New York Times columnist David Brooks is sending in dispatches from China, and in one piece last week he wrote about what he had learned on his trip:
This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.
These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.
His column was promptly torn apart by journalists and bloggers. The reactions to his piece, from James Fallows, John Pomfret and others, have been collected online at cnreviews.com:
Of course, its easy to criticize and hard to come up with simple, written expressions of complex, underlying reality that help people have a more informed opinion. I don’t claim to have an answer. But then again, I’m not a NYT columnist like Brooks who has significant influence over American popular opinion. Many Americans already see China in a mirror dimly, and other Americans do not see through the one-way mirror at all. Instead of helping people see, Brooks is filling the field of vision with a misleading image of “collectivism” that just isn’t true…potentially for ideologically-motivated aims.
Read also translated comments on the column from Chinese cyberspace, via ESWN.
