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CHAPTER 34 C34.S1

Chinese social identity and inter-group relations: the influence of benevolent authority James H. Liu, Mei-chih Li, and Xiaodong Yue

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he articulation of a contemporary perspective on Chinese social identity and intergroup relations requires integration of three basic strands of knowledge: interdependent and independent selves from cross-cultural psychology; social identity and self-categorization from intergroup psychology; and historical analysis, grounding these strands of influence in the context of Chinese culture and its evolving indigenous psychology. The theories of interdependent and independent self (Markus & Kitayama, 1991) and social identity and self-categorization (Tajfel & Turner, 1979; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987) have been among the most influential developments in psychology over the past two decades. Each provides ingredients necessary, but alone are insufficient to capture the dynamics of Chinese social identity and intergroup relations. To put these abstract ideas practically into play, the theories must be integrated within a representational account (Liu & Hilton, 2005) of the socio-historical context of (1) the ancient development of Chinese civilization as a singularly successful, multilingual enterprise, and (2) the recent development of Chinese nationalism in the context of its contemporary suffering and failures. Concepts like the interdependent self are frail abstractions without the substance of indigenous Chinese concepts like guanxi, or social interconnectedness (Yang, 1995, 2005; Hwang, 1987, 2005; Ho, 1998). Such indigenous concepts transform general description into cultural prescription, and enable an understanding of how Chinese have understood their social identities historically, through an ethically prescribed system of Confucian ethics for hierarchical social relations. With the onslaught of Western imperialism over the last two centuries, traditional Chinese civilization collapsed, and traditional Chinese virtues came to be understood as flaws by leading Chinese intellectuals (see Levenson, 1959) and their political rulers. The Confucian vision of state as ‘family and other particularistic social relations writ large’ became viewed as one of the reasons why Chinese people were unable to mobilize successful resistance to European and then Japanese invasion. Generations of intellectual and political leaders sought to instill the ‘virtues’ of nationalism and patriotism to Chinese people as a means of mobilizing resistance to external aggression (Unger, 1996). This was the context from which a contemporary form of Chinese social identity emerged, very much consistent with Western ideas of nationality and the group-based social comparison processes

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580 · James H. Liu, Mei-chih Li, and Xiaodong Yue

described by social identity and self-categorization theory. The impact of two centuries of brutal experience with Western modernity has been to harden what was previously a moral/ethical identity practiced within a context of particularistic social relations into a more categorical form of binary inclusions and exclusions consistent with other national identities in the global system of nation-states. Using a representational and historically contingent approach to social identity and intergroup relations (Liu & Hilton, 2005), we will argue that the ethical and relational origins of traditional Chinese social identity enable culturally unique predictions about how Chinese people manage cultural diversity and international relations today. Foremost among these are: (1) Chinese identity is primarily defined by role-based social relations rather than clear category boundaries, so that, (2) under conditions of low threat, traditional Chinese prescriptions for guanxi motivate ‘benevolent paternalism’ rather than out-group derogation as the default script for dealings with out-group members, and (3) under conditions of high threat, a defensive reaction in the form of nationalism fueled by a narrative of great civilization versus recent historical victimization is activated. These three predictions integrate traditional conceptions of Chinese identity within the socio-political context of its recent historical traumas, and enables researchers to examine the interactions between Chinese tradition and modernity unencumbered by either Western hegemonic views of identity or a reactionary rejection of these views.

Revolution in cross-cultural psychology

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In 1991, Markus and Kitayama published a revolutionary fusion of cross-cultural psychology and American social cognition. While cross-cultural psychologists have known for the better part of a quarter century that Western, and particularly American, notions of individualism are far from universal ideals and practices of personhood (Hofstede, 1980/2001), these challenges were not heard by the American mainstream. What Markus and Kitayama (1991) did was translate the primary dimension of cultural difference that had been identified by cross-cultural psychology, individualism-collectivism, into the language and findings of social cognition. In an empirical tour-de-force, they argued that virtually everything that mainstream social psychology cherished as scientific truth, from the experience of cognitive dissonance to the beneficence of primary control and the ubiquity of self-enhancement, was actually a culture-specific manifestation of a particular sense of self construal that they called the ‘independent self’. The independent self is a ‘bounded whole’, unique and distinct from other people and the situational context; it is conceived as self-contained, autonomous entity that comprises a unique configuration of internal attributes, and behaves primarily as a consequence of those internal attributes. They contrasted this independent self (rooted in individualistic cultures) in dichotomy and contradistinction with an interdependent self characteristic of collectivistic cultures. This all-or-nothing approach has been effective at gaining attention, but because of serious ambiguities in defining what collectivist culture is and how the interdependent sense of self is configured (Shimmack, Oishi, & Diener, 2005), there is currently considerable controversy around this formulation (see Oyserman, Koon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002).

A self-categorization perspective on self

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In an entirely separate but theoretically and temporally parallel movement, Tajfel and Turner (1979) developed social identity theory as a European alternative to American individualism in inter-group psychology. In social identity theory, the self is realized in social comparison with others - sometimes individuals, sometimes groups. To the extent that significant aspects of one’s self are conceived to be part of the groups to which one belongs, there is a motivation to make characteristics of these groups or social identities positively distinct in comparison with relevant out-groups, like ‘I am woman (not a man)’, ‘I am Chinese (not Japanese)’, or ‘I am a member of the Liu family (not the Li family)’.


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Chinese Social Identity · 581

Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell (1987) went on to define self-categorization theory as a more fully developed model where all psychological phenomena are again contingent upon self-construal. In self-categorization theory, a person is not theorized to have a stable or singular sense of self, but rather is conceived as having a repertoire of selves at different levels of inclusiveness, from the individual (which would be just like the independent self) to the group (the critical level of analysis for this inter-group theory), but potentially ascending to an all inclusive sense of humanity. These different senses of self are activated in response to different situations, so that the same person sometimes behaves according to internal attributes (I am naughty) and sometimes according to group norms (I am a gentlemen who treats women with respect). The key psychological process in group behavior is self-categorization, whereby, through a process of ‘de-personalization’, individuality is temporarily submerged within conformity to a group prototype containing idealized characteristics of the group. Hence, in self-categorization theory, it does not make sense of speak of independent and interdependent selves as culturally-inherited scripts. Rather, each person has a repertoire of scripts for appropriate behavior that are activated in different situations (see e.g. Sarbin & Allen, 1968). Sometimes the person acts as an individual, according to personal preferences or beliefs, and at other times a group-based sense of self becomes salient, at which time the person acts according to group norms. But, behavior is still dichotomized, into the product of individual and category-based group identities. C34.S1.3

