comparative value priorities of chinese and new zealand

the regional context of Guangdong Province due to its mix of traditional and modern
Chinese business tendencies.
Huang (2008) points out that “…many Western economists think China has discovered
its own road to prosperity, dependent largely on state financing and control. They are
quite wrong.” In fact, Huang’s research covering the 1980s and 1990s indicates that
improved property rights and private entrepreneurship provided the dominant stimulus
for high growth and lower levels of poverty in China since 1979. What actually
happened is that early local experiments with financial liberalization and private
ownership, in the 1980s, generated an initial burst of rural entrepreneurialism. Those
earlier gains, not the massive state-led infrastructure investments and urbanization drive
of the 1990s, laid the true foundation for the Chinese miracle. In fact, the city-oriented
programmes in the 1990s led to stagnation in new business development by Chinese,
revived by the increasing Government acceptance and promotion of entrepreneurial
activity.
GOVERNMENT SPONSORED CULTURAL CHANGE
In spite of the fact that Government-sponsored cultural change in China was a failure in
the business community in the 50s and 60s, it can be a feasible programme, as when it
changed back to customary Chinese values. Perhaps government-sponsored change
works better in socialist-tradition societies such as China and New Zealand, and with
difficulty in fully democratic societies. However, in the USA, as an example, female
gender roles have been changed, albeit slowly, since the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the
1972 Education Amendment. Both guaranteed ethnic minorities and women more
nearly equal rights to men in work and education. In another culture, the Japanese Equal
Employment Opportunity Law of 1985 has had little if any effect. Discussions of the
feasibility of government policy changing citizens’ behaviour can be reviewed in
Australian Public Service Commission (2007) and Askew, Cotterill and Greasley
(2009). For change to occur, citizens must recognise a need for a change. How far into
the awareness of the general population of New Zealand knowledge of such studies as
INTOUCH (2008) and the Nielsen survey commissioned by New Zealand Trade and
Enterprise have penetrated is unknown.
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