Cultural differences

By Timothy Pratt

Monday, Feb. 16, 2009 | 2 a.m.

The fortunes of a newspaper published out of a second-floor Chinatown Plaza office may give us insight into differing attitudes about money and ways of surviving tough economic times.

In a time when a 162-year-old national news chain such as the Tribune Co. file for bankruptcy protection, the Las Vegas Chinese Daily News is actually growing, fueled by an increase in advertising. The paper has gone from 16 to as many as 36 pages since printing its first copy five years ago.

Publisher Helen Hsueh said the paper’s success is due in part to the fact that many Chinese business owners consider times of economic stress a time to spend money on advertising.

Hsueh said advertising outlook is one of several that separate Chinese and U.S. cultures when it comes to doing business. Together, these attributes may make it easier for the estimated 20,000 valley residents of Chinese heritage to survive the highest unemployment rates in a generation, not to mention the nation’s worst foreclosure rates.

Chinese attitudes about money include the notion of saving profits and growing slowly, instead of leveraging long lines of credit and expanding rapidly, several business owners said. Then there’s the idea of developing loyalty between employees and employers. And of controlling consumption, or frugality, both at work and at home.

Though these qualities may be found in people everywhere, there are definitely differences between the cultures, said Robbie Blinkoff, a Baltimore-based anthropologist who has studied Chinese consumer habits.

“The Chinese rely more on what is known as a relational economy, compared to Americans, who function more in a ‘me economy.’ The Chinese system is based more on, ‘I do something for you, you do something for me,’ with everyone being on the same level, whereas our system is more hierarchical, with more differences based on power.”

So the traditional Chinese outlook — which, of course, can vary among Chinese-Americans depending on how long they have lived in the United States — leads people to avoid credit, for example, because “credit is a risk, and it puts people around you at risk,” Blinkoff said.

Similarly, “you live within your means and take care of the people around you,” he added.

These are “underlying cultural attitudes,” said Alan Chen, president of the local Chinese American Chamber of Commerce and does public relations for the Chinatown Plaza Corp., the commercial center that started what is known as Las Vegas’ Chinatown in 1997.

These days, Chinatown Plaza has no vacancies, even as other strip malls around the valley empty out. The most recent valleywide commercial vacancy rates are twice as high as a year ago, with the highest reaching 15 percent.

Chen uses the tortoise and hare parable to illustrate the gap in viewpoints between the cultures.

“When we’re doing well in business, we may feel we don’t need to advertise, we can trust the momentum. And we think, let’s just collect. Let’s save. Whereas American businesses think, expand, expand!”

This can be seen in personal finances as well, Chen said.

According to a 2006 Fortune magazine article on the subject, people in China save about 30 percent of household income, while people in the United States save nothing after taxes.

Sitting at her backroom desk in a small office next door to Chen’s, Hsueh says: “This is because we think, when you’re in the sunshine, you have to prepare for the rain.”

Albert Cheng, executive director of the 43-year-old nonprofit organization, the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, said this millenary attitude comes from having to survive so many political and natural ups and downs. “Even in the villages, you can see people saving rice in case something happens to the crops,” he said.

Hsueh notes that advertising has also increased from what she calls “Caucasian” businesses because “they know that Chinese people still have cash,” even in a recession.

She gets visits all day from her advertisers among the 42 businesses in the plaza.

One of them, Frank Hu, owner since last February of the Emperor’s Garden restaurant, said he recently began advertising in the paper because “otherwise, how are you going to get out of bad times?”

Hu also noted that even bad times don’t change his relationship with his employees, which he considers more like family.

“In the traditional Chinese culture, we have loyalty to our employees. If I make money, they make money,” he said. And even with sales down, he still recently engaged in the Chinese New Year’s custom of giving money to his employees in little red envelopes.

Similarly, Hu noted that most owners and managers do all they can to avoid layoffs in tough times. Hu said recent sales declines have led them to cut back employee hours. But no jobs have been lost.

Benjamin Chen, manager of 99 Ranch Market, the plaza’s supermarket, said sales have dropped about 10 percent in the past year, but he has cut only employees’ overtime hours.

Cheng, of the Chinese Culture Center, voluntarily took the step that only recently has become fashionable among Wall Street CEOs — cutting his salary. He reduced it 35 percent. He said he also had to reduce salaries of his staff — but he held that decrease to 20 percent.

Cheng, who has lived in the United States most of his 60 years, thinks Americans might need to learn some new habits to avoid sinking deeper into recession.

“We need to rethink our way of spending money,” he said. “It’s like it grows on trees — but, trees don’t grow without pruning.”

Might there be other lessons in traditional Chinese values?

“It would be good to look not just at the Chinese culture, but other old cultures, to see how they’ve survived so long,” Cheng said.