Famous Chinese company ByteDance recently was featured in the news for doubling down on its Chinese roots—in the American market. In the article, the reporter describes how ByteDance refuses to listen to its local American staff about how to succeed in the US, instead insisting that the Chinese way is the best way. In this article we’ll look deeper at the culture within China driving this strange behavior in order to help make sense of what’s happening.
The phenomena at ByteDance are actually a further extension of the well-known exclusion of foreigners from the professional world in China. In a previous article, I pointed out that people from developed countries do not want to go to study or work in China because China does not want China experts. What they want from them instead are English teachers, technologies, and foreign investment.
You may be thinking this, and it’s true that these Americans who master China could, as experts say, make a huge impact for their organizations in international business because they would bring unique expertise and knowledge to these organizations. However, these organizations don’t really care about workers’ impact or individual contributions, and this manifests in bizarre problems like the “996” work culture. That is, it’s an input-focused culture, not an output-focused work culture. That also results in cultural phenomena like “white monkey” jobs where the only thing that matters is a foreigner shows up to work, not whether they do anything.
From organizational psychology, we know as a well-established fact that the more diverse backgrounds on a team, the better decisions that team will make. Second, experts from a particular region will drive better decisions about the organization. But this is not how Chinese businesses see things, and is why they pursue 100% Chinese teams. This applies to not just Americans, but dozens of countries, and what I have to say can be applied in other contexts.
As hinted in a previous article, once the American begins asking people from China about work there, they will eventually be told that because they are not Chinese, they can’t understand China, and cannot make a contribution in China or related to China. In other words, only “people like me” can succeed, not “people like you.” Americans take the hint and abandon their China interest. The underlying reason is not an evil discriminatory animus, but rather that the work culture values worker inputs and not outputs, so even if these Americans can bring unique insights that make an impact, nobody will recognize them. Eventually this reality became widely known and documented, and Americans lost interest in going to China. Strangely enough, the Chinese government and policymakers subsequently said this was an unexpected, huge problem.
Americans Turned Away
But many Chinese graduates in the United States are working there, so is there a double standard? Not explicitly, many students in business disciplines in the United States express surprise that they are considered for positions that are 100% English, despite that they are not Americans and also lack language skills. Nonetheless, they do try to get those jobs, and are pleasantly surprised when they do. Some executives and law firm partners from China told me that they also brought Americans who had learned Chinese on board to collaborate on China-related projects. However, when they used Chinese to talk to clients, their Mandarin was imperfect, and the clients simply couldn’t accept them.
The challenge here is that the Chinese companies’ culture aggressively measures inputs for workers and not outputs. In the words of managers as it relates to foreigners, they see this expat is in the same job role, doing the same tasks, and say that the only thing they bring to the table local workers don’t have is “fancy words” in English. Chinese business professionals I asked about their opinion on the matter said that they were capable of learning native-level English and foreign culture equally as well as natives, making foreigners irrelevant. While this is absolutely credentials inflation, nobody is getting ACTFL proficiency testing done, and organizations do believe it. The flood of Chinglish emanating from so many corporations is testament to that.
The intense focus on work inputs in China is nowhere more apparent than in its “996” and “touching fish” culture. If you’ve read various media reports about China, you may have heard that Chinese companies expect workers to be at the office from 9AM to 9AM, 6 hours per day. In parallel, there is a culture of “touching fish” from the expression hunshui moyu which in the classical Chinese logic means “it’s easy to catch fish by grabbing them in muddy waters.” Here, in the office environment, this means that there’s a lack of clarity about what workers are doing, making it easier to take advantage of the situation. Put these two things together, and you have a culture where people are focused on looking busy for 12 hours a day, 6 hours a week, but finding ways to avoid doing actual work.
For example, an engineer in Shanghai related that he simply sat at his desk and stared at a PowerPoint presentation for 10 hours, daydreaming the whole time, and not doing actual work. At Apple, the same exact worker with an Ivy League engineering education in the US office is paid around 8x more than in their Shanghai office; a lot has to do with what each work culture values and the result that has for impact and productivity for each location. In a recent television show in China, Love Game in Eastern Fantasy, the protagonist avoids doing actual work while being physically present in the office, by using a discreet earbud to listen to fantasy novel audiobooks.
The story told on television and in the media is that managers in China are focused not on the work being done, or the impact of your work, rather they are laser focused on the presence of those physical bodies in an office. Even if you can bring a lot of unique, high-impact knowledge, and really make a difference for this company, it doesn’t matter. The way the manager’s brain processes it, the Chinese body filling that office space is just as good as an American body filling that office space, and since the American can never “really understand China,” they are fundamentally inferior to the Chinese worker who can truly understand both China and “Foreign Places.”
At the tech giant Google, workers are measured by how much impact they make on the business, whereas at ByteDance according to media reports, workers are graded on factors like “ByteStyle.” According to a WSJ report on the company talking to American tech workers, there was a lot of pressure to simply work non-stop, for the sake of working non-stop. US tech companies measure worker impact, Chinese measure presence of bodies in an office.
