Summary of the Culture in China
I think my home country China is such an unique country from what it has been through in the past and what it achieved in the past 20 years, and when those long traditional culture meets the modern or western culture, they get mixed and form the culture as it is now. Now I’m listing and explaining according to the five dimension from my point of view.
Power Distance
I agree with the point that Hofstede gives - 80, the power is highly centralized by the government, I think the primary reason is because China’s one party rule. All the big decisions are made by those 5 - 7 people in the top level, or some power could even been made only by the chairman. Therefore, the power is distributed from the top all the way down to regular people, not only in the political structure, but also in corporate where people worked, hierarchy is a common sense especially in state-owned companies, i.e. everybody should follow leader or manager’s direction. However, along with more and more foreign company came to China and some private or startup which bring advanced management or organization structure to China, a new trend of encouraging normal employee to come up with their own thought or opinion.
An example that I can think about is the internet censorship in China. Since 2000, along with the information explosion and web 2.0 are more and more popular around the world, people can get information or news from multiple sources over the internet, but Chinese government concerned a lot for their people that could gain more information other than government’s public news or media resources. Therefore a series technical methods has been implemented, such as IP blocking, DNS filtering and redirection, URL filtering, etc, all those kind of methods are called the Great Firewall of China. Furthermore, social networks are boosted nowadays, Chinese government is more sensitive on this and the situation is more and more intensified. I think even most people know that it
Power Distance
I agree with the point that Hofstede gives - 80, the power is highly centralized by the government, I think the primary reason is because China’s one party rule. All the big decisions are made by those 5 - 7 people in the top level, or some power could even been made only by the chairman. Therefore, the power is distributed from the top all the way down to regular people, not only in the political structure, but also in corporate where people worked, hierarchy is a common sense especially in state-owned companies, i.e. everybody should follow leader or manager’s direction. However, along with more and more foreign company came to China and some private or startup which bring advanced management or organization structure to China, a new trend of encouraging normal employee to come up with their own thought or opinion.
An example that I can think about is the internet censorship in China. Since 2000, along with the information explosion and web 2.0 are more and more popular around the world, people can get information or news from multiple sources over the internet, but Chinese government concerned a lot for their people that could gain more information other than government’s public news or media resources. Therefore a series technical methods has been implemented, such as IP blocking, DNS filtering and redirection, URL filtering, etc, all those kind of methods are called the Great Firewall of China. Furthermore, social networks are boosted nowadays, Chinese government is more sensitive on this and the situation is more and more intensified. I think even most people know that it