China has dealt with COVID-19 incredibly better than the USA. It has suffered 3 deaths per million while the US has suffered 424 deaths per million at the latest count, so the PRC has less than 1% of America’s death toll. Why is this, when the US had so much more warning?
My company measures the values of managers world-wide. The whole of East Asia, influenced over the years by Chinese civilization, is less individualist than it is community oriented. China grasps that the community is what preserves the rights of the individual, who must defer to that community if and when it becomes infected, so that parents and grandparents could die. Confucianism teaches fidelity to parents. In contrast Americans feel their liberties are infringed by lock-downs, by face masks, by interfering governments.
Charles Hampden-Turner is a British management philosopher, and Senior Research Associate at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge since 1990. He is the co-founder and Director of Research and Development at the Trompenaars-Hampden-Turner Group, in Amsterdam.