Foreign-area Expertise Marginalized: the “Flower Vase” Pattern
Even if foreigners’ unique insight on global partners could drive value, since organizations are measuring input, they see a different global opinion as being a waste of time. A scholarly book on organizational culture I read in China highlighted Huawei and Alibaba as developing a culture of “efficiency” where people don’t waste time discussing opposing viewpoints. If this results in a big failure abroad, for example causing so much public opposition the companies get hit with sanctions or tariffs, they will always blame it on the malice or ignorance of the foreign side.
Instead, what will happen in an organization is that local Chinese staff will assert their expertise about the United States (or UK etc.), even advancing highly untrue stereotypes, and build consensus with other Chinese colleagues. Once, a Chinese professional told me that it would even be “insulting” if a foreigner were to provide information and assistance about how to succeed in their own country.
His belief was, a talented Chinese person can easily and quickly master everything about the United States, and there’s not much to master because it only has “three hundred years of history.” This professional was quite surprised when I pointed out that white Americans didn’t suddenly appear in 1776, but actually had family lines going back thousands of years into Europe.
If we go back to the article about TikTok doubling down on their “Chinese roots,” this is probably what’s actually going through the heads of those executives: that they have fully mastered all things American, thus the strategic opinions of experienced American executives are not worth adopting. I draw this conclusion because the Business Insider reporting never says TikTok executives say they are taking a “Chinese path” in America, rather the reporting describes American views on what “they” Chinese are doing (“locked in” on a Chinese strategy).
In my observations of Chinese-Foreign interaction in China, this is nothing anyone ever says or at least admits to thinking, instead their deeper rationale is always that they believe their combination of superior foreign area knowledge + superior strategic thinking = winning results.
In a Chinese business, your colleagues will develop extremely bizarre opinions about foreign people (here, Americans), often highly stereotypical, and expect you to acknowledge their authority even when making costly mistakes. Once the group makes a decision, if you express a contrary opinion, everyone will insist the Chinese group is correct and you are wrong about the foreign area they’re doing business with, even if you’re literally from that area and everyone else has only read about it on WeChat.
In the view of the Chinese managers doing this, if you go along with what they say, and their opinion, it will elevate their personal status. As a result, if you don’t play along, and cause that manager to lose face, they will find a way to get you fired. If you do play along, it means you have to tell the entire organization that a person who maybe studied in the USA for 2 years in a master’s program is an expert on America, not only that, their level of expertise equals yours.
In Chinese business culture domestically, the “flower vase” is a metaphor for a foreign employee who is put into the organization in order to make the managers look good. Perversely, by hiring only flower vases, these managers also persuade an entire country that American colleagues have zero value, because someone who goes to the USA for a year or two can become a master (this is unscientific and disproven, by the way).
In expat circles, another metaphor for foreigners working with Chinese business has emerged, that of the “white monkey.”
“White Monkey” Jobs & International Expansion
You may have noticed Chinese companies do hire foreign workers in China, and this has led to the famous phenomenon of “white monkey” jobs. That is to say, the sole reason these companies in China are hiring the foreigner is solely to show to other Chinese people that they can have a foreign person there and thus demonstrate their prestige and international status. This is not limited to China, other input-focused East Asian countries like Japan do the exact same thing. This is an extreme manifestation of input-based management for work,
This results in some fairly bizarre contradictions, where ByteDance opened US offices and have people working there on $400,000 salaries. Having read about this phenomenon at other companies, the high price is justified based on arguments that this is a superior talent market, and the higher salaries are justified market-wide. High salaries are often offered for Chinese workers who were at companies in these markets for many years. When I went to China to work at an organization, colleagues emphasized that I had worked in New York. Having been steered away from China, having avoided China, in the eyes of Chinese people, made me a better person.
While this sounds like ethnic self-loathing, it fits in very well with the narrative of wealthy parents who send their children abroad that I mentioned in a previous article. In this narrative, children are sent to the United States to learn in a superior country, thus giving the elites’ children an advantage and prestige over 99% of their peers. After having gained American experience, they return home with know-how about American technology and business acumen. Local Chinese can’t compete with them. Americans can’t compete with them because of their key limitation: as foreigners, they will never be able to understand China. In the view of these parents, the true masters of the universe are their children, people uniquely positioned to understand China and the entire foreign world.
That’s right: elites don’t talk about America on their return, they refer generally to guowai, or all foreign places. So complete is their children’s mastery of the world’s knowledge that they must stand like gods towering above both the unworldly local Chinese and the foreigner alike. When I just talk to people and explore these ideas, they do realize it’s an unrealistic fantasy. But nonetheless through a combination of the psychological dynamics magical thinking and groupthink, people accept these ideas without giving it as second thought.
This groupthink likely motivated the behavior media reported, of Beijing engineers for TikTok accessing US data to stalk journalists, which led to the company’s brief ban. That is, the Chinese executives developed groupthink that excluded the opinion of American collaborators, leading to a ban.
Worth noting that, as an early stage startup, ByteDance like other successful market entrants, did follow best practices for harnessing the power of diverse opinions from many countries, even in Beijing. As it’s matured into a large corporation, typical Chinese corporate culture has taken over. And the typical corporate culture that does not value foreign talent for their area knowledge.
