Forbes: A flaw in the system of cultural conflicts kills "China jobs"

Lead: Panos Mourdoukoutas, an online version of the Forbes magazine, Panos Mudukuta China's own Steve Jobs, partly because of the traditional Confucian culture, On the other hand, it stems from flaws in the current economic system.

The following is the full text of the article:

As China began discussing jobs ' legacy with the rest of the world, many Chinese wondered why China could not be a schumpeter-style entrepreneur and not be able to make its own jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg).

As I said earlier in the book China against herself, Schumpeter's entrepreneurial spirit needs to explore and exploit new market opportunities and introduce products and processes. But this spirit is unable to integrate well with the Confucian culture that China has complied with. Throughout Chinese history, the existing social system has not given enough respect to inventors, entrepreneurs and business pioneers.

Chinese people who follow the Confucian tradition are sometimes hostile to entrepreneurs, unlike the mercantilism of Europe, which was infected by the ideas of Renaissance and religious reform and influenced by Francis Bacon's ideas, which were embraced and promoted by the American War of Independence (Bacon).

The mentality of Chinese Confucian believers can also be further attributed to their mobile genetic system, which allows successful businessmen to invest their profits in land and become landlords. Not only that, because China follows the pattern of fair inheritance, allocating family property to all sons, not just the eldest, easing the younger son's pressure to pursue independent entrepreneurship or business opportunities.

Before the founding of New China, the Chinese society did not give entrepreneurs enough respect. And when the new China was founded, the situation had not changed. Even after 30 years of reform and opening-up, China's understanding of entrepreneurship is still very different from that of the western world, even compared to some Asian countries. Entrepreneurs are not seen as pioneers and adventurers, but as heroes and model workers, and as role models for the rest of the workforce and society as a whole.

The heroism of workers is not in the Schumpeter-style entrepreneurial spirit, nor can it breed companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon, not because the Chinese do not have enough ability and knowledge to pursue innovation, but rather from China's economic system, which makes it impossible to catch up with new technologies and global market demand. Despite the market economy reforms, Chinese entrepreneurs still lack the information, freedom and incentives to explore new products because they are still "units" of a planned economy rather than "companies" in a market economy.

Within this system, entrepreneurship comes from the supply side of the market and is realized through resources. But in the market economy environment, the universal pattern should be originated from the demand side, and by virtue of consumer realization. In the view of planners, this pattern is reasonable, they hold a lot of resources and are eager to find shortcuts to achieve short-term growth. But from a fast-changing global market, this is unreasonable, as consumers, not planners, really dominate the economy.

To be fair, not all American businesses understand and apply this idea. Many technology companies, including Kodak, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard, have retreated from consumer-driven entrepreneurship back to supply-driven entrepreneurship, causing shareholders to suffer.

In the final analysis: to have their own star entrepreneurs, China must develop a consumer-centric market economy, thereby releasing the people's ingenuity and creativity, exploring innovative ways to change the lives of consumers, and let them accumulate wealth for themselves in the process.