You’re teaching some great lessons here. Here’s some more anecdotal info: One of the big wigs at my company was telling us that what often happens is that the country folk from China come to work at our plant for 5 years or so, live fairly spartan existence, and save up money to go back to their home turf and start their own businesses. Everyone wins! You can hardly think that way in the States. It takes most of your life just learning all the regulations, much less figuring out how to weave through them. Hats off to you and anyone who manages to make their own way in this climate!
I learned them from 20 years working for small businesses or for myself. There's no school to teach you this, other than the school of hard knocks!
Here’s some more anecdotal info: One of the big wigs at my company was telling us that what often happens is that the country folk from China come to work at our plant for 5 years or so, live fairly spartan existence, and save up money to go back to their home turf and start their own businesses.
That is EXACTLY correct. Ask any factory worker what their dream is: to start their own business.
The typical factory worker is female, between 18 and 25. They come to work in the factories, living in company-supplied dorms, eating the 3 free meals a day in the cafeteria, and work as much overtime as possible.
After 5-6 years of dutifully sending 90% of their income home (usually 800-1500 RMB per month), they quit and move home. Get married, have a child or two, and start a business. With a nest egg of 50,000 RMB - a huge amount over here (what an engineer would earn for an entire year).
And then the next cycle continues!
Historically that has not been the case. China is always trying to fly apart. It's not really one nation you know. Anymore than the Russian Empire/Soviet Union/Russian Federation is.Although perhaps they are more so now than anytime in the recent past, like the last millennium or so.
People really don't appreciate this point! China's historically been 100-300 small kingdoms that rarely unite into 2-3 "empires". It's not a homogeneous society, no more so than "Europe".
You can look at a Chinese person and tell if they're from Shandong, Sichuan, Hubei, Zhejiang, or any of the provinces. They have distinctive facial and body features.
Even languages; for example, Mandarin is the official language (when does the US get its own official language?), but each kingdom/area had its own language. Here in Shanghai, I know some Mandarin, but no Shanghaiese. And 100 miles away, in Ningbo, there is Ningboese.
And the languages are such that if I speak Mandarin, you speak Shanghaiese, and the third speaks Ningboese, we cannot communicate; as different as Slovakian, Finnish, and Spanish.
China's much more akin to an EU with a MASSIVELY strong central Government, than a homogeneous country one would normally think (like Japan).