“So what are the Chinese like?”

“So what are the Chinese like?” – How to deal with and talk about your experiences with Chinese people

By Anna-Maria Linhard, English and German teacher in Shanghai


Anyone returning from China will encounter this question at some point. Probably multiple times. “What are the Chinese like?” How do you even begin to answer this? There are over a billion Chinese people living in an area about as big as all of Europe speaking hundreds of different languages*. What could all these people possibly have in common except maybe a Chinese passport?

When I ask my Chinese students to describe the Chinese people, they mention things like “conservative” and “shy”. According to them family is important to the Chinese and “they really care about how other people think of them”. They are materialistic and “if you ask them to choose between job satisfaction and a high salary, most of them will choose high salary”. The students say Chinese people used to be polite, but now they only care about themselves and are inconsiderate, the behaviour of Chinese in subway stations being the prime example. However, even the students recognise their own answers as stereotypes. Other stereotypes I’m aware of are e.g. how hospitable, ambitious and hard-working the Chinese are. All of these examples are things I heard or read about before I came to China. Considering myself an open-minded person, I was ready to discard them all – – negative or positive – as clichés and prejudices and discover the “real” China. From talking to other foreign teachers I know that others felt the same way when they came here. But what do I do, when after several months I find that my own experiences confirm many of the negative things I’ve heard? My Chinese colleagues are not very welcoming and even after several months they only talk to me when they need something work related. My school seems more interested in keeping up appearances than improving the quality of teaching. Whenever I enter the campus, the security guard leans out of his window and stares at me as if I were an alien, even after 10 months. When my boss asks me to teach at a partner school on Saturday because they don’t have a foreign teacher, I am happy to help, but later I find out that my school gets paid for renting out their foreign teachers. Every day I get pushed and shoved on the subway without a word of apology. At some point even every foreigner’s mantra “this is China” doesn’t help anymore. I experience culture fatigue and whenever I meet other foreigners, all we do is rant to each other about our colleagues, schools, students, neighbours and Chinese people in general.



Anna and two friends, on a trip to Suzhou

As much as we try to be rational and objective, we all come to China with certain cultural biases and preconceived notions about what we are going to find here. We inevitably make negative experiences that seem to confirm our biases and like a self-fulfilling prophecy it happens again and again until a bias turns into a prejudice that colours all our interactions with the locals. Many foreigners leave China disillusioned and disappointed. Some write books about it which are picked up by people like me trying to prepare for their new adventure before they go.**

There are two reasons why we as expats should be critical about the way we think and speak about the Chinese. Although Europeans may hear and read much about China in the news, most of us probably don’t know many people who’ve actually lived there. What we tell our friends, families and acquaintances at home, might be the only personal account they get and it will leave much more of an impression than any news article. It will shape their perception of China and possibly perpetuate cultural and racial stereotypes. One of the main reasons I came to China is the way a friend talked about her time teaching here. She absolutely loved living in China and her enthusiasm and excitement influenced my decision and could have set me up for disappointment. Both positive and negative stereotypes can be harmful. The other reason is the simple fact that we have to find a way to deal with our negative experiences so that they don’t affect our daily life and our happiness. I wish I had the perfect solution to this problem. The advice that I can give, is to treat people not as members of a group but as individuals. Stereotypes are mental shortcuts. They help us make quick judgments and reduce the amount of processing we have to do when we deal with people. He is acting like this because he is Chinese. She said that because she is Chinese. “It’s their culture” is a popular explanation for someone’s behaviour. But these generalisations are not very helpful in real life. Whatever might be true about “the Chinese”, “Chinese students”, “Chinese teachers” etc., in front of you is a person, not a “culture” walking on two legs***. Of course learning about China’s history and socio-economic conditions, especially if you speak/read Chinese and can access Chinese sources, will help you understand Chinese people’s behaviour up to a point, but not everyone has time for a sinology degree. So if you find that you are struggling to understand/communicate/interact with Chinese people around you, forget about “the Chinese” and focus on your colleague Ms Zhang, your friend Xin, your student whose English name is Darth Vader (I’m not making this up!). And for every individual person that turns out to be inconsiderate, materialistic or reserved, you’ll meet someone who is kind, open-minded and excited to talk to you. When I found out that most of my colleagues in our department have small children, I understood why they didn’t want to go out after work when I invited them for dinner, but a new young teacher was happy to, and I get along very well with her now. It’s easy to find Chinese people who want to hang out with foreigners to improve their language skills, but when I met Xin to help her with her German studies it took us about a week to become really good friends and I will miss her a lot when she goes to study in Germany in October. Whether they turn out to be soulmates or natural enemies, I want to make an effort to get to know the people around me as the individuals they are and not use “culture” as an excuse to stick labels on them.

By the way, when I finally talked to someone about that strange guard, I found out that he is very short-sighted and leaning out the window and staring is probably just him doing his job to check who is entering the campus. I’d assumed the guard was staring at me because I am a foreigner and that’s what Chinese people do, right? Now I stop and smile at him and I feel a lot more comfortable going through our main gate.

* The Chinese government calls the different Chinese languages “dialects”, but many linguists agree that they are languages of their own. Although they now all use Chinese characters, the spoken language is vastly different in grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. Knowing Mandarin will not enable you to understand or speak the Shanghainese “dialect” for instance. And then there is Mongolian, Uyghur, Tibetan, Zhuang…you get the idea.


** The book in question is a German woman’s account of her family’s three year stay in China. A depressing read by someone who didn’t manage to leave their foreigner bubble and judged everything based on some negative experiences they made after they first arrived.

*** What is “Chinese culture” even supposed to mean? Remember, one billion people, a country the size of Europe, hundreds of languages, many religions and ethnic groups, huge difference between countryside and cities etc.