Collectivism as relational orientation, not category-based difference Recently, Yuki and Brewer have begun to break down this dichotomous thinking and theorize the links between the inter-group literature and individualism-collectivism in cross-cultural psychology. The basic point is that groups are ubiquitous for human survival, so it makes no sense to think of individualism as precluding group-based behavior. Rather, in a seminal paper Yuki (2003) argues that East-Asian collectivism is characterized by cooperation within a group as an interpersonal network. He cites the relational orientation of Confucianism to support his claim that East-Asian collectivism is ‘an intragroup rather than intergroup phenomenon’ (p. 169). Reviewing the literature, he finds no evidence that people in collectivistic cultures show more in-group favoritism than people in individualistic cultures, as should be expected if collectivism were a form of group identification in the self-categorization tradition. Following Brewer and Gardner (1996) and Kashima and Hardie (2000), he makes a distinction between the collective self, as a depersonalized self defined in terms of the prototypical properties shared among group members, and the relational self as defined by enduring connections and role relations with significant others, arguing that the relational self is more characteristic of East-Asian collectivism. Yuki (2003) found that Japanese in-group loyalty and identity were predicted by knowledge of the relational structure within the group, knowledge of individual differences within the group, and feelings of personal interconnectedness with group members, whereas American in-group loyalty and identity was correlated with perceived in-group homogeneity and group status. Yuki, Maddux, Brewer, & Takemura, (2005) furthermore reported that Japanese trusted strangers with a potential indirect relationship link more, whereas Americans trusted strangers with whom they shared an in-group membership more. Brewer and Chen (2007) advance the more general argument that collectivism should be properly thought of as a relational orientation across the domains of identity, agency beliefs, and obligations/values, not as a tendency to categorically identify with particular in-groups, as in the social identity tradition.

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An indigenous Chinese psychology of identity The above position is highly congruent with what indigenous Chinese psychologists have argued for some time. Yang (1995, 2005) has advocated for the centrality of a relationally-focused Chinese


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social orientation throughout much of a career that has spanned three decades. After two decades, Hwang’s (1987) citation classic on Chinese face and favor remains one of the most elegant theoretical formulations of Chinese relationalism, whereas Ho (1998) has made methodological relationalism the cornerstone of his system for doing research and analyzing research findings. There is consensus among indigenous Chinese psychologists that an ethical system of social roles and obligations is at the core of Chinese definitions of personhood. In adopting this position, many writers have noted the extensive influence of Confucian philosophy on traditional and contemporary Chinese society. They begin with the five cardinal relationships, or wu lun, in setting the framework for the conduct of particular human relationships. For the purposes of this chapter, we focus our attention on the fact that three of the five cardinal relationships deal with family members, and that, beyond these three, many writers have argued that the Emperor-Minister relationship mirrors that of the Father-Son. The traditional ideology of Chinese society centers around the role of the benevolent patriarch (see Liu & Liu, 2003), cast in the roles of Father, Husband, and Ruler. Four of the five cardinal relationships involve complementary and unequal role relations that in various forms exchange benevolence on the part of the higher powered person in return for loyalty from the lower powered person. None concerns relationships between strangers. In a nutshell, it is possible to argue that a Confucian theory of statecraft is family writ large. Each person is involved in a web of social obligations to particular others, but society as a whole is woven together of many networks made of the same types of role relations. In this way, Confucianism can be considered as a universal ethic for the conduct of particular social relations (see also King & Bond, 1985).

Historical practices of Chinese statecraft and identity

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Confucian ethics require high standards for particular and committed social relations, not for civil society in general. It was a highly inter-connected system where the family (or clan) was the basic administrative unit of society at both the local and state levels. But, it is important to recognize that Confucianism was only the yang, or the articulated face of Chinese statecraft. In practice, ideals of benevolence and morality were accompanied by the yin of a comprehensive, well-articulated, but also draconian legal system (see Chien, 1976; Fitzgerald, 1961 for overviews of Chinese history). Ordinary people feared magistrates and the law, regarding legal institutions more as a system of last resort than a method for ordering daily social life. The ethics of social relations were embedded within rule-based bureaucratic practices. The Chinese state was more bureaucratically competent than comparable ancient civilizations, such as medieval Europe. Chinese society was rare and distinctive among ancient civilizations in practicing bureaucratic meritocracy, with examinations that allowed ordinary people to become officials of state (thereby increasing the fortunes of their entire clan). The caveat was that only a select few were capable of passing these rigorous examinations, as Chinese writing is pictographic (see Him, this volume), so the time and effort required for literacy was beyond the means of most people in an agrarian society. Nevertheless, meritocracy made Chinese high culture esteemed, and created a cultural psychology where education was cherished as a primary marker of Chinese identity, and a route of upward mobility. Unlike practices in ancient Rome, where citizenship, as the official marker of Roman identity, was a legal matter of heredity and wealth, there was no formal categorical demarcation between citizens and non-citizens in ancient China. Rather, there were degrees of power and practice between the high culture of the Confucian gentleman and the low culture of the peasant in the fields. The merchant who became rich trading overseas wanted his sons to be educated. It was this high culture of committed social relations and the art of learning and working with an enormously difficult script that we consider to be the driving forces behind the creation of a prototype for Chinese social identity in ancient times. The parallel collapses of the Roman Empire and Han dynasty provide a fascinating historical thought experiment for testing such a speculative model. Contrary to popular belief, Chinese ‘dialects’ are technically vernacular languages in the sense that the different ‘dialects’ are mutually


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unintelligible: a Northerner speaking Mandarin is as incomprehensible to a Southerner speaking Cantonese as German is to Dutch or French is to Italian. The Qin Emperor (259-201BC) only unified the written script of Chinese for bureaucratic purposes. His subjects spoke dozens of mutually unintelligible vernaculars, and only learned the script if they had upper-class aspirations. In both cases, a far-flung empire encompassing a wide range of peoples speaking mutually unintelligible tongues collapsed, in the case of Rome to be replaced by dozens of smaller principalities, in the case of China to be reunited after more than 360 years. How was this reunification possible? According to Anderson (1991), it should not be possible; the central tenet of his theory of the emergence of nation-states is reification of vernacular into a marker of national identity and an instrument for bureaucratizing homogeneity within the borders of the state. One obvious answer is physical geography (Diamond, 1999): China does not have the same natural barriers preventing military unification of its central plains. More than this environmental support, however, there was an ‘imagined community’ (in Anderson’s, 1991, terms) of China as a singular center of civilization that was more capable of regeneration than was Rome. We believe that it was a combination of three basic factors that enabled a sense of Chineseness to endure: first, Confucian philosophy contributed a universal model of particular social relations centered on the benevolent paternalism of the Father figure. The Confucian model of benevolent paternalism allows a seamless and integrated transition between the roles of father, husband, and ruler for dominant males; the basic social unit of the family/clan is ideologically connected to the administrative unit of the nation/state. Second, this Chinese relationalism downplays categorical boundaries and privileges, so that there were no formal definitions, like heredity or citizenship, around being Chinese, but rather a high investment in skill-based practices requiring literacy and moral cultivation. Third, this cultural emphasis enabled the creation of a high culture, and a semi-permeable educated class of intelligentsia whose interests were in governing bureaucratically and perpetuating their high culture rather than ruling militarily. This class of ‘mandarins’ could work with anyone, including foreigners, and in periods of collapse they could retreat to the administration of smaller units. The combination of these factors allowed the Tang dynasty restoration (618-907AD) to be a political as well as cultural renaissance for China. Because of its geographical isolation relative to other great civilizations of the ancient world, China had no peers culturally. So, its model of international relations was a center-to-periphery model. Other peoples like Koreans and Japanese borrowed liberally from Chinese culture to establish their own states, but China imported little from its neighbors other than Buddhism from far over the Himalayas. Politically, it did not recognize any other state as an equal. However, from the very beginning when the Qin Emperor built the Great Wall, China had trouble militarily against Northern horse/herder peoples. Two of the six longest dynasties in Chinese history were ruled by non-Han, herder peoples (Qing and Yuan) from beyond the Great Wall, a third by a Northern people who had settled in China’s central plains during the period of disunity after the collapse of the Han dynasty (Tang), and a fourth dynasty (Sung) had to pay continual tribute to its Northern neighbors in order to survive. With its immense population and sophisticated bureaucrats willing and able to serve whoever captured the Mandate of Heaven, Chinese culture had a way of assimilating its rulers. While Manchu people ruled China from 1644-1911, their culture and language virtually disappeared in the process, whereas Chinese culture took advantage of Manchurian military prowess to extend its sovereignty to Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet. Chinese people seemed content to serve a foreign ruling class if they governed well, as did the Manchu, even though in popular literature and history, non-Chinese are often referred to with disdain as barbarians. This apparently gave Chinese people a mission to civilize their rulers, or if this proved impossible, overthrow them as they did to the Mongolian Yuan dynasty. C34.S1.6

