ABSTRACT
A comprehensive coverage of the roots of contemporary Chinese business thinking would take a thousand scholars a thousand days. Here, we seek merely to open the door into a room, one that is full of furniture that the occupants of the room themselves have, for much of the time, long ceased to notice. The ‘room’, i.e. the Chinese mind, is dimly lit. When the Westerner enters it, some pieces seem the same as at home; some are strange, some are old, inherited from ancestors long dead, and some are new. Some may not be noticed in the half light and blundered into, perhaps causing damage. The Western mind has its own furniture that we likewise rarely
notice. The way we think is inherited from Greek, Jewish and Christian patterns of analysis dating back two thousand years or more. Whether we now go to church or synagogue is no reflection of their influence on our thinking today. With more powerful means of mass communication and a missionary zeal for which there is no apparent explanation, patterns of Western thinking have been more exposed to the Chinese than theirs to us. The lighting, in this metaphor, is thus brighter for the Chinese entrant. The first focus of this chapter is on philosophies and how they affect
the psychology of today’s businessperson. Whether the inheritor of the
culture is in PRC, Singapore or the USA matters about as much as whether the inheritor of European culture is in Europe, Argentina or Australia. Location does make a difference and younger generations feel, as they always have, that they are very different from their parents’ age group. Latourette’s comment (to which can now be added Communism and, according to some, capitalism) illustrates that point. Why, if every generation is so different, do ways of thinking survive for centuries? The line between philosophy and school of thought and religion is
not as clear as in the West. Confucianism is not a religion in the sense of believing in supernatural powers or beings that should be obeyed. Buddhism is not strictly a religion either, but the ancestor cult may be. Frankly, their classification is immaterial; we are concerned with their impact on modern thinking. This leads to a review of values. From philosophy and values, we go on to discuss strategy. Sunzi, or
Sun Tzu as he is more familiarly known in the West, could be called the greatest strategist of all time. His book The Art of War has had a profound effect on military thinking, especially guerrilla warfare. (The Art of War as we know it today was heavily rewritten in the 3rd century AD by the general Cao Cao, one of the key figures of the Three Kingdoms period, who adopted it as a manual of strategy for his own officers. The end result is no less valid for all that.) Today, the 13 chapters provide guidance to businesspeople and generals alike and are too well known to need more than the briefest of recaps here. Another famous text, The Thirty-Six Stratagems, has also had much influence, as has the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms which chronicles the struggle between the master strategist Zhuge Liang and his rival Cao Cao.
