One of the many purposes of having the residency experiences overseas, beyond just exposing the students to business climates around the world, is the immersion experience.  Leaving behind work and our regular day-to-day lives has the effect of improving focus on the school tasks at hand, but it’s not without a price.  Being +12 hours has made communication with my wife difficult, emails that are sent to me from home tend to get answered about 12 hours from when they are sent, and when I get around to reading my favorite news and entertainment websites, the content has already become stale.

When I’m at a residency, I almost never read the local newspaper, nor do I watch television.  Our schedules are generally so tight that there really isn’t time.  However, I couldn’t help but notice the headline on the newspaper this morning:  National Mourning Day.

It’s hard for me to believe that it has already been a week since the earthquake that hit the Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai Province happened.  Last Wednesday, I was in Yangshuo in the Chinese countryside, and the only way I found out about this tragedy was word-of-mouth through several classmates.  Because I haven’t been paying attention to the outside world, this event had slipped my mind, but digging into the article made me realize the true magnitude of this ongoing tragedy.  The death toll as of this morning is 2,064, and “there appears little hope of finding more survivors in the icy conditions.”

As I sat in class today, there was nothing that overtly suggested that today was any different than yesterday, nor did I notice a dramatic change outside the hotel on the way to dinner.  Even though all live entertainment, sporting events, and movies have been canceled for the day, given that it’s raining outside I wouldn’t expect to see the same hustle and bustle.  However, when I turned the television on at the suggestion of a classmate, I finally found the validation I was looking for:

"Dear Subscribers, To mourn the Qinghai Yushu earthquake victims, the State Council of the People's Republic of China has announced that April 21st 2010 will be National Mourning Day. To express our deep condolences, the relevant agencies are to suspend relay of overseas channels with limited landing rights that contain entertainment programs over the announced period. Hereby we express our gratitude for your understanding and cooperation. April 21st, 2010"

Seeing a message like this on the television highlights how different the Chinese culture is in relation to the United States.  We pay lip service to our tragedies in the U.S., and with 9/11 there were some tributes, but I can never remember a time when television networks just stopped showing entertainment for a day in remembrance of a tragedy.

Borrowing from the House frameworks in our CCL class, the high level of in-group collectivism in China explains the motivation behind message, and of course, given that this is a government mandate there is 100% compliance.  In the U.S., you’d never see something as dramatic as this, essentially forcing people to turn off the television; we’re just too fragmented of a society right now, preferring to bicker about political nonsense and splitting ourselves into various aggrieved sub-populations to made keeping score easier.  A message like the one above though is quite clear:  In China, its citizens are Chinese, no hyphenated sub-groups.

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