Are the Chinese Collectivistss? Critical Reflections on a Conundrum in Understanding Chinese Culture

Abstract

A widely used commonplace about Chinese culture characterizes it as ‘collectivistic’. Based on recent psychological research, I show that the ‘individualism vs. collectivism’ dichotomy is highly misleading. I propose a three-dimensional analytical framework that adds the dimensions of ‘categorial vs. relational embeddedness’ and ‘verticality vs. horizontality’. In this space, China obtains the position of ‘individualism’ combined with ‘relational embeddedness’ and ‘verticality’. I argue that this location grounds in more fundamental cognitive structures of field dependence, and I propose the hypothesis that field dependence reflects the aesthetic pattern of ‘modularization’ in Chinese writing. I provide support for this psychological reasoning by reference to three approaches in Chinese studies: Fei Xiaotong’s indigenous comparison between Western and Chinese society, confirming the three-dimensional framework, the study of ‘guanxi’ as an individualistic means of building social capital, and the case of polytropy in traditional Chinese religion, which supports my argument on modularization.