Before I left Shanghai for Singapore a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a copy of  Think Like Chinese by Zhang Haihua and Geoff Baker.  The look of the volume was attractive (I know, I know… don’t judge a book by its cover!), and the idea of trying to get inside “the Chinese mind” appeals to me, so I picked it up.  I started reading it on the way home, and just finished it this week.

Overall, I have to say it is good, but it does tend to repeat itself more than seems necessary.  I think that if I were new to China and Chinese culture, this would not bother me so much.  But it seemed the repeated bits were things I’ve known for a long time, and so it got a little slow at times for me.  That said, if I were relatively new to China, I think that seeing the same ideas presented more than once in different contexts might be helpful, so I can’t really hold that against the book.  The only thing, then, that I have to complain about is the fact that there were several typing errors, which is always an irritation.  That’s a pity, because otherwise this book is really pretty good — and I say that despite the fact that my interests in China are not really geared toward setting up a business, which is the very clear focus of the book.

Anyway, I suppose I am not really looking for a reason to complain.  So, I guess I can move on to the good stuff.

Of particular interest to me was a discussion in the very early parts of the book on the importance of the Chinese language in shaping Chinese thought.  I’ve known for a long time that language is a fundamental shaper of Chinese thinking, but what I had never heard that Zhang and Baker bring to the forefront in this book is that in order to learn the Chinese language, one must use a form of “symbolic thinking” that uses both hemispheres of the brain almost simultaneously.  When using English (and most other Western languages), the left brain is primarily used.  For Chinese, both right and left brain are put into action together, with the right brain triggering a fraction of a second before the left.  This is apparently due to both the pictograph nature of the written language and to the tonal system of the spoken language.  It is pretty amazing reading, looking into how this shapes the way the Chinese mind works.  I have to say a big thanks to Zhang and Baker here, because they’ve given me leads for some other reading material I intend to pursue in connection with this idea.

Some other good points raised in the book include the reminders of just how vast a thing “Chinese culture” is.  Zhang and Baker compare it to Europe, with its widely differing cultures from country to country.  Though China’s provinces all lie within one national boundary, the cultural differences are still there, and that needs to be understood by anyone who wants to work in China.  And, even more importantly, this applies all the more to overseas Chinese, most of whom were brought up in a Chinese culture that can be seen as “of the past” in Mainland China, as most overseas Chinese were brought up without the influence of communism.  There is no getting around how big a difference that makes — often meaning that the cultural differences between Mainland Chinese and overseas Chinese is as great as between Mainland Chinese and those of completely different ethnic groups.  I think Think Like Chinese does a pretty good job of emphasizing this point, and it is one that is helpful to keep in mind.

Overall, I find Zhang and Baker’s Think Like Chinese to be a pretty insightful book for people wanting to do business in China, especially for those relatively new to China (more than a year or so, less than 10 years), or those who have limited direct contact with people born and raised in Mainland China.  It is an easy read, and probably worth picking up and giving some attention to before starting a big venture in the Chinese market.