The title of this post refers to Guanxi. I first heard of Guanxi from the China Law Blog, which referred to the Silicon Hutong Blog.
After reading the China Law Blog’s post, I did more research and also watched a few videos on the subject.
I learned that Guanxi is an aspect of Chinese culture that does not translate easily.
There are several elements and layers to Guanxi. First, Guanxi is based on a Confucian hierarchy of familial relationships, long-term friendships, classmates, and schoolmates and to those no stranger—Chinese or foreign—will ever have access to. (Silicon Hutong)
Guanxi evolved over the millennia because China didn’t have a stable and effective legal system. In fact, the legal system in China today is relatively new and made its appearance after the 1982 Chinese Constitution was established.
Since 1982, there have been several amendments to the Constitution as China adapts its evolving legal system.
In time, this legal system may replace Guanxi since business law modeled on Western law with Chinese characteristic is developing faster than civil law.
Through the centuries, merchants in China needed a way to avoid disputes and problems in the absence of a well-developed legal system. To survive, a complex system called Guanxi developed with many components such as partnerships, trust, credibility, etc.
Guanxi developed organically in civil society due to the absence of a uniform, government mandated legal system, and maintaining Guanxi is different than how relationships are maintained in other cultures. The embedded videos with this post offers a more detailed explanation.
The China Law Blog’s had more than twenty comments, and it was a lively discussion worth reading if you are interested in discovering more on this topic.
Learn about “face” and discover how it might affect Guanxi.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the unique love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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And those previous 5 stories are only the tip of Mt. Everest. When I Googled “U.S. Jobs Lost to China,” there were almost 70 million hits.
That’s why I find the following information so interesting: 59.2 percent of the civilian labor force age 16 and older had jobs in 1950, but in 2015, that ratio was 66.8 percent. Isn’t that an increase in jobs instead of jobs lost? – Labor Force Change, BLS.gov, table 4, page 22
In addition, Heritage.org says, “Those who attack China often do not examine real economic events: They do not measure actual failed businesses and actual job losses. Instead, they assume the U.S.–China trade deficit means that both production and production jobs are moving from the U.S. to China. … Imports do not cause unemployment; quite the opposite, they are a signal of prosperity and plentiful jobs.” The Heritage Foundation is an American conservative think tank based in Washington D.C. and the foundation took a leading role in the conservative movement during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. Therefore, you can’t blame alleged liberals for this report.
Cato.org, an American libertarian think tank (To be clear, libertarians are not liberals.) founded by the Charles Koch Foundation, (yes, that Koch) supports what Heritage says: “In the quarter century between 1983 and 2007, as real GDP more than doubled and the real value of U.S. trade increased five-fold, the U.S. economy created 46 million net new jobs, or 1.84 million net new jobs per year.”
If what Heritiage.org and Cato.org says is true, is the United States really losing jobs?
First, after the 2007-08 global financial crises caused by U.S. Banks and Wall Street greed, trade between the United States and the world shrunk by 12 percent and almost 9 million jobs were lost in the U.S. — jobs that were not lost to China. In fact, since 2009, more than 9 million jobs were added back making up for those lost jobs.
That proves that the United States has not had a reduction in jobs, but “In the U.S., jobs paying between $14 and $21 per hour made up about 60% of those jobs lost during the recession … such mid-wage jobs have comprised only about 27% of jobs gained during the recovery through mid-2012. In contrast, lower-paying jobs constituted about 58% of the jobs regained.”
Did you know that the United States has the 2nd largest manufacturing sector in the world, and that China only became #1 recently? Brookings.edu says, “As recently as 2010, the United States had the world’s largest manufacturing sector measured by its valued-added and, while it has now been surpassed by China, the United States remains a very large manufacturer.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if you said no.
At this point you may be confused or in denial. You might be thinking that this can’t be true. How can the U.S. have such a large manufacturing sector when millions of jobs have been lost there?
Bright Hub Engineering.com offers one answer: “Robots have replaced a lot of activities formerly carried out by a human, with one robot replacing as many as ten workers.”
“In the last fifteen years, manufacturing in the United States has undergone a fundamental shift,” Arena Solutions.com reports. “As millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs have been lost to … automation, output has steadily continued to grow. And while U.S. manufacturing output has decreased by only 1% since 1990, manufacturing jobs have decreased by over 30% in the same time period.”
Losing manufacturing jobs is not only happening in the US. The Harvard Business Review.org says, “Manufacturing employment decline is a global phenomenon. As a Bloomberg story summarized: “Some 22 million manufacturing jobs were lost globally between 1995 and 2002 as industrial output soared 30 percent.”
Instead of blaming China, blame the real culprits: robots and the greedy rich who are behind the decisions to replace humans with automation. If one robot can replace ten humans, that’s a lot of increased profits, and more job losses are on the way. Earlier this year CBS Money Watch reported The robot revolution will take 5 million jobs from humans.
After all, Robots don’t need Social Security, medical care, retirement plans, paid sick leave or vacations — in fact, they don’t earn any money, even minimum wage with no benefits, making robots better than human slaves.
China is also going through its own robot revolution. FT Magazine reported this June that “Factories in China are replacing humans with robots in a new automation-driven industrial revolution.”
The manager of one Chinese company that makes stainless steel sinks in Guangdong talked about 9 robots doing the job of 140 full-time workers, “These machines are cheaper, more precise and more reliable than people.”