Painful transitions to modernity In some ways, the Manchu Qing dynasty was the apex of traditional Chinese society. They had solved the problem of invasion from the North because they were the strongest of the Northerners, able to


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subjugate even the Mongols. However, they could not manage either the practices or the consciousness associated with Western forms of modernity. Chinese traditions were highly assimilative? to the extent that its high culture was morally and administratively superior to alternatives. However, the West was not only superior militarily in the nineteenth century, but increasingly came to be perceived as superior administratively (see Pye, 1996, for an account of the Treaty port of Shanghai). According to Chinese traditions, any dynasty that lost the Mandate of Heaven, as the Qing dynasty did when it was defeated in a series of conflicts with foreign powers beginning with the Opium War in 1839, should be overthrown. But Western support for the fading Qing dynasty prevented its overthrow. Part of the price for this support was foreign concessions carved as Treaty ports into the territory of China. What was different with these new conquerors was not only their science and industry, but their administration, which was markedly superior to that of the last imperial dynasty. By the late nineteenth century, for the first time in history, the Chinese intelligentsia began to consider the possibility that there might be a cultural system equal to or superior to its own. In the Treaty-port concessions, all members of Chinese society, Manchu or Han, nobility or commoners, were considered as inferior by Westerners. Such a categorical system where one group identity transcends all other social positions like class, gender, and profession, was a shock for Chinese, whose traditional model of social relations is more consistent with role theory (Stets & Burke, 2000) than this type of group-based self-categorization. One of the elements that Chinese intellectuals began to incorporate into their new identity projects was Western forms of nationalism (Levenson, 1959). In ancient times, when martial skills like the spear, sword, horse and bow required a lifetime of training, there was no point in mobilizing the masses. Peasants were useless militarily and their consciousness of identity was rooted to the local and particular social relations of classic Confucianism. This social logic changed with the improved technology of the gun and cannon. With the pull of a trigger, a lifetime of skill and training could be obliterated. The traditional strengths of Chinese culture, where the mass of Chinese people were peasants grounded in particularistic social relations of family/clan, and hierarchically administered by a small number of bureaucratic elites, became a weakness when the agenda was to unite and expel foreign invaders and overthrow the ruling class. So, from the late nineteenth century on, there were persistent if only patchily successful efforts by Chinese intellectuals to create a Chinese nationalism patterned after Western forms of what we have referred to as categorical consciousness, the group consciousness associated with not only self-categorization theory, but Western imperialism and European nationalism. If we examine Western history, we can find strong parallels between the benevolent paternalism of Confucianism with that of Papal doctrines within the Roman Catholic Church and ideology like the Divine Right of Kings in Europe. European peasants were just as grounded in particularistic social relations and lacking in national consciousness as were Chinese peasants prior to the democratic and industrial revolutions of the late eighteenth century (Anderson, 1991; Smith, 1971). However, what accelerated national consciousness in Europe was the constant warring between neighboring principalities, because after Napoleon, these wars were increasingly waged by conscript armies of ordinary men rather than professional warriors (Tilly, 1975). Western colonial and imperial adventures reinforced this type of categorical consciousness even more, as any class of white person in Europe could be transformed first by a social role within some imperial project, and then into a White Person categorically superior to any Natives he was destined to encounter, whether they be Chinese, African, Native American, or Arab. Our perspective on social representations of history (Liu & Hilton, 2005; Liu & László, 2007, Liu & Atsumi, 2008) locates the cross-cultural differences between East and West described by Yuki (2003) within an ecological (Berry, 2001) and representational (Moscovici, 1988) framework wherein different types of consciousness are historically contingent on conditions characteristic of different eras. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where militantly aggressive foreign imperialism threatened not just the ruling class of China, but the very existence of Chinese culture itself, a nationalistic form of categorical consciousness was required for survival (even today, among Hong Kong Chinese stories of war can be used to prime Chinese social identity, see e.g. Hong, Wong, & Liu, 2000). It can


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be argued that this categorical consciousness of national identity is historically contingent on institutional forms associated with modern states (see Anderson, 1991; Liu & Hilton, 2005). Many social scientists have argued that contemporary nationalism is a product of the industrial and democratic revolutions in Europe of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mediated by advances in the technology and thinking of this era. Anderson (1991) locates the ‘imagined community’ of nationhood in bureaucratically advanced techniques like map-making and the use of local vernacular languages in popular publishing; Tilly (1975) complements this assessment with a military perspective such that, ‘war made the nation-state and the nation-state made war’ (p. 42). Smith (1971) has been at the forefront of Western scholars who argue that the nationalism we know today is a product of the transition from traditional societies where politically inert peasantry is governed by elite ruling classes into a world of nation-states where the primary units of participation are the citizen and the state, the individual and the nation. The relational and networked forms of group consciousness characteristic of traditional China and pre-modern Europe were destined to be swept away by this unstoppable combination of the culture of modernity (e.g. literacy, individual rights) and the technology of modernity (the factory and conscript army). C34.S1.7

Narrative psychology for Chinese people The above narrative (Liu & László, 2007; Liu & Atsumi, 2008) is an account that provides a framework for understanding that is not verifiable according to the empiricist maxims of mainstream psychology. The difficulty with historical accounts is that they are inevitably influenced by presentday politics and present-day epistemologies in ways that can distort historical facts (Wertsch, 2002). Therefore, it is necessary to move beyond historical narrative to examine how traditional Chinese forms of social organization and representations thereof interact with modernity to produce cognitive, motivational, and behavioral impacts on Chinese social identity and intergroup behavior today. Confucianism is no more a ruling ideology for China than Catholicism is for Europe today. Both continue to exert influences as implicit theories of social organization and interpersonal relationships (Hong & Chiu, 2001), and explicitly as values and beliefs driving the formulation of ideologies and discourses. For a variety of reasons, some political, some epistemological, empirical research on Chinese social identity and intergroup relations is thin, and so we present our literature review as a proactive agenda for the future as well as a review of the existing empirical literature.

