China Culture Essay

Chinese culture is vastly different form of living than here in the United States. Chinese cultural practices like “face saving, social ritual, family-based structures and connections, and other aspects of Chinese culture were preventing Western firms from imposing their impersonal and highly efficient business practices in China” (RARICK p. 1). For those reasons, China was characterized as being difficult to do business with. “’History has had an enormous influence on business operations and environments in China today’” (RARICK p. 1). The Book “The Chinese Tao of Business” notes the power of Neo-Confucian ideas that have a strong impact on Chinese culture. Confucius and his value system stressed the importance of “hard work, loyalty, dedication, learning, and social order” (RARICK). Confucianism remained a social force in the Chinese society for over two thousand years and Confucius teachings remained in tact through an “informal mechanism that transmitted the wisdom of the sage from generation to generation” (RARICK p. 2). After the Chinese fall of their imperial system, Confucian teachings dissolved. The core of business in China revolves around Confucian theories; at the Four Seas School in Beijing, “students recite the saying of Confucious until they have them memorized” (RARICK p. 2). Confucianism is reliant on individual honor and duty to family and society, and utilitarian type values of this nature.
Neo-Confucianism is a second branch of Confucianism that developed over the course of time—it is the “integration of the writings of Confucius, with that of Daoist and Buddhist beliefs” (RARICK p. 2). It was a powerful philosophy throughout a great deal of ancient Chinese history and, for the most part, have been viewed as a positive contribution to Chinese business management practices and implementation. Zhu Xi’s four books on Neo-Confucianism became the groundwork for the new school of thought. In the “Analects” of Confucius, there are