But what happens when there are no human jobs left for people to earn money so they can buy stainless steel sinks and all the other consumer crap factories churn out around the world? After all, robots don’t read books, watch films, use sinks or toilets, or even eat.
Are the world’s rich and powerful planning to get rid of the rest of us and replace us with robots, because they certainly are not creating robots to replace them?
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the unique love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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According to World Education News & Reviews, in 2010, senior high schools [in China] accommodated 46.8 million students (23.4% of the 199.5 million students attending K to 9). But 48 percent of that 46.8 million students were in vocational senior high schools — not academic high schools, and only 15 year olds in academic high schools took the PISA test.
That leaves 21.2 million enrolled in the senior high school academic track designed to prep kids for college—that’s 10.6% of the total number of K to 12 students in China. This means that the fifteen-year-old students who take the international PISA in China are the elite of the elite attending China’s best public schools.
Students in China are taught from a very early age how to beat tests.
In addition, what country’s public schools have been used as a role model for China’s public school system?
Solutions Journal.com reports, “What the Chinese found valuable in American education is the result of a decentralized, autonomous system that does not have standards, uses multiple criteria for judging the value of talents, and celebrates individual differences. Recognizing the negative consequences of ‘test-oriented education,’ China has launched a series of national reforms to cultivate more creative citizens. In 1999 China’s Central Committee sought to reform testing, abolish middle school exams, and encourage local provinces to experiment with their own examination regimens. This was followed by further decrees in 2001, encouraging more diverse curricula, and greater choice for students in subject matter—although any new material used must still ‘equip students with patriotism, collectivism, a love for socialism, and the Chinese cultural traditions, as well as moral-ethic values, democratic spirits with Chinese characteristics.’”
While China is moving closer to what the American public education system was like before 1999, the U.S. with NCLB, RTTT, and the Common Core and its high stakes tests has been moving away from the model China admired, and 13 years later, China’s 15 year old high school students in 10th grade in Shanghai earned 1st place in the 2012 international PISA test.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the unique love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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How did China’s city of Shanghai beat out everyone else in the world with such a dramatic 1st place average on the 2012 international PISA test?
First, the 15 year olds in Shanghai that took the PISA test had to rank high on another test just to get into high school (grades 10, 11 and 12) so they were already great test takers, the best in their generation and China has almost 200 million students in its public schools.
You see, students that graduate from middle school (grades 7, 8 and 9) in China have to take the senior high school entrance exam known as Zhongkao. Students that fail this high school entrance exam are not allowed to graduate from junior high school, and they do not get into any academic senior high schools.
Second, Asia Society.org reports that Shanghai has the world’s best school system. “China has a long tradition of respect for education. In fact, there is much societal and family pressure to do well academically. This has fostered education reform throughout history at many levels. While the entire country has made strides in education, Shanghai is at the forefront as it has been given special authority to experiment with reform before the rest of the country. … One interesting strategy employed by Shanghai (that the United States is not doing) to improve weak schools is the commissioned education program. Under this scheme, top performing schools are assigned a weak school to administer. The ‘good’ school will send a team of teachers and a principal to lead the school and improve it.”
To explain how this works, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has acknowledged a “9-6-3 rule”. This means that nine of ten children began primary school between the ages of 6 and 7; six complete the first five years and three graduate from sixth grade with good performance. The 3 of 10 that graduate from 6th grade are allowed to go on to grades 7, 8 and 9.
For a comparison to the United States, in the U.S. in 2015, 82 percent of 17/18 year olds graduated on time from academic high schools, because education is mandatory to 12th grade instead of 9th grade like it is in China. Students that continue beyond 9th grade in China want to keep learning. To be clear, it isn’t mandatory past 9th grade.
By the time a student reaches senior high school—grades 10, 11, and 12—most enrollment is in the cities and not in rural China. Many rural Chinese don’t value education as much as urban Chinese do. Many of the migrant urban workers from rural China still have some family back in the village where they often leave their younger children. In fact, many of the migrant workers, when they retire from factory work, return to the village and the family home.
The United States, by comparison, keeps most kids in school until the end of high school at age 17/18, and another 10 percent earn a high school diploma or equivalent GED by age 24. This all takes place in academic schools, because there are no vocational public schools in the U.S.
Continued with Part 3 on August 18, 2016 or start with Part 1
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the unique love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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In 2012 Shanghai earned 1st place in the world on the International PISA test. Its score was 613 in math, 570 in reading, and 580 in science. Second place went to Singapore: 573 in math, 542 in reading, and 551 in science. The mean score for all the countries that took part in the PISA was 494 in math, 496 in Reading and 501 in Science.
Around 510 000 students between the ages of 15 years 3 months and 16 years 2 months participated in PISA 2012 as a whole representing about 28 million 15-year-olds globally.
All 34 OECD member countries and 31 partner countries and economies participated in PISA 2012, representing more than 80% of the world economy. The U.S. was ranked #36 compared to the 65 countries/cities listed.
But Shanghai is not a country. It is a city and so was Hong Kong and Macao. Even the Principality of Liechtenstein, a landlocked microstate that is one of Europe’s most affluent (wealthiest) communities, with a population of almost 37,000, was ranked in the top 10 right behind Japan. At least Shanghai has a population of more than 20 million.
At this point, you might be thinking, why is he mentioning America’s PISA score when this post is about Shanghai. In Part 3, the ironic answer to that question will be answered.
Continued with Part 2 on August 17, 2016
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the unique love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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