Truth and Lies through Chinese Eyes
Words signal something, certainly, but who would be so naïve as to believe that it is the thing being said?
The Chinese are a simple people.1 They do not engage in irony or sarcasm as we do. Their advertisements are direct: a Nescafé ad shows an office worker drinking the coffee, then moving in hyperspeed as he scribbles down meeting notes.
On the other hand, when it comes to directness in speech, we are the simple ones. Chinese people generally don’t say what they mean. They say what should be said. Speech is ultimately an act not of direct individual-to-individual communication, but of network communication within a web (like PTP server traffic as opposed to FTP). The strands of the web are guanxi, connections, the essence of Chinese society. It’s a high-context culture where actions are molded less to an invariant moral imperative, and more to considerations of how what you do or say affects those around you.
For instance, let’s say you’re an au pair staying with a Chinese host family. Your Chinese host mother is displeased with you. Is she going to tell you directly that something’s wrong and ask you to please change your behavior? No: that would cause you to lose face, potentially embarrassing both of you. Instead, she will tell someone who is connected to both of you – in your case, the homestay program director. The friendly program director can then act as a mediator, bringing up the issue tactfully and (since it’s not her problem) without emotion, and allowing you to bring up any issues of your own to be later passed on to your host mother without conveying resentment.
Confrontation is always to be avoided. A corrolary of this is that if you are so bold as to ask your host mother directly “is there anything I need to work on?”, you’d be a fool to expect a straight answer. The worst thing for her to do would be to answer directly. The only way for her to defuse the embarrassing situation you’ve created is to answer, “no, not at all!”, regardless of whether that statement is literally true. Even if there’s a simple change that you would be happy to make, she’s not going to tell it to you directly. When it comes to confrontational speech, lying is always better than the truth.
I say all this as preamble to considering why, from America’s perspective, China is constantly and aggravatingly lying to us. For instance,
Xi and Obama agreed in 2015 not to engage in cyber economic espionage. The Americans don’t do it, in any case. But presumably, Xi had his fingers crossed…
In 2018, nearly twenty years after China was allowed into the World Trade Organization, the respected American economist Marvin Feldstein noted, “What is needed is a change in Chinese behavior to conform to rules Beijing accepted when it joined the WTO in 2001.” Good luck with that.
What American companies didn’t give away, the Chinese stole—and still do. The damages: $225–$600 billion in losses every year.
We constantly blame China for breaking their agreements with us. But perhaps they blame us for taking things so literally.
When Xi agreed to cease stealing American technology, he may have intended to do so, but later changed his mind. Or, he may have been overruled by a hardline faction. Or he may never have meant to do so at all. Regardless, from a Chinese perspective, the simple charge of “lying” is hardly a sin — contrary to old Kant, the rightness or wrongness of telling a lie is determined by who will get hurt. It’s as much the listener’s fault for believing the lie as it is the liar’s for telling it. Caveat auditor, particularly when it comes to someone with whom you have no guanxi, like the United States for China.
Chinese people have a lot of pride in their culture – justifiably so. Any Chinese person will tell you that China has a unique, uninterrupted civilizational legacy of 5000 years. Sure, you can argue about whether this is completely accurate, and if you look closely it’s not that simple. But all countries have foundational myths, and in a political (not historical) context, obsessing too much about their exact truth reminds one of new atheists trying to “disprove “the Bible.
In the West, from Greece onwards, we have a tradition that strongly values the truth. From Plato and Aristotle onwards, western philosophy was very closely connected to philalethia. Logos, the word, became God in Christianity. Skepticism does exist in Greek philosophy, but it doesn’t really come into the philosophical mainstream until Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes, Descartes, and Hume, and then moderns like Wittgenstein. Thus, when it does arrive, the prospect that causality is false, the universe is not real, and all of philosophy is just “word games” is deeply disquieting for the Western tradition — a shock from which I think we have yet to recover.