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Contemporary Chinese social identity and intergroup relations We organize our review according to three major hypotheses or themes: (1) Culture changes slowly, and so Chinese identity still takes a form whereby it is defined primarily by role-based social relations rather than analytical category boundaries; (2) Under conditions of low threat, traditional Chinese prescriptions for guanxi motivate ‘benevolent paternalism/benevolent authority’ rather than outgroup derogation as the default script for dealings with out-group members, a process evidenced by the preferential treatment for ethnic minorities prevalent in China today; (3) Chinese nationalism is a new invention made necessary by external threat, and so under conditions of high threat, we hypothesize that strong forms of rather reactionary nationalism (or ‘blind patriotism’), fueled by a narrative of great civilization versus recent historical victimization will be used to defend China and Chinese identity.

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1. Chinese identity as role-based social relations Several major Chinese indigenous psychologists have based their entire theoretical systems around the idea that Chinese society consists fundamentally of role-based social relations (Yang, 1995, 2005; Hwang, 1987, 2005; Ho, 1998), but they have not produced as much empirical evidence for their assertions as one might like. In the area of self-categorization, their thinking fits like hand in glove


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with the work of American cross-cultural psychologist Nisbett and his students (Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001), most notably Peng, to converge on the idea that Chinese social identity is by default not categorical but relational, and by nature is primarily judged by degrees of separation rather than absolute and analytical or logical boundaries. According to the culture-based cognition model of Nisbett et al (2001), social organization directs attention, and what is attended to influences beliefs and epistemology about the nature of the world and causal relations that structure it. These, together with social organization/practices, in turn direct the development and application of some cognitive processes at the expense of others, including questions of causality and use of dialectical versus analytical reasoning. We find Nisbett et al’s (2001) empirical results more compelling than the broad brush strokes of their 4-5 page summary of 2500 years of history. In a nutshell, ‘the authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on ‘dialectical’ reasoning, whereas Westerners are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior’ (p. 291). Most pertinent to the issue of self-categorization and social identity, they cite several studies showing Chinese grouping objects according to relationships (e.g. woman and child together because the woman takes care of the baby), whereas Americans grouped the man and woman together because they belonged to the same category of adults (p. 300). Asians in their review were less likely to use formal rules for constructing categories and making inferences from them. Furthermore, Peng and Nisbett (1997) characterized Chinese thinking as dialectic in style, based on principles of change, contradiction, and holistic relationships (see also Ji, Lam, & Guo, this volume). In a variety of studies, they have showed that Chinese tended towards a ‘Middle Way’ style of reasoning, whereas Americans relied more on formal logic and analytical, rule-based reasoning. All of these studies support the idea that Chinese social identity even today may be constructed more around relationships than Western national identities, but cross-cultural empirical evidence is still rare. Bresnahan, Chiu, and Levine (2004) do report that relational self-construal was higher among Taiwanese Chinese than for Americans, whereas independent and collectivist self-construals were higher for Americans. Aside from this study and previously cited work by Yuki and colleagues, evidence is indirect. One piece of indirect evidence is that as of the drafting of this chapter in June 2008, there was not a single reference in PsycInfo to a paper that combined a search for the terms ‘minimal group’ and ‘Chinese’ in the abstract. The minimal group paradigm (see Brewer, 1979) uses a bogus classification procedure to show that self-categorization in the absence of any relationships or other factors can produce in-group favoritism; it is proof positive of the effects of self-categorization that has not yet been demonstrated among Chinese populations. This is not to say that the minimal group paradigm will not work on Chinese1: among the 197 studies on the minimal group paradigm located in our literature search, there have been 5 published studies using Japanese participants, who according to Nisbett et al (2001) use similar cognitive processing styles to Chinese. Personal communication from Yamagishi, a leader in minimal group studies in Japan (see Yamagishi, Jin, & Kiyonari, 1999, for example), however, has signaled that it took considerable effort to make the paradigm work, and that the experimenters were forced to truly rather than randomly assign participants to groups based on their preferences for Klee versus Kandinsky. This necessary amendment to the established procedure suggests less faith in abstract categories among Japanese than Westerners. There are, however, reasons to doubt whether the label, ‘East Asian’, should be stretched to fully accommodate the social orientations and thinking styles of both Chinese and Japanese, not to mention Koreans (see e.g. Bond & Cheung, 1983). In a recent study on internet trading in East Asia, Takahashi, Yamagishi, Liu, Wang, Lin, and Yu (2008) found substantial differences among Chinese and Japanese in their willingness to trust and reciprocate trust in an experimental social dilemma. Cultural Chinese, both from mainland China and Taiwan, showed a significantly higher willingness to trust a stranger in a behavioral choice with real monetary consequences than did Japanese. Noting the widespread success of the Chinese diaspora populations compared to the more stayat-home orientation of Japanese, Takahashi et al (2008) speculated that among Japanese, relationships


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take the form of a limited set of assurances, or relationships guaranteed against exploitation, whereas among Chinese, the art of relationships or guanxi, takes a more expansive form where a person is more willing to take the risk of being exploited in order to build up a more potentially rewarding social network. Hwang’s (1987) work on face and favor hypothesizes that Chinese have a precise set of rules to govern resource allocation/exchange: close, affective ties are governed by a need rule, mixed ties by a ‘renqing’ or human relations rule, and instrumental, or distant relationships are governed by a fairness rule. Such a set of rules for resource exchange in social relations would be highly adaptive not only for maintaining committed social relationships (what you need I will give you, and what I need you will give me), but also for using a tit-for-tat type of fairness rule to govern the expansion of the social network to accommodate new members, initially by an instrumental fairness rule, and then over time to a renqinq or human relations rule. Indeed, Cheung and colleague’s work on Chinese personality has demonstrated that beliefs about human relations form a factor of personality that cannot be folded inside the ‘Big Five’ (Cheung et al, 2003). This argument suggests that in the future, combining social identity theory with an indigenous Chinese psychology of role relations or guanxi could fruitfully energize the as-yet underdeveloped dialogue between the psychological theory of social identity, and identity theory based on a sociology of social roles (see Stets & Burke, 2000). Li, Liu, Huang, and Chang (2007), for example, used examples from Taiwanese history to illustrate how relationships could become the basis for categorybased conflict. C34.S1.8.2

2. Chinese intergroup behavior characterized by benevolent authority under conditions of low threat At the heart of the system of Chinese intergroup relations that we are proposing is a difference not of only in thinking styles, but more importantly in ideals about how society should be organized. According to Liu and Liu (2003, p. 48): The model society in traditional East Asia is harmonious: the ruler looks after the people, the people respect the ruler, and at each level such an unequal but reciprocal system of exchange serves to maintain order. The model society in the West is a civil society, where competing interests strive against one another under the rule of law which administers justice in a way as to keep the struggle within boundaries. The virtues of selfcultivation and work are central to the former system, just as the values of freedom and equality are central to the latter.

