The Chinese Secrets for Success

Five Inspiring Confucian Values

YuKong Zhao

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781614485353
• eBook ISBN: 9781614485360
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Go beyond the tiger mom philosophy with "a more balanced—and more useful—elaboration of how to apply each [Confucian] value" ( Kirkus Reviews).
 
Today, many American families are facing the economic fallout of global competition, a decline in education quality, the potential reduction of Social Security and Medicare benefits, and high oil prices. The answer to these problems can be found in five inspiring Confucian values regarding career aspiration, education, money management, family, and friendship—the untold secrets behind the rise of China and the success of Asian Americans, whom the Pew Research Center calls the highest-income and best-educated racial group in the US.
 
Based on his bicultural living experience and deep understanding of Confucianism, YuKong Zhao connects ancient Chinese wisdom to today's real-life challenges and shares an "inside view" of how Chinese Americans apply these values to their lives and make themselves successful in their careers and as parents. Using an insightful cross-cultural perspective, he advocates a balanced approach that combines the strengths of Confucian values and American culture. He challenges many prevailing pop-culture values and offers sensible solutions that are refreshing, distinctive, and effective.
 
"Will we be able to learn from other countries? Can we take the best practices and apply them to our own culture? I believe we have no choice in the matter if we are to be among the global leaders in the future.  The Chinese Secrets for Success is a good start to at least getting us thinking in a productive way." —Executive Leader Coach (execleadercoach.com)

PART I.

Why Does America
Need Confucian Values?

Chapter 1

CHALLENGING TIMES ARE AHEAD

AT THE END OF the 20^th century, the U.S. economy was booming and enjoyed one of the longest periods of economic expansion since World War II. American household incomes had increased. The Dow Jones and NASDAQ Indexes were rising. Real estate was appreciating. American productivity was up. It was a prosperous time. Americans were enjoying good lives: they moved to larger houses, bought larger automobiles, and spent more and more.

After entering the 21^st century, however, the United States encountered a number of unprecedented economic and security setbacks: the boom and bust of the Internet and telecommunications industries, the Enron and WorldCom scandals, the September 11 terrorist attacks, and two costly wars, one in Afghanistan beginning in 2001 and the other in Iraq beginning in 2003. The combination of both wars has cost thousands of American lives and, as of February 2011, more than $1.369 trillion dollars in direct costs (not including indirect costs such as spending on veterans).¹

Following that was a jump in oil prices, to a new high of $145 per barrel in July 2008.² At the end of 2008, the sub-prime mortgage bubble burst, and the US began its largest economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

From December 2007 to December 2009, the US lost 8.7 million jobs.³ The unemployment rate reached a high of 10.2% in October 2009,⁴ the highest point since the Great Depression. From 2008 to 2010, over 8 million homes received a foreclosure notice.⁵ By 2011, 46.2 million Americans (about 15% of the U.S. population) were considered to be living in poverty.⁶ In order to fight the economic recession, the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations launched bank bailouts, economic recovery programs, and other massive spending endeavors that drove the U.S. national debt to a new high of $16 trillion in 2012.⁷ The US entered an economically difficult time.

Starting in 2011, the U.S. economy finally began to show signs of recovery. The unemployment rate dropped to 7.8% in September 2012.⁸ Although virtually no one disagrees that the economy will recover down the road, many Americans started to ask: Does a U.S. recovery mean a return to the good old days? Can many Americans continue their way of spending beyond their means, living in larger and larger homes, and driving larger and larger automobiles?

Drawing on my twenty-plus years of experience in corporate strategic planning, I gathered the key facts that stand to impact the future of the US, and based on this conducted a strategic analysis. The results suggest a very challenging scenario: Although the US is still the number one economic and technological power in the world, many nations are rapidly catching up. Faced with a host of domestic and global challenges, many Americans may no longer be able to sustain the lifestyle they enjoyed in the last decade. In order to maintain a good quality of life, it is necessary that the American people and their leaders find ways to cope with economic and political challenges domestically and internationally. The situation calls for a bold change in policy by the government as well as a dramatic change in behavior by many American people. Let me tell you why…

1.1 INCREASING GLOBAL COMPETITION IS TAKING AWAY MANY MIDDLE CLASS JOBS FROM THE US

While international trade has existed for thousands of years, it was not until the second half of the 20^th century that the globalization process sped up dramatically. After World War II, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was set up in 1948 to promote international trade. In 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was established to replace GATT. With the efforts of GATT and now WTO, international trade barriers have been significantly reduced. The U.S. government has also signed a number of free trade agreements with various countries, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico in 1993. One direct impact of these trade agreements is that manufacturing jobs have moved from industrial nations such as the US to newly industrialized countries such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s, and then to developing countries such as China and Mexico after the 1990s.

