LettersUS and China in Alaska: culture clash helped turn up the heat
- Deep divergences in how Eastern and Western societies comprehend issues lay behind the sparks that flew at the meeting
Anyone who cares about US-China relations or world affairs would have watched what transpired in Alaska last week. China’s foreign policy chief Yang Jiechi appeared to work hard to suppress his emotions when he said the United States was a “champion” of cyberattacks, in contrast to US national security adviser Jack Sullivan and US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s unsurprisingly measured and stoic manner.
I don’t agree that this is the result of similar personalities, or the less than well-honed soft skills of the Chinese diplomatic corps. There is something deeper separating the Eastern and Western approaches to comprehending issues, which explains the differences observed in Alaska.
Their Western counterparts view things discretely. The net result is the cultural ability to set aside one’s emotional baggage, to behave with faith that the big picture will take care of itself when the tiny bits are attended to.
02:23
Gloves off at top-level US-China summit in Alaska with on-camera sparring
This nuance plays out in how one learns mathematics, for example. Some choose to follow mathematical procedures to arrive at an outcome, having faith that if the procedure is right, so will the outcome be. Others cannot help but want to feel the sense of logic, how the elegant and neat mathematical answer makes sense in the chain of cause and effect.
In this sense, the Chinese are likely to be the latter, and this explains why a lot their mental approach involves a great deal of emotion.