While this chapter is focused on empirical research, we should not be blind to the socially constructed nature of empirical results: S.H. Liu’s (1993) concept of a ‘height psychology’ emphasizes ideals and aspirations as well as descriptions of fact for Chinese people. In the previous sections, we presented the case that benevolent paternalism was a ruling ideology that governed social relations in ancient China, and in this section, we show evidence for the influence of benevolent authority in present times. The change in terminology is not accidental. A height psychology pays heed to the past with an eye to the future: sexist terminology is not helpful to describe authority relations in the present when increasing numbers of women in Chinese society are assuming roles of power and influence (Halpern & Cheung, 2008). In reiterating the power of the ideals and practice of benevolent authority in contemporary Chinese societies, we are treading a tightrope between reifying outmoded ideologies of the past and defending traditional values worthy of respect. While our main defense is functional and empiricist, it is worth noting Inglehart and Baker’s (2000, p. 49) conclusion to their massive study of value change in 65 societies: A history of Protestant or Islamic or Confucian traditions gives rise to cultural zones with distinctive value systems that persist after controlling for the effects of economic development … We doubt that the forces of modernization will produce a homogenized world culture in the foreseeable future.


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Cross-cultural research like that of Inglehart and Baker or Hofstede (2001) consistently places Chinese societies with ‘high power distance and collectivist’ or traditional/security oriented cultures (see also Bond, 1996). Hence, traditional ideals will influence Chinese attitudes and behavior whether we articulate their influence or not. In height psychology, we attempt to describe their influence in a way that can lead to better and more modern forms of human-heartedness in leadership behavior and intergroup relations (see also Chen & Farh, this volume). The work of Cheng and of Farh has been instrumental in rediscovering a Chinese view on what is described in the literature as ‘paternalistic leadership’. Farh and Cheng (2000) describe how the seminal work of Western scholars like Silin (as cited in Farh & Cheng, 2000) not only articulated the attributes typical of contemporary Chinese business leaders, but also presented disapproving judgments of what they described as authoritarian and anti-democratic styles of leadership. Rather than capitulating to Western worldviews, Cheng, Chou, Wu, Huang, & Farh (2004) have defined paternalistic leadership as ‘a style that combines strong discipline and authority with fatherly benevolence and moral integrity couched in a personalistic atmosphere’ (p. 91). It encompasses three separable but correlated styles of leadership: authoritarian, benevolent, and moral. In our review of this work, we group the latter two styles together as benevolent authority, and treat the authoritarian style separately, since Cheng et al (2004) have found that benevolent and moral leadership styles were positively correlated, and both were negatively correlated with authoritarian leadership style (p. 30). Benevolent leadership ‘demonstrates individualized, holistic concern for subordinates’ personal or familial well-being’, whereas moral leadership demonstrates ‘superior personal virtues, self-discipline, and unselfishness’ (see Cheng et al, 2004, p. 91). Both of these styles align with the original idealism in Confucianism. Benevolence emphasizes reciprocal but unequal obligations in a dyad, and treating subordinates as family members in many respects by understanding and forgiving, and in case of emergency, providing help as needed. This leadership style is expected to foster gratitude and desire for reciprocation from followers. Moral leadership, on the other hand, emanates not primarily from reciprocity or exchange, but is character-based, with such indicators as not abusing authority for personal gain, and putting collective interests ahead of personal interests. According to Farh and Cheng (2000), this style of leadership fosters identification with the leader’s values and imitation of the leader by subordinates. It comes closest to Confucian ideals of statecraft, whereby the leader’s moral rectitude creates the atmosphere wherein much can be achieved: A ruler who governs his state by virtue is like the north polar star, which remains in its place while all the other stars revolve around it. Confucian Analects (Chapter 2, discourse 1)

Cheng et al (2004) found that benevolent leadership in Taiwan had the strongest effects on subordinate gratitude and repayment to the leader, as expected. But, it also had the most powerful effects on identification and imitation, which suggests more of a relational than a moral orientation, just as specified by Confucianism. For subordinate compliance, it was moral leadership that had the greatest effect, not authoritarian leadership as might have been expected. These effects were significant even after controlling for Western measures of transformative leadership. Empirically, the two benevolent forms of authority are negatively correlated with authoritarian leadership that ‘asserts absolute authority and control over subordinates and demands unquestioning obedience’ (Cheng et al, 2004, p. 91). This style is characterized by top-down communications demanding high performance, reprimanding poor performance, and providing direct guidance and instructions for improvements from subordinates. The leader acts in a dignified manner, exhibiting high self-confidence, tight control of information, and an unwillingness to delegate authority. This leadership style fosters dependence, attentiveness, and compliance from subordinates, and while often effective, inspires fear rather than gratitude from subordinates. It is especially effective when combined with benevolence (Farh & Cheng, 2000; Cheng et al, 2004), as a combination of carrot and stick. It has its historical origins in the politicized form of


