FACES beijing: Ronnie Chen

During the FACES Beijing conference this November, Ronnie Chan, a successful business man (in terms of money), gave a speech on "Americanism vs. Chineseness: Differences and Similarities and How They Affect US-China Relations Today". His speech covers a huge range of topics, such as how Chinese and English language affect people's thinking pattern, medicine, and literature. He talks about why an ABC girl fails in business bidding in China because of her aggressiveness and assertiveness, which are very common in people doing business in US. He talks about why the leadership in China is described as "benevolent dictatorship". He also talks about the corruption in China. In a word, in his speech, I was totally astonished at his amount of knowledge and experience.

The confrontation arises when American delegates question about his classification of Japanese people as amoral people in the Q&A section. In his speech, Ronnie Chen classifies Chinese and American as moral people, and Japanese people as amoral. The base for his argument is that the Japanese deny their outrageous crime in World War 2. Chen questions that what you are going to with a person who just killed 40 people yesterday and ask who they are today. At that moment, I liked his statement very much. But I changed my mind abruptly soon when some delegates argue later that every nation did silly things in the past. Chinese and American both did. So why did Chen use a double standards. And I was ashamed that I did not discover this obvious fallacy in Chen's argument.

Though I do not remember clearly how this argument ends, I learn one thing from it. It's hard for me to keep rational when intense emotion is aroused. Under intense emotion, I am more likely to fail to identify what is opinion and what is fact, what are reasonable and what are irrational. Being completely rational is impossible, but identifying beforehand what my "hot spots" in emotion are will make easy coping with situations like that.