The eastern tradition, by contrast, engages with non-binary concepts of reality from the first passage of the Dao De Jing:
道可道非常道。
Whether or not you read Chinese, take a look at these six characters. You will notice that three of them are the same. This character is the titular 道 dào, which is usually translated as “way” or “path”. However, it can also mean “to speak”. In this passage it is playing a polyfunctional part as both verb and noun:
The dao which can be dao’ed is not the constant dao.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to translate this sentence into English while retaining a singular word for both noun and verb, so we are left with something like
The way which can be spoken is not the constant way.
However, a friend and I are considering a translation of the Dao De Jing as “The Classic of God and Virtue”, in which this sentence will be:
The god which can be named is not the eternal god.
Regardless of your translation, dao is at the center of the Dao De Jing. Compare this with the treatment of logos in John 1:1:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
In Christianity we have existence, togetherness, and an equality relationship. In Daoism, ambiguity emerges from the very beginning. God, logos, or ultimate truth may exist, but it can never be given a binary value.
Because this non-binariness is present from the beginning, in its fruition it leads to a rich tradition in both Daoism (Zhuangzi is my favorite2) and Buddhism (especially in Zen, which occurred from the influence of Chinese thought on Indian Buddhism). Meanwhile, these two traditions exist in parallel with Confucianism, which is not so much focused on determining what is true and not true as it is on determining the proper form of a society. (The neo-Confucians may be an exception, but personally I don’t see them as having much of a continuing influence.)
All of this is to say that, while it would be too simplistic to claim total dependence of culture on philosophy, I do think the connection is there, in both East and West. Chinese people are simply much more comfortable with living in a non-dualist, non-black and white world than we are. So, when we interact with them, it will be helpful to try to see things from this perspective, instead of expecting them to live up to our own standards for truth, and then getting angry when they fail to do so.
Some may see this entire essay as stereotyping or orientalism. I would respond that stereotypes are useful in helping us make sense of a heterogeneous world, and are useful in moderation. Orientalism, too, is dangerous in excess, but I think a bit of the “mystique of the east” would be a good thing for many Americans to feel. Given the decadence of our own cultural trajectory, it doesn’t seem imprudent to venture wide in search of new inspiration, and China presents one of the most interesting vectors.
A sample passage of Zhuangzi (my translation). Compare with Hamlet talking to the skull — perhaps the arts of the West do a better job with engaging nondualism than philosophy per se:
Zhuangzi went to Chu. There appeared to him an empty skull, bleached bones with a human form. He hit it with a horsewhip, and thereupon asked the question: “Did you covet too much life, fail in your reasoning and hence end up thus? Or were you involved in the affairs of some ruined state, went to the axe and came to this? Or were you involved in some unsavory business, and the shame of leaving your parents, wife and children brought you here? Or did undergoing the afflictions of cold and hunger turn you into this? Or was it simply many springs and autumns that drew you to this state?”
With this their dialogue ended, and he took the skull and used it as a pillow to sleep. In the middle of the night the skull appeared in his dream, saying, “You chatter like a sophist. You’ve enumerated all the possible types of human life; but death is not like this. Do you want to hear an account of death?”
“I do”, answered Zhuangzi.
The skull replied, “In death, the gentleman is not above, nor the servant below. Each new season brings no new work, so our springs and autumn are taken from heaven and earth, and even a king facing south could find no more happiness than this.”
Zhuangzi unbelievingly replied, “If I made the Overseer of Destiny restore life to your form, make you bone and muscle, skin and flesh, restore your parents, wife and children, and the friends in your village - would you not want this?”
Deeply furrowing its brow, the skull replied, “Why would I discard the happiness of the south-facing monarch to return to the burdens of human life?”
In Indonesia, the culture of indirect communication is prevalent. Most people bacj home perceive this indirectness as duplicity and expect for people to express themselves directly. Personally, i see it as a testament to Indonesian values of valuing and respecting those we communicate with (being polite is the first lesson parents taught their kids before reading or other stuffs). It's not about being a people pleaser, but rather adhering to the famous Indonesian proverb that emphasizes the importance of diplomacy: "Your mouth is your tiger." In essence, it's better to avoid creating enemies and prioritize maintaining harmony by preserving others' feelings and dignity, rather than leaving emotional scars. Sorry if i you find i am being unclear 😬