A strong piece in New York Magazine – "Paper Tigers: What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends?" – caught my eye.  Author Wesley Yang puts out some sharp observations of social and cultural difference and bias.  There's a lot in there, but I want to focus in on this passage:

Maybe it is simply the case that a traditionally Asian upbringing is the problem. As Allyn points out, in order to be a leader, you must have followers. Associates at Pricewaterhouse­Coopers are initially judged on how well they do the work they are assigned. “You have to be a doer,” as she puts it. They are expected to distinguish themselves with their diligence, at which point they become “super-doers.” But being a leader requires different skill sets. “The traits that got you to where you are won’t necessarily take you to the next level,” says the diversity consultant Jane Hyun, who wrote a book called Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling. To become a leader requires taking personal initiative and thinking about how an organization can work differently. It also requires networking, self-promotion, and self-assertion. It’s racist to think that any given Asian individual is unlikely to be creative or risk-taking. It’s simple cultural observation to say that a group whose education has historically focused on rote memorization and “pumping the iron of math” is, on aggregate, unlikely to yield many people inclined to challenge authority or break with inherited ways of doing things.

The "traditionally Asian upbringing" he is referencing has a Confucian inflection: what is important is merging personal interests and presence into the social group, the family; too much autonomy and individuality is a bad thing.  And that kind of socialization, Yang suggests, works against Asian-Americans at the higher levels of the American economy, where greater initiative and creativity are rewarded.

If this is true – and I suspect that Yang's analysis will attract various sorts of criticisms – it could have broader implications.  It implies that certain expressions of Confucianism are socially and materially disadvantageous in American society – it's hard out here for a Confucian!  Or, to extend the idea a bit more, in order to enact something like Confucianism in an American context there must be a certain cultural compromise.  Liberalism, with its assumption of individual self-possession and autonomy, is too deeply ingrained in American society for a strict Confucianism to take root.  And market relationships create further incentives, very strong material incentives, that undermine Confucian sociality.  That is not to say Confucianism is wholly irrelevant to modern and post-modern America.  Rather, whatever application Confucianism might have has to be filtered through American cultural and economic realities.

And I would push this even further.  Competitive capitalist market relationships, which corrode Confucian social ethics, are by no means peculiar to the US.  China is becoming more and more of a market society every day, and we can see the effects this has on Confucian sensibilities.  The growing individualization of Chinese society.  Indeed, Yunxiang Yan (Anthropology, UCLA) argues that this is a complex process in China, that individualization does not necessarily produce a greater number of individualities (see Youtube clip at bottom of page).  Yet the compulsion of the market and the state that he mentions, and the bounded individualization that he sees in China, certainly produce a social-cultural context unfavorable to Confucian sociality. 

I suspect, therefore, that the kind of critique that Wesley Yang now levels against "traditionally Asian upbringing" is fast becoming the critique of a younger generation of Chinese against the social and cultural constraints that they face.   Or maybe it already has….