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Confucianism which became fused with Legalism to become the yang and yin of top-down ideological control prevalent during two thousand years of Chinese dynastic rule (Liu & Liu, 2003; King, 1996). While undeniably effective, especially in societies where subordinates tend to internalize top-down requirements from superiors (Farh & Cheng, 2000), from the perspective of height psychology, we would like to probe deeper and encourage research into how to modify traditional authoritarian scripts in ways that make room for the rule of law, that has been so effective in governing contemporary Western societies, and for more effective forms of remonstrance from subordinates to bring new life into Confucian doctrines. The work of Huang, an indigenous feminist psychologist, is relevant to this second issue. Huang’s (1999) model of harmony and conflict centers on dynamics of relationship management. Huang and Huang (2002) used an experimental paradigm to show that Taiwanese mothers preferred to use didactic reasoning over coercion to influence their children to achieve in their academic tasks, but did resort to authority and coercion when their children strayed off-task. The unquestioning, oneway obedience required of Chinese children in tradition has been converted by Taiwanese mothers into more of a didactic, feminine style that cuts across the paternalistic styles of leadership identified by Farh and Cheng (2000). In organizational behavior, Huang, Jone, and Peng (2007) found that Taiwanese subordinates do not adopt a single conflict resolution style to appeal to their superiors, but most typically use direct encounter/confrontation followed by compromise in dealing with their bosses. Far from avoiding conflict or immediately accommodating their supervisor, only one-third of their sample used such strategies initially. Huang et al (2007) reported that subordinates with a good relationship to their supervisor typically used a direct encounter or direct encounter followed by compromise to resolve conflict, whereas employees with superficially harmonious relationships tended towards accommodating or conflict-avoidant styles. After being rebuffed by their bosses and retreating into accommodating or avoidant styles, subordinates’ relationship with their supervisor often deteriorated into ‘superficial harmony’. This is consistent with Cheng et al’s (2004) review of the literature and results suggesting that ‘some cultural values were preserved, but an authoritarian orientation had faded, as it may be unsuitable to modern trends’ (p. 96). Taiwanese Chinese employees will adopt a traditional accommodating or submissive style if they have no recourse, but they will not appreciate their bosses for being forced to do so. Similar results were found for Yeh and Bedford’s (2004) dual filial piety model where reciprocal filial piety, defined as ‘emotionally and spiritually attending to one’s parents out of gratitude for their efforts in having raised one, and physical and financial care for one’s parents as they age’ (p. 216), was associated with enhanced intergenerational relationships among young people; authoritarian filial piety, defined as ‘suppressing one’s own wishes and complying with one’s parents … because of the force of role requirements’ (p. 216) was linked to less affection, and more hierarchy-enhancing and submissive attitudes. The data and theory thus show that for organizational behavior and social identification with small groups and families, benevolent authority in Chinese societies is alive and well, and changing to keep up with modernity (see Yang, 1996). Sociological evidence from Taiwan at the macro-level complement this micro-level evidence. Hu, Chu, Shyu and their colleagues have tracked the evolution of political ideology in Taiwan over more than two decades, covering the entire span of the island’s political transition, from the weakening of authoritarianism to the completion of the democratic transition since the 1970s (Chu & Chang 2001; Hu, 1997; Shin & Shyu, 1997). According to these scholars, support for political equality was high from the beginning, and endorsement of popular accountability rose dramatically from 1984 to 1993 (as did belief in political pluralism, even though it remained rather low). Their data also show that by the late 1990s substantial segments of Taiwan’s public still manifested the fear of disorder and preference for communal harmony over individual freedom. Taiwan has been moving steadily from authoritarianism to democracy, and its political attitudes have been changing with them, melding Western and traditional Chinese ideas of the ideal society (see also Ng, this volume; Huang et al, 2004).


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On the mainland, preferential treatment of ethnic minorities in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been documented by a variety of observers, particularly by Safran (1998) and by Mackerras (2003). In accord with the theory of benevolent authority articulated here, Sautman (1998) writes that, ‘preferential policies are a key legitimizing strategy of a regime which is overwhelmingly Han Chinese and claims that Han culture is more ‘advanced’ than minority groups’ (pp. 86-7). Scholars in China Studies are in broad agreement that non-Han peoples are currently beneficiaries of significant forms of preferential treatment. The first and most important is that the 55 state-defined ethnic minorities, who made up about 8.4 per cent of the population of the PRC in 2002 have more exemptions from the one-child policy than are allowed to Han Chinese. This is the most potent indicator of preferential treatment that also extends to other areas, including lower grade requirements for university entrance, and preferences in regional taxation policies. It is impossible to understate the extent of difference in this area of social policy between China and the West. But the best illustration is to ask readers to imagine a scenario where the United States of America passed into effect a law where African, Latino, and Asian-Americans could have up to four children, whereas Euro-Americans were entitled to have only one child, and be subject to loss of state benefits initially and forced tubal ligation subsequently for violations of this policy. As in the West, the issue of ethnicity in preferential treatment is conflated with economic issues; ethnic minorities in China have lower incomes and tend to live in less prosperous areas far from the fast-developing coast and away from urban centers. However, policies to redistribute wealth and opportunity in favor of ethnic minorities are accepted as a basic policy platform of the Chinese Communist Party (Sautman, 1998, pp. 87-8), whereas in the West elaborate societal discourses have emerged to position affirmative action policies in favor of ethnic minorities as creating ‘fresh injustices’ against majority members (Sibley, Liu, & Kirkwood, 2006; van Dijk, 1993). In Western societies, there is equality in principle, and a variety of justificatory mechanisms to explain why there is not equality in fact (Sibley, Liu, Duckitt, & Khan, 2008), but in China ‘the ultimate aim is equalityin-fact’ (Sautman, 2008, p. 88). Mackerras (2003, p. 27) notes that real power is being divested from Han Chinese to ethnic minorities, such that ethnic minorities are over-represented on China’s highest governmental body (about 15 per cent in 1998), but under-represented in the Communist Party (6.2 per cent, pp. 39–40). While the non-democratic nature of China’s institutions may be partly responsible for the lack of any Han Chinese backlash against such preferential treatment, Sautman (1998) argues that an ideology of benevolent authority is at least partially responsible for this massive civilizational difference in outcomes. Sautman quotes an official statement to the effect that, ‘great assistance of the relatively more advanced Han is extremely important in speeding up the development of minorities. Yet the Han have selflessly regarded this kind of assistance as their responsibility’ (p. 88). He summarizes China’s policy towards its designated minorities as follows (p. 88): Jiang Zemin was telling the minorities that they would get preferential policies and treatment if they opted to stay within China, with plenty of economic and other incentives and an improving standard of living. However, the government would not tolerate separatism and would immediately suppress any attempt at succession on the part of any ethnic group.

This may be a controversial solution. For Tibetans in particular, this blend of paternalistic nationalism and didacticism may be difficult to accept (see Bass, 2005), and regarded as concealing assimilative policies. But, it should be appreciated that China is providing opportunities for its ethnic minorities that the West cannot or will not provide, and that discourses of equality in principle in the West may not always better for its disadvantaged minorities than the redistribution of resources to minorities top-down accompanied by discourses of paternalism, as in contemporary China. Lee, Noh, Yoo, and Doh (2007) found that for Koreans in China, greater perceived discrimination was associated with reduced ethnic identification, exactly opposite to what has been found in the USA. Their findings are consistent with the idea that it is relational, not categorical acceptance that drives Korean ethnic identification - lower discrimination from the Chinese majority encourages


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Koreans to express themselves more as an ethnic minority, because they can have a comfortable relationship with Chinese as Koreans without being assimilated within a superordinate category. This is exactly the opposite of American data supporting a rejection-identification model (Branscombe, Schmitt, & Harvey, 1999). In the terminology of Liu and Liu (2003), the model of benevolent authority affords a different set of possibilities in dealing with issues of majority-minority relations in China compared with the West, with far-reaching repercussions that will ultimately impinge on the ethnic makeup of China itself (see Hoddie, 1998, who argues that more Manchu are self-identifying as Manchu because of this preferential treatment). C34.S1.8.3

