Face rehashed.

I’m still not fully over my bout of unwellness, and it’s affecting my ability to think, including topics to write about on my blog. Thus I thought I’d rehash an old old entry from when I’d just started writing on my old blog. I don’t think there were many people reading back then (not sure many are reading now of course, but that’s another story), so I’ll probably get away with this.

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One thing that’s pretty alien to westerners is the Chinese concept of ‘Face’. Well, okay, that was badly worded. I mean the concept’s not hard to get, it’s what causes people here to lose face that’s difficult.

Face is like ‘status’ or ‘standing’, maybe it could be described as ‘pride’ even. Basically in the west if you are embarrassed or made to look foolish in some way, you could say you’ve ‘lost face’.

In China the concept is the same, but what causes Chinese to ‘lose face’ is, to westerners, completely strange.

For example. I’ve done some corporate training here. If I ask a question to the class in general, especially if the class is a new one, no one will answer, because they’re afraid of getting it wrong, which will ‘lose them face’.

I’ve encountered a load of these situations, and very few I would have expected before hand.

One thing to be careful of!

If you make a person lose serious face in China, they will do just about anything to get back at you. It’s incredibly vindictive. It doesn’t matter if they squander money, or make themselves look a total idiot, they will try and recover their ‘lost face’ in any way. It’s frightening.

Thus you can imagine how China felt collectively when, back a hundred or so years, they were basically invaded by various western countries, almost at will. I went to the military museum here not long ago, and found the below plaque, which I think sums it up beautifully. I’ve never seen such a round about way of saying ‘we surrendered’! )

No post here Thursday, something on my Blog of Lies instead. See you for Friday’s lethargicness.

Tags: face, living in China