To See Ourselves: Comparing Traditional Chinese and American Cultural Values (review)

Reviews 505 Zhongdang Pan, Steven Chaffee, Godwin Chu, and Yanan Ju. To See Ourselves : Comparing Traditional Chinese andAmerican Cultural Values. Boulder , Colorado: Westview Press, 1994. xiv, 258 pp. Hardcover $49.95, isbn 0-8133-2075-5. This book serves as both an exploratory study and a survey ofa culturally changing China and as a comparison ofsome highly abstracted value orientations between China and the United States. The authors begin their inquirywith a new twist: specifically, they set out to compare American and Chinese cultures from a traditional—read "Confucian"—Chinese perspective. They give statistical survey answers to the following sorts ofquestions: To what extent do contemporary Chinese cultural values retain or diverge from core Confucian teachings? To what extent do the stereotypical contrasts between China and the United States hold? Where do Americans stand in their support oftraditional values and fundamental human relationships? Do Americans and Chinese share a common basis for mutual understanding? The four authors themselves are professors ofmass communication at various American universities. One is non-Chinese and the three others are originally China born and bred; the former offers survey-method expertise and the latter provide their insiders' perspective and scholarly knowledge ofChina. Although their main aim is to conduct cross-national comparison research between China and the United States—"usually opposing poles"—their subsidiary aim is to weigh the media's effects on sociocultural change. To further contextualize their data and make additional inferences about the forces influencing social change, they compare the U.S. and Chinese data with two other noncommunist, Confucian cultures, notably Taiwan and Korea. With the different disciplinary input and insights ofsenior Chinese sinologists, for example Frances Hsu, Wong Gongwu, Ambrose King, Anthony Yu, and a host ofother collaborators, they draft twenty-seven cultural-value items in survey -questionnaire form, eighteen ofthem consisting oftraditional Confucian ideas—for example "three obediences and four virtues," "younger people respect older people," "benevolent fathers and filial sons," "harmony is precious," and "respect tradition"—that together make up four conceptual domains: "male-female relationships," "kinship relations," "relations in an authoritarian hierarchy," and "general interpersonal relationships." The respondents consisted of two© 1996 fry University thousand Shanghai regional residents (approximatelyhalfrural, halfurban), two thousand-plus American residents from various urban areas housing major universities and one rural Florida sample, 960 Taiwan respondents, and 530 Korean respondents. The authors start offwith a macroscopic look at the comparative ofHawai'i Press 5?6 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1996 data, further evaluate it in terms of demographic characteristics—for example gender, age, education, income, occupation, and marital status—and then look at it again for configurative patterns. Throughout, they try to interpret their data against theories of modernization and social change. Caveats are many and necessary. For example, the main two-country samples may be unrepresentative, with more country than city folks in the China sample than in the United States; fixed universale such as age and gender may assume different implications in different cultures; and American and Chinese sociopolitical , administrative, and economic conditions vary greatly. Moreover, what people say and what people actually do can be very different. Further, trying to find equivalent wording—that is, rendering classical Confucian ideas and phrases into English—proved tricky and troublesome. Taking "harmony" as an example, the authors suggest that propaganda-weary Chinese may have endorsed this value as a return to stability; independent and individualistic Americans, on the other hand, may have spurned this same value because the authors chose to retain its Chinese essence by translating "harmony" into English as "yielding to others' wishes." In addition, heavy-handed Communist assaults on traditional Confucian ideas and phrasings may have tainted some of the Chinese responses, influencing the respondents toward disavowal rather than support ofkey Confucian teachings. In the end, the overwhelming result is this: China is much changed, and it is changing in a way that is different from the United States. There are some surprising results that signify a significant shift away from key Confucian values, probably as a result, the authors think, of four decades of Communist anti-Confucian campaigns. In addition, Americans embrace more traditional values than expected, particularly in the areas of male-female, authority...