East and West Culture

In 2018, I worked for Apple as an automation manufacturing engineer. It was our team’s responsibility to go into the factories in China and prepare the lines for production. We would take manually run stations in which a worker would be operating a substation and combine them into automatic robotic stations instead. At one point during my internship, I was charged with leading a test in China at our factory in Shenzhen. I was the only one of my team there at the time and was responsible for seeing the whole test through from start to finish.

Immediately I noticed some differences between how tasks are complete and how business is run in the East and the West. What struck me first was the sense of honor and duty the Chinese workers had. In the West, workers might not be so willing to blindly follow orders, but in the East, living with an authoritarian government had led to an omnipresent state of subservience. It was very easy to command the Chinese team to run the test precisely how I wanted it to be run, and changes to plan were made with alacrity. If I had run the test in the West, which I tried to do a few months later, things would have progressed much more slowly. It would have been nearly impossible to get twenty people all on the same page and working on a common goal in such a short time.