After U.S. manufacturing employment reached its peak of 19.55 million jobs in 1979, over the last three decades, the manufacturing sector has lost more than 40% of its workforce, almost 8 millions jobs. Unfortunately, the trend has been exacerbated by national and international developments since 2000. The US has lost 6 million jobs, 75% of the total, in just the last 10 years.⁹

While gains in productivity have partially contributed to the reduction of manufacturing jobs in the US, global competition is another major factor. It manifests in the loss of many manufacturing industries in the US. At first, the US lost the labor-intensive industries such as the apparel and textile industries, followed by a majority of its electronics industries, steel and fabrication industries, the furniture industry, and other industries. In recent years, many high-tech products such as computers and printers have been manufactured in China and other countries. What is the impact of such manufacturing job loss in the US? More and more Americans are forced to switch to low paid service jobs.

Unfortunately, with globalization this trend is going to continue. A good example is the auto industry. In the recent restructuring of GM, the union finally agreed to allow 40% of new plants to operate with wages set at $14/hour, which is equal to a salary of $35,000 per year, about $10,000 less than the U.S. median household income. Even after the manufacturing wage has been driven down so low, it still is not competitive globally. As a comparison, in GM's subsidiary in Mexico, workers earn only $7/hour.¹⁰ As a result, many multinational companies cannot resist the allure of global sourcing: More and more jobs are being relocated to low-cost countries such as Mexico and Vietnam. In the meantime, countries like Japan, Korea, and China are nurturing their manufacturers, competing with American workers directly by exporting more goods into the US.

By early 2012, there were signs that some American companies had started to move manufacturing jobs back to the US. This trend, however, is still small, limited to a few bright spots in which the US has resources or other advantages. Considering the higher wages and higher corporate tax rates (as compared to emerging countries) as well as political uncertainty in the US, there is no compelling reason to believe that this small trend will grow into a big wave any time soon. In an NPR interview on March 13, 2012 Howard Hauser, vice president of Hiawatha Rubber Company, which moved some manufacturing jobs back to the US recently, said the future of U.S. manufacturing does not lay in bringing jobs back, but in improving productivity through increased automation, which will eventually reduce the manufacturing labor force.¹¹

If we have seen a gloomy picture regarding the loss of the manufacturing jobs in the US, the ongoing loss of American service jobs is downright scary. The advancement of telecommunication and information technology, in particular the Internet, has created a borderless service platform. Service personnel in faraway countries now can provide a host of services to American customers: call centers, computer troubleshooting services, and many others. These kinds of jobs have been rapidly shifted to India, the Philippines, and other countries. Alan Blinder, a distinguished economist and Princeton professor, estimates that 28 million to 42 million American service jobs eventually will be “susceptible” to be outsourced to other countries.¹² If that is the case, the number of American service jobs being impacted will be far greater than the number of manufacturing jobs the US has lost in the last three decades.

1.2 DECLINING AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL COMPETITIVENESS IS ERODING MANY HIGH-PAID U.S. JOBS

If the loss of manufacturing and service jobs ultimately means the depletion of the American middle class whose members depend on such jobs to feed their families, another more dangerous trend is emerging: the gradual erosion of U.S. high-tech industries. After World War II, Europe and Japan rapidly developed their high-tech industries and have since become key players in this arena. In recent decades, China, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and other Asian countries “are quickly ascending as science and technology leaders, and our position will continue to decline without significant efforts to maintain and strengthen the U.S. innovation system, with major implic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Why does America Need Confucian Values?
• Part II: The Five Inspiring Confucian Values
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index