Summary of the Culture in China

Only available on StudyMode
  • Download(s) : 287
  • Published : October 14, 2012
Open Document
Text Preview
I think my home country China is such an unique country from what it has been through in the past and what it achieved in the past 20 years, and when those long traditional culture meets the modern or western culture, they get mixed and form the culture as it is now. Now I’m listing and explaining according to the five dimension from my point of view.

Power Distance
I agree with the point that Hofstede gives - 80, the power is highly centralized by the government, I think the primary reason is because China’s one party rule. All the big decisions are made by those 5 - 7 people in the top level, or some power could even been made only by the chairman. Therefore, the power is distributed from the top all the way down to regular people, not only in the political structure, but also in corporate where people worked, hierarchy is a common sense especially in state-owned companies, i.e. everybody should follow leader or manager’s direction. However, along with more and more foreign company came to China and some private or startup which bring advanced management or organization structure to China, a new trend of encouraging normal employee to come up with their own thought or opinion. An example that I can think about is the internet censorship in China. Since 2000, along with the information explosion and web 2.0 are more and more popular around the world, people can get information or news from multiple sources over the internet, but Chinese government concerned a lot for their people that could gain more information other than government’s public news or media resources. Therefore a series technical methods has been implemented, such as IP blocking, DNS filtering and redirection, URL filtering, etc, all those kind of methods are called the Great Firewall of China. Furthermore, social networks are boosted nowadays, Chinese government is more sensitive on this and the situation is more and more intensified. I think even most people know that it is not a good approach to control people’s willing of exploring the internet, but this must be a power distributed unequally and nobody can question whether it is right in the whole hierarchy of power distribution system.

I think the point is a little lower than I expect. I agree the example in Hofstede that considerations affect hiring and promotions with closer in-groups (such as family) are getting preferential treatment. The phenomenon is especially common in state-owned company, I heard of the stories like this almost from every family member or friend. Another example is many employee are toadying to their boss and hope to keep closer to the group that they belong to. But again, this phenomenon happens not that common in foreign company. From my experience, I worked for two foreign company before I came to US, although there are some rumor that some employee are hired because of some relationship with manager or manager’s manager, but I believe this things happened more rarely than state-owned company. Regarding to “Whereas relationships with colleagues are cooperative for in-groups they are cold or even hostile to out-groups. Personal relationships prevail over task and company.” I heard of this kind of sayings for a long time but didn’t have met that, both in my schools or companies, I think those relationship between groups or teams are just competition, the objects are all hope to get job done better.

My score on this dimension would be 60.

Masculinity / Femininity
I find there are some different understanding for “Masculinity / Femininity” in Hofstede and ppt slides, Hofstede’s definition for “masculinity” is saying the society is achievement and success oriented, and “femininity” means the dominant value of society is caring for others and quality of life. In ppt slides, it also mentioned equality of men and women. I agree that give China a high score but expect the score should be higher, 90 or more. In my opinion, China is an extremely success...
tracking img