3. Authoritarianism as the dark side to benevolent authority: categorical and defensive reactions under threat Mainstream Western research emphasizes the dark side rather than the balance between harmony and hierarchy-enhancing orientations towards society that characterizes indigenous Chinese research. As early as 1967, a cross-cultural study by Meade and Whittaker found that authoritarianism measured with the F-scale was higher among Hong Kong Chinese than for Americans and Brazilians, but lower than Indians and Rhodesians. Using a more contemporary measure of support for group-based inequality, social dominance orientation (SDO), Pratto, Liu, Levin, Sidanius, Shih, & Bachrach (2000) found SDO higher among mainland Chinese than Canadians, Taiwanese, and Israelis. Finally, and most recently, Liu et al (2008) reported that SDO was highest in Japan, followed by China and Taiwan, with the USA and New Zealand lowest. They further found that right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), a more contemporary measure of the authoritarian personality, was highest in China, Taiwan, and Japan, lower in the USA, and lowest in New Zealand. They also found that SDO and RWA were correlated with nationalistic and anti-human rights positions as regards the cross-straits relationship between China and Taiwan and the Iraq War for both mainland Chinese and for Americans. In summary, the available evidence (all using non-representative university student populations) suggests that Chinese people are higher on authoritarianism and SDO than Westerners, particularly mainland Chinese in comparison with Americans. Liu et al’s (2008) study suggests more tentatively that these orientations towards authoritarianism and SDO predict prejudicial attitudes in international relations. It should be noted that these findings are derived from Western measures that focus on the dark side of hierarchy and inequality and do not balance or see co-existence between their light and dark sides. From a mainland Chinese perspective, Taiwanese independence is certainly viewed as a threat (Liu et al, 2008). However, in the absence of the threat of independence, mainland Chinese showed in-group favoritism only with Japanese and not Taiwanese out-group members in an experimental social dilemma involving real money during internet trading (Takahashi et al, 2008). Historically, Taiwan is viewed as part of China. The alienation of Taiwan is seen as a vivid reminder of the terrible century plus the period from 1840 to 1949 where many foreign powers were bent on dismembering China, and Japan succeeded in taking Taiwan (Huang et al, 2004), and much else besides. Takahashi et al’s (2008) experiment demonstrated that Taiwanese are to a significant extent not viewed as outgroup members by mainland Chinese, whereas by contrast Japanese are viewed as prototypical outgroup members. Other striking results by Takahashi et al (2008) were that while mainland Chinese showed ingroup favoritism in both trust and trustworthiness in interacting with Japanese over the internet, Japanese university students did not display any ingroup favoritism in interacting with Chinese, even though they carried negative stereotypes of mainland Chinese into the experiment and had low expectations of cooperative behavior from their opposite numbers. This may be a legacy of the great wars of the twentieth century, where young Japanese are aware that their ancestors perpetrated something horrific to Chinese, but, given restrictive Japanese policy about curriculum content, are unclear about details. In consequence, they feel they cannot afford to be acting in a discriminatory way against Chinese, whereas Chinese believe that the Japanese have never apologized for their conduct


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during the wars, and are therefore unrepentant and dangerous, even in situations not involving overt threat. In fact, Japanese officials have apologized (albeit in an understated manner many times. Liu and Atsumi (2008) argue that national identities are constructed out of the raw materials of the past in response to current political needs, and that for China after Mao, a national narrative involving past victimhood became salient just as economic liberalization began. Within mainland China, there is a paucity of psychological research on intergroup relations and national identity. Fong’s (2004) anthropological fieldwork on ‘filial nationalism’ among teenagers in Dalian provides a good qualitative basis for future research on contemporary national identity in China, however. She argues that teenagers in an urban setting idolize wealthy Western countries, and see China as backwards by comparison. They dream of going overseas, but at the same time, regard it as their filial obligation to return home to help with modernization. While often openly critical of China themselves, particularly the use of guanxi to get ahead, these teenagers defended China fiercely as soon as the overseas-born author tried to chime in with criticism of her own. Fong’s (2004) work is more illustrative than definitive; the closest she comes to a definition of filial nationalism is with a quote from one of her participants: ‘I love China because China is my motherland, not because I think China is better than other countries. China is poorer and more backward than other countries, but my parents are also poorer and more backward than many other people’s parents. I can’t renounce my motherland any more than I can renounce my parents.’ (p. 641). Many forms of nationalism have been proposed by theorists to understand China (see Unger, 1996), but Fong’s (2004) formulation is refreshing both in its simplicity, and its rejection of official self-aggrandizing narratives that appear abstract and hollow to ordinary people. Filial nationalism returns to the starting point of this chapter, viz. that Chinese national identity is family writ large rather than a system of categorical beliefs. However, survey data from Hong Kong and Taiwan have in recent years provided ample evidence that people of Chinese cultural origins are perfectly capable of behaving according to the tenets of social identity and self-categorization theory, even if this is not the default position. About at the time of Hong Kong’s return to the sovereignty of mainland China in 1997, Lam, Lau, Chiu, Hong, and Peng (1999) found that categorical identification among adolescents as a ‘Hong Konger only’, ‘Hong Kong-Chinese’, ‘Chinese-Hong Konger’ and ‘Chinese only’ was systematically related to attitudes of pride, trust, and cultural superiority for mainland China and Hong Kong. These attitudes in turn were associated with valuing modernity and Chinese tradition. Adolescents who identified as Hong Kongers trusted Hong Kongers more, took greater pride in being a Hong Konger, and believed in the superiority of Hong Kong and Western culture and people over Chinese culture and people compared to those who identified themselves as Chinese. Self-identified Chinese had the opposite pattern of results, and the two hybrid groups occupied intermediate attitudinal positions. These results mirrored those of Huang (2007) in Taiwan, who found that those who identified as Taiwanese only were more against reunification with China, saw Taiwanese culture as small but beautiful, and held stronger attitudes towards self-autonomy and were more against social dominance and authoritarian conservatism than those who identified as Chinese-Taiwanese, with Taiwanese-Chinese in the middle. The two societies appear headed in opposite directions over time, however. In Hong Kong, the percentage of people taking an intermediate, hybridized position of Hong Kong Chinese or Chinese-Hong Konger in representative samples increased from 47 per cent in 1996 to 53 per cent 1999, and anxiety over Chinese military and paramilitary forces decreased (Fung, 2004). This shows a general reduction in anxiety over reunification with China, and a greater acceptance of mainland Chinese rule over time. In Taiwan, Huang et al (2004) reported, in a nonrepresentative but large sample, 91 per cent identifying with hybrid positions compared to 70 per cent in Huang (2007); identifying as ‘Taiwanese only’ increased from 7 per cent to 26 per cent, whereas identifying as ‘Chinese only’ dropped almost to zero. These longitudinal results show the impact of threat on self-categorization and identification processes: in Hong Kong fear of authoritarian crackdowns has decreased after 10 years of relatively uneventful and reasonable governance by mainland China, whereas in Taiwan, the fear of threat


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from China has increased over the same time period, with Taiwan edging towards independence (see Li, 2003), at least prior to the results of the 2008 election. C34.S1.9

