China’s Survivalist Culture
The history of China is marked by long spans of civil war.
From 445 to 221 BC, China found itself under the power struggle of warring states, each state having declared itself independent of the Zhou dynasty’s weak government. The period was so tumultuous, it can hardly even be considered a dynasty. Civil wars ravaged the country repeatedly. Multiple centuries later, from 1850 to 1864, a mass revolt against the Qing Dynasty, known as the Taiping Rebellion, became one of the bloodiest revolts in world history resulting in 20 million casualties; and again a similar number in the Nationalist-Communist civil war.
Today, there is a common Chinese saying that goes, where you have three Chinese, you have a civil war.
Add to this tragic pattern a mix of frequent earthquakes (the Tongshan earthquake in 1976 alone killed hundreds of thousands), floods that sometimes had death tolls on the same scale, famines in which even tens of millions starved to death, plus millions more perishing as virtual slaves building public works like the Great Wall, and it’s no wonder simple survival emerged as a core value!
China’s long history of conflict and scarcity has deeply impressed Chinese culture with a survivalist mindset. Social, business, and family relationships tend to function from this basis—the most valuable action step you can take is the one that will allow you and especially your extended circle of family and relationships to succeed and, thereby, survive.
On the face of it, Chinese culture is known to value harmony and emphasize the importance of silo groups over the individual. And yet, Chinese business and social relationships can tend to operate through divisiveness, and competing groups are often reduced to cliques. While enshrining harmony, the sense of security needed to ensure that harmony will last is a scarce commodity.
Because of this survivalist-culture mentality, pragmatism becomes the most valued perspective by which to approach life. Marriage in China, for example, is a means to attain influence, money, and better social standing for your family circle. As Western culture has started to influence the younger generation (sometimes referred to as ziwo yidai—the “Me Generation”), some have embraced the idea of marrying for love. This perspective is intolerable to traditional Chinese: How can you put your own good above the reputation and well-being of the family?
Pragmatism also affects religion. Many believe in God because of the practical help they believe that God will give them. If you ask someone in China why they became a Christian, it is not surprising to receive an answer like, I prayed to Jesus to get a residency card to Beijing, and I got one.
Lacking a foundational basis for morality, Chinese culture functions through a system of saving face and favor-for-favor exchanges within relational networks known as guanxi. To westerners this can seem manipulative and ingenuine. Even among Chinese the question becomes: how to know who you can trust?
In the Chinese mind, the best motivation for civil behavior is a worldview of pragmatism: you do what is right because of its usefulness and benefit to you and your relational circle.
As Confucius once said, Why should you talk about heaven when you can’t even get along on earth?
Much of Chinese culture has been built upon highly pragmatic Confucianist principles like this one. The aim of Confucianism, which originally was a social philosophy and not a religion, was to establish stability and harmony in the world. Even one’s choice of religion is based upon its effects. And the long-term effects must be to better not only the individual, but the group and, ultimately, the betterment of China.
Even in the midst of a still strong survivalist-culture mentality, the national pride of the Chinese people continues to grow. As the economic power and global influence of China expands, the Chinese have begun to view themselves less and less as a poor country overshadowed by the humiliation of their war-ridden history, and more as a people of pride in their own right.