Eastern culture seems too big a term. What do you think is cooperative in Chinese culture? The whole point of the Chinese imperial ruling system post-Qin is to make sure people don’t cooperate to secure the emperor’s rule. It worked wonders for two millennia. Then the totalitarian Leninist system perfected it with modern technology, party organization and propaganda. The modern mainland Chinese people cooperate because there is a powerful central government pushing. Random people have minimal trust towards one another for cooperation. Yes we build power plants and highspeed rails. But we also quarantine cities and abort fetuses en mass and engineer famines with the same system. It’s cooperation with totalitarian characteristics.
Remember that the study is westerners trying to make sense of psychological surveys conducted in east asia with the words they have in their vocabulary.
I agree that “cooperation” isn’t the perfect word. What they really mean is that east asian countries are good at large-scale projects: rice farming back then, building high speed rail today.
But westerners overlook that east asian societies, specifically China, often tolerate openly self-interested behavior: pursuit of personal advantage, or advantage for one’s family, without regard to others. There’s a funny Ronny Chieng joke that east asian mothers want their kids to be doctors, but view “helping people” as an undesirable consequence of the job.
By contrast, we think of westerners, and Americans specifically, as highly individualistic, but many subgroups of Americans have a high level of self-organization. They’ll make and socially enforce rules without anyone telling them what to do.
I've always thought that the American individualist/China familial is looking at things absolutely upside down. For the Chinese, the family mimics the tyrannical nature of the government (and/or the other way around). The keyboard social observer of me find the American family value of equality, respect for autonomy, unconditional love and support more conducive to forming stronger bonds. Anyone who's lived in a typical Chinese family should wonder why the hell there's the stereotype that Americans are more individualistic?
> Anyone who's lived in a typical Chinese family should wonder why the hell there's the stereotype that Americans are more individualistic?
For me, it was finding a lot of my American friend’s grandparents lived in nursing homes. That really shocked me, since just about everyone I knew in Taiwan lived with their grandparents.
The other one was learning quite a few of my American classmates had to pay their own college tuition. Not because their parents couldn’t afford it, but simply because they were seen as “adults” so were on their own.
Or people getting divorced multiple times each, parents having extensive hobbies that don't involve family, grandparents who don't help raise kids, how much input grandparents have into how kids are raised, etc. My wife is Anglo-American and I'm south asian and the culture shock is real. In my family you have all these rules to allow people to save face, suppress open conflict, etc. In her family, you just say what you mean and if the other person doesn't like it, you just get divorced, or "go no contact," or otherwise just stop dealing with each other.
In China at least the equivalence of WWI and WWII was basically the Warring States period (around 400-200BC), where tons of people die, therefore generally a strong dislike for war in Chinese culture. I always thought that WWII created a similar feeling in at least Europe.
There were other periods also of disunity in China, and consequently tons of people ended up dying as well. I'm sure it's similar with e.g. Japan where they had their own "three kingdoms" period.
