribution for wrongs they have suffered, and unless they can trust the majority of Chinese judges, they will want a different judicial system.

Last, China cannot give up its fight on corruption, especially among local officials in the lower rungs of government. Despite the high incidence of corruption among economic and political elites in the United States, it is still perceived to be much less corrupt than China in many circles. China needs to tackle provincial corruption much more thoroughly if it plans to avoid more serious societal unrest down the road. Premier Wen acknowledged that corruption in China is a serious problem, but the fact that the top leader in China cannot put an end to it indicates how difficult it is even in China to drive constructive political changes.

While this book is about China’s best practices that the United States could try on for size, the fact remains that the United States still does a lot of things right. Americans must remember not to lose confidence in their own government and engage in too much self-defeating talk. Like the Tunisians who inspired democratic movements throughout the Middle East, Americans should also rise to the occasion and demand the best solutions in our own government, not just on Election Day, but every day.