Chinese collectivism and Western individualism at the time of the coronavirus outbreak
I analyse how the Chinese people have confronted the coronavirus emergency admirably, thanks to their collectivism. Despite some initial criticism imputed to how the institutions underestimated the threat, the residents of the affected areas followed the guidelines and reacted by segregating from each other in a state of quarantine almost complete. Denoting stoic patience, they remained at home for a month, isolated, yet feeling at the same time united in the fight against this threat. Will the Westerners be able to react in the same united way?
The study of the evolution of cooperative behaviour is one of a dozen research topics, indicated by magazines such as Science and Nature, amongst the most relevant in science. It is in fact still not completely clear how it happened that different species such as viruses, plants or mammals evolved preferring a gregarious life rather than a solitary one. With time, a series of social behaviours developed so that the group is favoured over the single individuals.
The Chinese collectivist model provides us with a radical example of this social organization. It is worth analysing such system in view of the current epidemic which has highlighted some of the positive sides of such an organized society. Often more concerned about the fairness of the Chinese government system, the Americans, the Europeans or even some Asians project to that country and the behaviour of its citizens the result of seventy years of communist government.
Research carried out in sociology, economic behaviour and anthropology, on the other hand, shows how the last seventy years have transformed only to a limited extent traditional ideologies, whose remnants are still to be found today present in the inhabitants of modern neighbourhoods of, for example, Shanghai and Shenzhen. The hegemony that the communist party now, and the empires previously, have tried to maintain in that sizeable land is noteworthy, given the high population density.
It is believed that it was above all the practice of rice cultivation, which is very intense and requires work-group labour, which led them into a communist organisation of the work and public affairs. It is in fact from the division of the land to be cultivated by farmers associated in groups that the idea of the communes was born. Communes were land lots cultivated by several farmers at a time, taking alternate shifts.
With the appearance of an epidemic become particularly threatening also because of the fast information flow and the social networks, we westerners have indeed noticed and acknowledged how ingeniously the Chinese have tackled this emergency resorting to their own technology made of apps, telemedicine, drones, not to forget the construction of purposed hospitals and the exploitation of internet for remote working and on-line study.
Much has been written about how the central government has implemented highly restrictive measures, which is quite normal in an autocratic state of that type. However, it is not correct to focus only on this element. For over fifteen years, from the experience they underwent with the SARS, Chinese airports have been equipped with full-body scanners to instantaneously check the body temperature of the passengers. This is just a demonstration of how many resources they invested, back then, to avoid a pandemic in a nation practically as large as a continent. In this novel coronavirus situation, the individual provinces have implemented restrictive measures with a certain degree of autonomy from Beijing. The representatives of the communist party, in this case, far from the capital, have had the opportunity to get noticed for the implementation of innovative means to deal with the emergency. For example, a novel monitoring practice was implemented in the province where I work as a researcher, Yunnan, located rather distant to the onset of the infection, in Hubei. At the entrance and exit of public places, everyone has been required to scan QR codes with their smartphones, thus leaving behind an Ariadne’s thread, useful for detecting afterwards the possible infections carried out by a person who turns out to be virus-positive.
What the western media have not paid enough attention to, over a month after the virus appeared, is the reaction that the Chinese people displayed to front this threat. As a researcher in exactly this field of studies of human cooperation behaviour, I was amazed at the confirmation of how their collectivist behaviour emerged strong. Above all, the citizens of the epidemic outbreak, Wuhan, confined themselves at home for over three weeks, emotionally supported by the whole nation which, united, surrounded them as close as possible in this idle fight. The many controversies brought about on how the virus was initially underestimated by the institutions — controversies officially censored by newspapers and TV reports, but apparent in their social networks — were modest compared to the staggering stoicism that they demonstrated by remaining at home for such an extended time. The moving videos circulating on their channels filmed the citizens of Wuhan encouraging each other from their balconies and windows, shouting in unison: Wuhan jiayou! — Come on Wuhan! This has become a hymn of common resistance, later enlarged as “Come on China”, against an enemy still little known, that speaks volumes about how strongly their collectivism emerged to instill into each other sustenance.
In my recent experiments on cooperation behaviour aimed at assessing whether the Chinese are capable of allocating a certain amount of private funds to combat climate change, I found out that the subjects whose sense of collectivism is most marked are the ones who manage to coordinate with each other in group, specifically, to buy new trees in order to mitigate the consequences of the greenhouse gasses. It is possible to obtain these scientific results by crossing game theory techniques, which derive from that part of microeconomics that studies human behavioural strategies, with the answers obtained from psychological questionnaires to evaluate whether the subjects are more individualistic as in the western world or, rather, more collectivist. In general, such collectivism can be defined as the propensity of individuals to identify themselves as part of a group prior than as single entities. A collectivist society is one as such able to sacrifice the needs of its individuals in order to prioritise the needs of the group. Often the group is intended as a family unit or a circle of close friends, but in these emergency situations it extends to the urban or national community. When the westerner is fighting to ensure that his freedoms of thought, speech and action are respected by the community in which he lives, the oriental man is concerned at maintaining his social relationships, even at the expenses of his personal rights. The high density of individuals living in a finite space therefore leads to the establishment of a culture that favours the good of the group, made up of individuals who must relate with each other leading to a state of harmony.
It remains to be seen how the Europeans will be able to fight this threat. Regardless of the politics, which will hardly be able to show in its best light, with our democracies going through a crisis of values, it will be interesting to evaluate how subjects with an individualistic profile will be able to endure life in quarantine. If, as we hope, the infection will be limited only to some circumscribed areas of the continent, the question to ask is whether the isolated people will grow a feeling of deep loneliness, as they lament those who had to pay the consequences of recent natural events such as earthquakes in Italy, or extreme climate events.
The iron curtain that separates the western and eastern worlds may not allow the Europeans to learn from the Chinese, because the media do not sufficiently emphasize the positive sides of that culture. In such a particular situation, however, it is evident how the Chinese benefited from a culture allowing them to cope with large figures’ social dynamics, to try and keep the mood up with a feeling of unity. It is a pity because the spreading virus could have been just another context for reminding Homo sapiens that this is a single planet, inhabited by an interconnected life system. Having witnessed the speed of evolutionary changes, albeit artificial, originating from our short-sighted economic objectives (which led to the appearance of diseases due to incorrect breeding practices, to the illegitimate use of wild animal resources and, ultimately, to climate change), we will have the opportunity to continue to thrive, or, rather, we will succumb, depending on the performance shown by the weakest link of the chain which connects all the life species. If only we, in the western world, could feel united in this difficult situation and learn from this collectivist society…
