Pascal Coppens is a sinologist and technology entrepreneur who lived in China for almost 20 years. Pascal has experienced firsthand the transition of the country and the Chinese people from 1990 until today. He is a partner and speaker at nexxworks, and the author of China’s New Normal (2019), a book about China’s leap in innovation, and his latest book, Can we trust China? (2022). As a China expert, he has also built up a YouTube community with over 50,000 subscribers.
In this new book “Can We Trust China?”, Coppens explains that the rise of China as a superpower has unnerved the West and has created a “fear” that he is trying to allay.
In the next two short videos, Coppens attempts to explain the following:
- What the West gets wrong about China? Four main misconceptions to understand China. (22.23 min)
- One simple model to understand China better. Why we shouldn’t think of China as a collective society (16:26 min)
I have presented the two videos in reversed orders. The first video is the one you should view if you only have time for one viewing. Otherwise, view the second video first.
In the first video, Pascal explains that it is not actually appropriate to classify China as: a) A top down society in which the people has no say; b) That there is no freedom in the Chinese society; c) That China is a very rigid, guided and static society; and, d) That China is an uniform and inhuman society.
In the second video, Pascal explains that the western society emphasizes individuality while the Chinese society is based on collectivism. At the 02:51 mark, he asserts that China is even more individualistic than the West; and the West is even more collectivistic than China. At 05:43, he explains that we need to understand the Chinese and Western “circles of trust”. The inner circles are the network circles, which are the people you trust, because you have a relationship with them. While the outer circles are the system circles, where people you don’t have a relationship with influence your life. It just so happened that the Western and Eastern circle of trust are mirror image of each other.
I have read many different accounts of why the East and the West fail to understand each other. Pascal has a novel/different way of explaining why this is so!
A caveat from me: The two countries have different cultures, what works in China would not work in the US (and vice versa)!
Joel