China and America: Winners Are Made, Not Born

In the report “Rise or Fall: China Is Pondering at the Crossroads,” the author wrote that winners are made, not born. This is an outcry against the social inequity commonly existing in Chinese society.

There is a major difference between the concept of “winners are made, not born” in China, and “all people are born equal” in America. The Americans regard the idea as self-evident, so even if it causes some real social trouble, they can evade the problem with nifty words. Things would be so much different if someone shouts, “Winners are made, not born” in China; is someone planning a rebellion? Ambitious people are only minorities in China and America, and the poor are not so foolish as to put themselves in such jeopardy by yelling slogans to express their dissatisfaction with inequity.

The class relations in China are becoming rigid. From civil servants to large state-owned company employees, the situations are the same: the young inherit everything from their father’s generation. Young people don’t have many chances to improve their status in the society; consequently, they become less hardworking and dislike their occupations or identities.

In China, people value blood ties very highly. On the one hand, the social order is well maintained in this way, but more often, it causes talent waste and creates a sense of inequity because it only protects the group interest. In big countries like China and America, we can bear the talent waste because there is little pressure on survival competition, but in small countries with small populations like Singapore, the Netherlands and some other small countries in Northern Europe, they have to make the most of their populations’ talents in order to develop.　　

America has been a developed country for a long time, job and social class patterns have been fixed and it has a series of mechanism to solve or cover up the conflicts.

The Americans have relatively fewer complaints because most businesses are private property. Such a system triggers few conflicts when someone gives special help to their kin in their career. Similar things happen in the private-owned companies in China.

In America, people from the underclass have the opportunity to exercise their rights. They and the politicians mutually benefit. Americans uphold individualism and advocate freedom of speech, which cultivates a sense of pride of their identity; even if everyone looks down on me, I still think I’m the best.

Meanwhile in China, face means everything. If someone thinks too highly of himself, people will look down on him.

The upper class in America is cunning. They know how to speak cleverly and humanely. They give people from other classes the chance to enter the ruling class, namely Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. Of course, Obama was carefully handpicked by the ruling class. They also know how to take care of the underclass. They provide all sorts of aid and offers regarding housing and education and so on.

In America, people like competition, and competence is everything. Therefore, people from other classes have a chance to gain higher status in society, and though such chances are in constant decline, at least the competition is fair and square.

All in all, Americans are more open-minded. They value freedom and equity. Nobody dares to speak out of turn, and gender discrimination can result in those who discriminate losing their jobs.

In China, there’s a severe problem: the lack of a system for dealing with conflict. Resource distribution is uneven; a minority of people take up a majority of resources. What’s more, with the one child policy, the older generation usually leaves the good resources directly to their own children. This is why people from other classes are rarely able to achieve positions as civil servants or employees of large companies.

Traditionally, Chinese people view blood ties as boundaries between different vocations and are unwilling to let in outsiders even if they badly need someone with more experience and knowledge. Therefore, an ill-uneducated relative usually trumps a PhD outsider in pay grade and in stable jobs. The convention goes without saying. Having a career different from your parents means you can’t become a Party member and have no identity and no future. Interestingly, such a problem can be easily solved by marriage. Chinese society is very corrupt, and its problems are much more serious than those in America. People value family too much; hence, there’s less competition and more inequality. For example, a government policy calls for a salary reduction for the employees in a large company, but that company divides its employees into several groups, and those who are outsiders get a sharper reduction in pay than those who are inside the core group with the blood relations. There are many problems in the structure of Chinese state-owned companies. They cannot rely on domestic demand. They are inefficient but pay their workers high salaries. Non-monopolized companies can hardly survive. Privately-owned companies have high efficiency but pay their workers low salaries because the labor unions are weak. People may think state-owned companies will eventually replace private-owned companies in the major industries. Things are more complicated than that. The conflicts of unfair pay grades among different vocations are still very difficult to tackle.

The upper class in China likes to show off their social identity by buying ostentatious things. This is a traditional tactic in a class society, though in America, such phenomenon is shown in a milder way. To show their high social status, they speak snobbishly, put on airs before outsiders and behave ruthlessly. They cannot be compared to the American upper class. As an old Chinese saying goes, dragons only give birth to dragons, and phoenixes only father phoenixes. Mice only give birth to mice, and they are born to dig holes. One’s fate is determined the minute he is born, as many cadres and party members would tell their subordinates to remind them of the cadres’ own status in society. They also mean it sincerely, as a complaint about inequality. This doesn’t sound like something suitable to say in modern times. It’s more like words used by Tibetan masters when they disciplined their slaves in old times. It gives people a feeling that China has returned to a slavery society.

In a vertical society like China, tyrants are likely to emerge. Society nowadays is much more complex than it used to be — there’s a wider gap between rich and poor, more conflicts, fewer constrains on individuals, more acts of violence to subjugate the underclass, more malfeasance, more numerous and more cunning criminals and more inequality. Relatively speaking, Chinese society nowadays is pretty barbaric, and Chinese people need to work harder to build up a prosperous, democratic, culturally advanced modern state.

A big problem in America is that labor unions are corrupt. Because they only protect the interests of the core group and the positions of the officials are inherited, the salaries of American corporate employees are too high, the costs for a company are high and efficiency is low. We can see the corruption of American companies’ management in this financial crisis.

The similarities between China and America lie in the universities and the Party. The American upper class receives education in elite private universities and the underclass in state universities. The elite universities in China and America offer good chances for the upper class to participate in government, so graduates usually become government officials rather than employees. Therefore, those well-informed social climber parents want their kids in Tsinghua University so badly that they don’t care about faking their ethnic identity. (In China, minority ethnic groups may have lower university entrance requirements.) In China as in America, the government looks for talented graduates from elite universities with a higher degree or with a Party membership.

Life in America is easier because of its two-party system. America doesn’t have huge gaps between vocations like China does. An American official can be someone who has worked in universities, private companies or government with experience and competence, but Chinese cadres can only be people who have a background in business or academics with limited experience. Americans enjoy more freedom entering or leaving government. They merely regard the Democratic and Republican Parties as places to share political view and values.

In conclusion, a country’s future depends, to a large extent, on the ability of the ruling class. The common people are good regardless of their nationality. The things that give China the advantage in economic development are low costs and the spread of knowledge. If employee salaries in China were at the same level with the American standard, then China would lose its competitive advantage in efficiency and innovation. Japan’s ambitious and corrupt ruling class is a cautionary example.