Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community (PDF) - CIA

COMBATING ETHNOCENTRISM
At the height of the Cultural Revolution, any dissent was sufficient to bring
accusations of counterrevolutionary sympathies and to qualify one for “reeducation,”
which could mean public denunciation, job loss, incarceration,
forced labor, relocation, and even murder, torture, and rape. The traditional
values of respect and honor were replaced with violence and terror, and the
historical social unit of the family had been disrupted and replaced with the
cult of Mao.
For those who had lived through the Cultural Revolution, the student challenge
to the government in Tiananmen in 1989 was also a challenge to social
order and stability. The people we interviewed remembered, correctly or not,
that the faction of the Communist Party then in power and the PLA had
stopped the Red Guard and the Cultural Revolution, arrested its highest ranking
proponents and beneficiaries, the Gang of Four, and eventually restored
order to the nation. The point of view of the people we interviewed was that
the PLA, despite the low social status of soldiers, had stopped the chaos.
Although they did not approve of killing students, the threat of another cultural
revolution, democratic or otherwise, was more disturbing to them than
the bloody climax in the square. Social order was the higher virtue.
Tiananmen Square: Discussion
We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances
as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to
organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our
speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.
Benjamin Whorf 5
In 1987, a Chinese academic, Min Qi, performed the first national survey of
Chinese political culture. 6 Respondents were asked, among other things, to
select statements that best described their understanding of democracy. Of the
1,373 respondents, 6.6 percent responded that democracy meant that people
could elect their political leaders and 3.4 percent that power was limited and
divided. These replies tended to be from individuals under 25 years of age, in
college, and living in urban centers.
5
Benjamin Whorf, along with fellow anthropologist Edward Sapir, developed the linguistic relativity
hypothesis, asserting that different speech communities had different patterns of thought.
Although challenged by linguist/philosopher Noam Chomsky and others with the Universal
Grammar hypothesis, linguistic relativity still has a significant amount of empirical research support.
Benjamin Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality.
6
Min Qi, Zhongguo Zhengzhi Wenhua [Chinese Political Culture]. Translation courtesy of a
friend of the author who prefers to remain anonymous.
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