Saturday's Core Brief: How Cultural Dimensions Interact to Create Political Systems - Week 2
The 8 political drivers
Cultural Perspective is reader-supported. Free subscribers get daily briefings. Paid subscribers get access to core briefs, like this one, and monthly Q&As. Consider upgrading if you want the whole picture and to support my work.
The Hague, 2016. A panel of international judges rules that China’s claims in the South China Sea have no legal basis. In Washington, champagne corks. Vindication of the rules-based international order. The system works.
In Beijing, a press conference. The ruling is “null and void.” Construction on the artificial islands continues.
A lot of people couldn’t understand what they were seeing. China signed the treaty. China helped create the tribunal. How do you just... ignore it?
The answer is that they weren’t ignoring anything. They were operating from a completely different cultural perspective.
In Asia, the most dangerous phrase in cross-cultural analysis is “but they agreed.” Agreement means different things to different cultural systems.
Americans are universalists. A treaty is a treaty. The rules apply equally to everyone, which is the whole point of having rules. You sign, you comply. This isn’t complicated.
Chinese diplomacy runs on particularism. Agreements are frameworks for relationships, not straitjackets. You interpret them according to circumstances, according to who’s involved, according to what serves the relationship now. To Beijing, the tribunal was a Western legal institution applying Western legal logic to a matter China considers bilateral. Sovereign judgment, exercised within a relationship they define on their own terms.
Washington saw betrayal. Beijing saw flexibility. Neither saw the other clearly.
But that’s only the first layer.