Conclusions The work of Hong, Chiu and colleagues on a frame-switching theory for bicultural selves has shown potential to integrate some of the tensions between modernity and tradition for Chinese people. Hong, Morris, Chiu, & Benet-Martinez (2000) primed bilingual Hong Konger’s social identities as either Chinese or Westerners using iconic cultural images like Confucius and the Great Wall for China versus Superman and the American flag for Western cultures. Respondents were found to use more situational attributions when their Chinese identity was made salient versus more dispositional attributions when a Western identity was made salient. The holistic, situational style of attribution is regarded as symptomatic of the East-Asian style thinking, and the dispositional style is typical of Westerners (Nisbett et al, 2001). Lu and Yang (2006) have further hypothesized that this type of frame switching may be a means for Chinese people to manage the impact of modernity more generally. The basic idea is that Chinese people maintain a Chinese cultural identity in some situations, effortlessly and implicitly bringing to mind culture-appropriate scripts for thought and action according to situation, but shift to Western implicit theories (like dispositional inferences) in other situations. The empirical work of Hong et al (2000) shows that Chinese (albeit predominantly bilinguals) are perfectly capable of maintaining segmented, categorical forms of identity when the social and historical conditions make such an identity adaptive. Hong Kong was ruled for more than 150 years as an outpost of the British Empire, where administrative power and social status was in the hands of British expatriates, who ruled the society from top-down, but did not interfere with local people’s private lives. Under such circumstances, a compartmentalized form of identity, facilitated by codeswitching between Cantonese and English, was highly adaptive (see e.g. Yang & Bond, 1980). Over the larger flows of history, power and agency have been located in the West for the last 200 years (see Liu et al, 2005), so that again historical conditions favor non-Western people acquiring the skill to function by frame-switching in Western-dominated environments; Lu and Yang (2006) raise the question as to whether such frame-switching may apply to Chinese people more generally as they encounter the power and apparatus of Western forms of modernity. Supporting this proposition, recent work by Chen and Bond (2007) confirmed that not only HK Chinese, but bilingual Mainlanders as well engaged in frame-switching when primed by linguistic cues. The vision of culture provided by Hong et al (2001) basically hypothesizes that people have a cultural navigation system inside their heads that allows that allows them to act according to different implicit theories or cultural norms depending on situational cues. What about the larger issue of the ethical values and normative beliefs that govern a society? Surely social identity as a Chinese or Westerner must be more than an implicit theory for attributing causality to the situation versus to individuals! Following an historical contingency model, Liu and Liu (2003) drew a conceptual map of Chinese society being governed by a model of social relations centered around the figure of the benevolent authority, whereas in the Western model, society is governed by an impartial code of law grounded in historical precedent to which all are subordinate. If this is correct, then we should be able to find evidence for an implicit theory of power relations through the cultural frame switching paradigm. When Chinese identity is primed or made salient, the moral character and benevolence particularly of leaders should be the primary criterion on which they are judged, both in terms of group prototypicality and overall evaluation; it may also shape the behaviour of leaders to become more sensitive to issues of face (Choi, Kim, & Kim, 1997; Hwang, 2005). When Western identity is primed, the law-abidingness and competence of leaders should become more central criteria for evaluation. These hypotheses have not yet been tested empirically, but techniques now exist for social scientists to more fully articulate a theory of benevolent authority, which we claim is central to the operation of most high-power distance societies like China, compared


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to a theory of equality under the law, which we claim is central to the operation of highly individualistic, low-power distance societies. Besides cultural frame-switching, there is also the issue of cultural fusion (see Chen, BenetMartinez, & Bond, 2008 for an overview of a bicultural integration model applied to Hong Kong populations). China has shaken the world with Deng Xiaoping’s formulation of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. While some critics have translated this as ‘socialism with capitalist characteristics’, we do not agree with this simplification. Rather than adopt free-market capitalism, China has adopted a form of capitalism that is controlled top-down to a considerable extent, through the authority of the Chinese Communist party. It has not adopted the ‘plurality of powers’ model (Liu & Liu, 2003) where various moneyed interests jockey for political power through democratic processes. Rather, the Communist Party portrays itself as a benevolent authority that provides the only means for governing the nation and protecting the people from outside threat (Liu & Atsumi, 2008). A similar path has been taken in Singapore, where the political party of Lee Kuan-Yew and his son Lee Hsien-Loong, the People’s Action Party, has maintained power for more than 40 years, albeit using legalistic democratic procedures rather than classic authoritarianism. Taiwan also followed this path for 50 years under the Kuo Ming Tang, but in the last decade and a half has shifted to a Western-style democracy including ferocious contests between political parties that alternate leadership (Huang et al, 2004; Huang, 2007). Given the varying cases of China, Singapore, and Taiwan, the issue that remains unanswered is the continuing viability of ‘benevolent authority’ as a form of governance. Liberal theorists such as Fukuyama (1992) claim that the Western liberal state constitutes the ‘end of history’, towards which all nations will eventually evolve. Countering this claim, the recent experience of China, Russia, and Iraq suggests instead that there may be historical contingencies that alter the benefits of adopting liberal (and capitalist) democracy. The early developing Western nations reaped the benefits of not only escaping the tyrannical rule of kings, but simultaneously using power gained from the industrial revolution to colonize the rest of the world, thus lifting social standards for their own non-elites. By contrast, the four most salient and successful instances of development following the first wave of industrialization and democratization in the West were all by authoritarian rather than liberal democratic regimes (viz. Prussian Germany, Meiji Japan, and the Communist Soviet Union, and China). According to historians like Meisner (1996), this is in part because the authoritarian regimes insulate or protect local populations and national interests from the alternative interests of global capital and Western elites. For the developing world, democracy imposed or propped up from the outside has often had disastrous consequences. Most recently, in the case of reactions to the Iraq War, a global survey of young adults found that 4 of the 6 societies that regarded both George Bush Jr. and Adolf Hitler among the 10 most important figures in world history preferred Hitler to Bush in their ratings (Liu et al, in press). Quite clearly, ‘the leader of the free world’ was not regarded as very benevolent, and the seeds of democracy have not sown much joy for Iraqi people. Given the phenomena of cultural frame switching and cultural fusion, there is no reason why Chinese societies cannot adopt their hard-won cultural scripts of benevolent authority to provide alternative means of constraining power-holders that add to the repertoire of governance developed through Western theories of individualism. The cultivation of benevolence is at the heart of the height psychology proposed by Liu (1993). Contemporary neo-Confucians see their model as both a description and an ideal, and acknowledge the need to calibrate this model according to contemporary theories of rule by law. Using elements of ‘facework’, like appealing to human heartedness and using public opinion to instill a sense of shame for bad behavior are traditional means for Chinese people to inculcate and cultivate desirable behavior among not only common people, but also among the political elites. This art of cultivating leaders as benevolent authorities is taking on new life with the empirical work of indigenous Chinese psychologists working in the areas of paternalistic leadership, harmony and conflict, and filial piety. We have high hopes that this work will inspire Chinese leaders to show more human heartedness towards their followers, and for Chinese culture to contribute new models of moral guidance and political stewardship to a world culture in dire need of new paths forward.


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C34.S1.10

Chapter note 1 However, the second author has tried several times to run minimal group studies among Taiwanese Chinese without success.

C34.S1.11

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