The most vivid description I have ever heard of the Chinese “external locus of control” came from a student of mine my first year in China. It was spring of 1992, and she was talking about her older sister in Harbin, down the line from Qiqihar, where I was teaching English. Whenever she talked about her sister, it was always about how different they were from each other. When she described her sister, she used a Chinese expression I hadn’t heard before. She said her sister’s "edge had been worn down" (棱角被磨平). I didn’t understand and asked her to explain. She said that when people are young they have an edge, like a cube of wood. Over time, society wears down the edge into a flat surface. It was only a matter of time, she said, until everyone’s edge gets worn down. She was wondering when hers and mine would get worn down.

My 23-year-old response was a mixture of shock and pity. The response of my current self, with many more years of experience and professional training under my belt, is a nod of recognition.If we dig deeper into what’s going on in the responses by both the Americans and the Chinese to the Surprise Arrest, Tax Hike, and Draft scenarios, what starts to emerge are two starkly differing models of the relationship between human beings and the world around us.

For the Americans, there is a deep-seated expectation that our desires do and should shape the world at large. When there is something in the world that is out of alignment with our desires, we expect that, all things being equal, we should be able to change the world, as opposed to being shaped by the world. This belief shines through in the Americans’ responses to all three scenarios:

Surprise Arrest: The situation created by the police officer is in direct and extreme conflict with the desires of the arrestee. It is incumbent upon the arrestee to take action in order to bring the world into alignment with his desires: sue the officer and bring some justice.

Tax Hike: The situation created by the government is in direct and extreme conflict with the desires of the citizenry. It is incumbent upon the citizens to take action in order to bring the world into alignment with their desires: demonstrate, refuse to pay, rebel.

Draft: Chris’s desire not to fight, born of his pacifist religious beliefs, threatens to be overwhelmed by the hard fact of the draft. Even the hardness of this fact, though, might not stop Chris from avoiding fighting. At the very least, it is reasonable to expect that Chris won’t be a great soldier, because if he doesn’t want to do something 100%, he won’t do it well: lack of desire leads to lack of worldly effect.

On the Chinese side, this expectation is by no means missing; it’s just much more muted. We saw in the Chinese responses to Surprise Arrest that, at least under this one set of circumstances, there is a strong expectation that humans can change the world around them, here by suing the police officer and demanding some form of “justice.” Still, as we’ve seen, this expectation is due to the particulars of the situation, not due to any overarching belief that humans can shape their worlds. From the Chinese side, the scenarios could be summarized as:

Surprise Arrest: The situation created by the police officer is in direct and extreme conflict with the desires of the arrestee, and also poses a major inconvenience to the arrestee. It is incumbent upon the arrestee to take action in order to protect himself and his reputation.

Tax Hike: The situation created by the government is probably in conflict with the desires and material well-being of greater society, but there really isn’t anything to be done about it: the government is too big and vague to fight, the harm isn’t immediate or apparent, and it isn’t even clear who the victims are.

Draft: It’s a time of war. The nation must be protected. It doesn’t matter what a person’s own beliefs or desires might be. Everyone must do his duty to the country.

I will never know what it is like to be Chinese, to be like my student back in Qiqihar, or like her sister, waiting for my "edge" to be "worn down." I only know “reality” from my particular, highly American perspective. Still, I can’t help but think that the differences I have described in this and other posts on locus of control reflect a fundamental difference in the moment-to-moment reality of Chinese and American people. It’s actually not much of a stretch to posit this. We know from psychology that people are, in real time, perceiving and responding to and interacting with their environments, and strategizing how to do so most effectively in order to achieve their goals. The world must feel inherently different if it is something rule-governed that is there for my shaping, as opposed to being more or less chaotic, whose caprice I am eternally at the mercy of.