How the Chinese Ideal of Virtue Transmits to an Ethereal View of Business

My OrchidOn a delightful fall day a few years ago, while with my family on a Sunday jaunt in the rural Songjiang area of Shanghai, we pulled over to look at a roadside stall selling beautiful flowers in narrow pots, hanging from a rack. I was intrigued by the elaborate rig for these simple-looking, grassy plants, and was even more captivated by the smell of their little green flowers. I was hooked. I bought two pots and brought them home, and it was the start of my two-year, love-hate relationship with Chinese orchids.

Doing some preliminary research, I found that the cymbidium (our Latin name for the Chinese orchid) was one of the “Four Sacred Flowers” of Chinese tradition. One of the original features of the “Crystal Palace” of the first World Expo in 1851, it was notoriously hard to grow in hothouses in Victorian England, but its flowers are regarded as one of the most rewarding of the orchid species. Its delightful fragrance fills a room for weeks at a time.

And then, by chance, I stumbled upon an even more interesting fact. After seeing the orchids in my office, a painter friend immediately commented that I was “becoming a Chinese scholar”. “There is no flower that represents the scholar and his life better than the orchid”, he said with a wistful smile on his ancient face. “Why?” I asked innocently. “For that, you must look to Confucius!” he replied, in a mysterious way, and then changed the subject. This peaked my interest, and I started looking into it more.

The Virtue of the Orchid

Confucius said, “The orchid grows where others cannot (in the mountains), endures the hardships of hunger and thirst, and is only loosely tied to the things that support it. And, even with all the difficulty of its life, the orchid graces the world with beautiful color and rare fragrance. This is like the life of a true gentleman, who sets himself to learn self-discipline, and whose character shines no matter where he is or what difficulties he experiences.” (My translation, from The Analects, Chapter 16)

Confucius loved mountain orchids because they were able to live high in the trees, far above the earth that feeds most plants, and yet they took nothing from the trees either, other than a little support and protection. He thought that this was the perfect analogy for one who sets out on the path of self-improvement.

“When Life Gives You Lemons…”

Regardless of the fact that this analogy comes from over two thousand years ago, it really helps me in contemporary China to understand more about the Chinese mentality. I am often struck by how the people at advertising agencies, media companies, or television stations will assume that because I am “both a gentleman and scholar”, they can give me less for my work. They think that “good people” are those who have fewer needs and do not seek to fight, making them not only ideal work-partners, but also cheap! If you prove otherwise by fighting for what is rightfully yours, they will go out of their way to tell others that you are not a “sincere student”, and that you “forget your teachers”.

Life has never been easy for the scholar in Chinese history. There was never a class more abused or deprived, except the peasant. Look, for example, at what the first emperor Qin Shi did to the scholars of the “One Hundred Schools” during his reign. Yet, despite all this, the scholars formed the basis of Chinese culture, and eventually formed it into the cultural inheritance that we have today. Why? Because the Chinese have perfected the art of a “silver lining”. With no one to complain to, and no one to help out in the event of an emergency, the Chinese learned to get by on little, look for niches to support themselves, and “live on air” – accumulating little amounts to sustain themselves as opposed to living in abundance. This is very much like the example of the orchid.

Being a Giver, Not a Taker…

Confucius clearly saw that epiphytes are not parasites. The orchid is a plant that everyone loves to have around, because it gives so much to those who keep it! This directly translates into Chinese society today. Educators make very little, and yet I have never met a class of academics in the West so ready to share their knowledge. My wife’s grandfather had a patent for tea-phenol extraction stolen by one of his students, and upon being asked if he were angry, he simply replied, “Teachers teach, and students learn. I should have thought about that before I told little Wang my discovery.”

It may be because of this high standard of personal virtue on the part of the Chinese scholar that intellectual property rights have never been adequately defended. If the scholar gets angry that his poem or book is stolen, the thief wags his head and chides, “Oh, oh, oh… weren’t you studying to improve yourself? Look at you now, all mad about someone taking your ideas!”

This is why “nice guys” rarely do well in China – “good people” are automatically presumed to be scholars, and scholars are expected to “live on air”. Businesspeople, on the other hand, are respected for being mean and aggressive, and while they do well, they will never be known as a “good person”. This expectation permeates even the highest echelons of business and government here in China. Being a virtuous person translates into a depreciation of personal worth, low expectations, and gratefulness for the simple pleasures of life.

Learning to Be Like the Orchid

The orchid-like virtues of the Chinese:

• High Toleration for Difficulty
• Patience in the Face of Adversity
• A Goal Bigger than Self – Spreading the Fragrance of Culture
• Taking a “Long Term” Approach – orchids take 7 years to bloom from seed

Unlike in the West, Chinese orchids are not hothouse flowers. They are expected to endure the coldest months of the year, all the while being deprived of water. Chinese orchids are tough!

Westerners in China have to learn the art of “being an orchid”, or else they will have a hard time surviving. We are not “delicate tropicals” that need to be protected from the ups and downs of life in Asia. Everyone else gets by with much less than in the West, so why should we be any different?

Now, whenever the television station refuses to pay me for services rendered, or the ad company turns out to be lying to me, I just think of Confucius’ orchid. Doing what they want will not kill me, and I could commit cultural suicide by trying to fight with them. I can live on less, and learn more, and in doing so, I will live to bloom another day.