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| Tom Doctoroff |
Tom Doctoroff:
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| Tom Doctoroff |
Social+ apps have also gained traction because Chinese tend to be more expressive and open online compared to in person due to the strong influence of Confucian values that minimise individualism in favour of the collective good, according to Tom Doctoroff, chief cultural insights officer at branding and marketing consultancy Prophet.
“The Chinese often generate social currency through their activities and online persona. The online world is a place where you can project your identity safely, and so there is a greater amount of expressive liberation happening online in China relative to other countries,” he said.
As China continues to prosper and its middle class becomes more affluent, many Chinese want their interests or material possessions to reflect that they are “sophisticated and worldly”, so many are happy to share their personal interests or purchases with others online, he said.
More in the South China Morning Post.“I call it pride commerce, where there is the idea that you are what you buy … and that sharing your interests is a way to make your identity stronger,” Doctoroff said.
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| Ian Johnson |
Promoting these old ideas has been a priority for President Xi Jinping, who has rekindled enthusiasm for traditional culture as part of a broader push to fill what many Chinese see as their country’s biggest problem: a spiritual void caused by its headlong pursuit of prosperity.
And when China’s most powerful leader in 40 years endorses a philosopher, even a long-dead Confucian one, people rush to take action.
The epicenter of Wang’s revival has been this city of four million people perched on a plateau in China’s mountainous south. When (Confucius-promoter) Wang (Yangming) spent three years in exile here in the early 16th century, Guiyang was a remote outpost on imperial China’s southern border.
Today, as the capital of one of China’s poorest provinces, it has high-speed rail service to the coast and is trying to position itself as a center of big data— and traditional culture.
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| Tom Doctoroff, fmr AP CEO JWT |
Whenever I am asked what makes Confucian countries -- China, Korea and Vietnam -- really different from the West, it’s not just the lack of individualism—it is the level of ambition. In China, for example, everyone is ambitious. Women want their piece of the sky, just as men do. A study by the Center for Work-Life Policy found that just 36 percent of college-educated women in America described themselves as “very ambitious,” compared to 65 percent in China. A further 76 percent of women in China aspire to hold a top corporate job, compared to 52 percent in America.
The “tiger mom,” forcing extracurricular activities upon her child to make sure he gets into Harvard 18 years later, is not a myth. Not all mothers are like this, but ambition remains a palpable force in Confucian societies. They were the first to become socially mobile societies; engrained in the Chinese psyche is people can achieve success by mastering convention and internalizing the rules. The desire to get ahead binds people together. From the bourgeoisie in the bustling metropolises of Seoul, Beijing, and Hong Kong right down to the farmers in the fields, all want to be an emperor of their small corner, no matter how modest their origins.
So the relationship between individual and society in Confucian countries is fundamentally different than in Anglo-individualistic ones. Across the Confucian cultural cluster, brands need to do more so cross-market resources should be pooled accordingly.More at Tom Doctoroff´s LinkedIn page.
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| Ian Johnson |
As Beijing prepared to host the 2008 Olympics, a small drama was unfolding in Hong Kong. Two years earlier, middlemen had come into possession of a batch of waterlogged manuscripts that had been unearthed by tomb robbers in south-central China. The documents had been smuggled to Hong Kong and were lying in a vault, waiting for a buyer.
Universities and museums around the Chinese world were interested but reluctant to buy. The documents were written on hundreds of strips of bamboo, about the size of chopsticks, that seemed to date from 2,500 years ago, a time of intense intellectual ferment that gave rise to China’s greatest schools of thought. But their authenticity was in doubt, as were the ethics of buying looted goods. Then, in July, an anonymous graduate of Tsinghua University stepped in, bought the soggy stack, and shipped it back to his alma mater in Beijing.
University administrators acted boldly. They appointed China’s most famous historian, seventy-five-year-old Li Xueqin, to head a team of experts to study the strips. On July 17, the researchers gingerly placed the slips in enamel basins filled with water, hoping to duplicate the environment that had allowed the fibrous material to survive so long. The next day, disaster struck. Horrified team members noticed that the thin strips had already started developing black spots—fungus that within a day could eat a hole through the bamboo. Administrators convened a crisis meeting, and ordered the school’s top chemistry professors to save the slips.
Over the following weeks, the scientists worked nonstop through the eerily empty campus—the students were on vacation, and everyone else was focused on the Olympic Green just a few miles east. With the nation on high alert for the games, security officers blocked the scientists from bringing stabilizing chemicals into the locked-down capital. But the university again put its weight behind the project, convincing leaders that the strips were a national priority. By the end of the summer, Professor Li and his team had won their prize: a trove of documents that is helping to reshape our understanding of China’s contentious past...
The manuscripts’ importance stems from their particular antiquity. Carbon dating places their burial at about 300 BCE. This was the height of the Warring States Period, an era of turmoil that ran from the fifth to the third centuries BCE. During this time, the Hundred Schools of Thought arose, including Confucianism, which concerns hierarchical relationships and obligations in society; Daoism (or Taoism), and its search to unify with the primordial force called Dao (or Tao); Legalism, which advocated strict adherence to laws; and Mohism, and its egalitarian ideas of impartiality. These ideas underpinned Chinese society and politics for two thousand years, and even now are touted by the government of Xi Jinping as pillars of the one-party state.2
The newly discovered texts challenge long-held certainties about this era. Chinese political thought as exemplified by Confucius allowed for meritocracy among officials, eventually leading to the famous examination system on which China’s imperial bureaucracy was founded. But the texts show that some philosophers believed that rulers should also be chosen on merit, not birth—radically different from the hereditary dynasties that came to dominate Chinese history. The texts also show a world in which magic and divination, even in the supposedly secular world of Confucius, played a much larger part than has been realized. And instead of an age in which sages neatly espoused discrete schools of philosophy, we now see a more fluid, dynamic world of vigorously competing views—the sort of robust exchange of ideas rarely prominent in subsequent eras.
These competing ideas were lost after China was unified in 221 BCE under the Qin, China’s first dynasty. In one of the most traumatic episodes from China’s past, the first Qin emperor tried to stamp out ideological nonconformity by burning books (see illustration on this page). Modern historians question how many books really were burned. (More works probably were lost to imperial editing projects that recopied the bamboo texts onto newer technologies like silk and, later, paper in a newly standardized form of Chinese writing.) But the fact is that for over two millennia all our knowledge of China’s great philosophical schools was limited to texts revised after the Qin unification. Earlier versions and competing ideas were lost—until now.Much more at the New York Review of Books.
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| Tom Doctoroff (Photo credit: Fantake) |
The more the Chinese change, the more they remain the same. To interact successfully with the business and political leaders and the consumers of post-Cultural Revolution China, Western businesses, government leaders and visitors must keep that paradoxical truth in mind, says Tom Doctoroff, Greater China CEO for J. Walter Thompson. "China's economy and people are evolving rapidly, but the underlying cultural blueprint has remained more or less constant for thousands of years. As the nation races toward superpower status, it will nonetheless remain quintessentially Chinese -- ambitious yet cautious at the core," Doctoroff writes. The influence of Confucianism, Doctoroff says, continues to pervade the worldview of the Chinese and their social mores, creativity and consumer behavior. He describes a society in which family and clan still take precedence over the aspirations of the individual and where "face" is still of paramount importance.Tom Doctoroff is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting of conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.
