This topic is a perennial hot topic in Silicon Valley. Some Chinese professionals consider themselves elites, but their career progression in Silicon Valley is often not ideal, hitting a ceiling after reaching senior technical roles. I myself am subject to this general trend. Indian professionals, overall, are the opposite, flourishing across the board in the workplace: from HR recruiters to top-level CEOs, there are many Indians at every stage. Every time the news reports an Indian immigrant becoming CEO of a major US company, or a member of the US Congress, major WeChat groups among Silicon Valley Chinese actively discuss and analyze the reasons. Some accuse the other side of cheating, while others reflect on the causes and how to break through the situation. I am also joining this discussion, hoping my humble thoughts might inspire more valuable insights (throwing a brick to attract jade), sharing my current superficial understanding, analyzing the reasons for my own failures, and welcoming criticism and corrections.

It should be noted that the title is intentionally broad to attract attention. In reality, this analysis primarily focuses on my personal problems and shortcomings. In fact, many Chinese friends in Silicon Valley have developed very well, starting their own companies or reaching high-level positions in major corporations. Eric Yuan, the Chinese founder of Zoom, one of America’s best employers, is a role model among them. Chinese professors are flourishing in American academia, and many Chinese were recently inducted as IEEE fellows.

1. Focusing Only on Individual Skills, Neglecting Teamwork

The core of traditional Chinese education is individual knowledge and skills developed through solitary effort. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this; having sufficient ability is the foundation for establishing oneself. However, focusing solely on individual skills without emphasizing the knowledge and skills of teamwork can lead to various problems when taken to an extreme.

A specific extreme example is spending 90% of one’s time practicing piano, math, physics, chemistry, and programming skills individually, focusing only on a very narrow technical field (“one’s own little acre”). Meanwhile, no time is spent learning how to interact and cooperate with others, communication techniques, the art of observation, public speaking, team motivation, conflict resolution, or understanding the functions of surrounding institutions and how to engage with them. This can also be seen in popular sports: some Chinese strongly push individual pursuits like piano and table tennis, rarely participating in team-based competitive sports like baseball, soccer, and basketball. It shouldn’t be hard to see which types of sports more closely mirror the cooperative and competitive environment of the workplace.

From a programmer’s perspective: Imagine the environment composed of oneself, surrounding people, and institutions as a programmable environment. Traditional Chinese education only teaches how to call one’s own module (How to recursively call self?), paying little attention to learning how to call others and institutions (How to call others?). Looking at the overall career landscape, if most Chinese spend their days writing and optimizing a single low-level function (themselves), while Indians spend their days learning self-invocation and writing higher-level functions that call other functions (other people + institutions), which group is likely to develop better in the long run? The answer should be obvious, without any suspense.

My understanding is that the basic way to “call” others is through speaking. I myself do this very poorly. Hence, a book title bluntly states: “So-Called High EQ is Simply Knowing How to Speak Well.” Sometimes, in WeChat groups, I carelessly display my superiority in various ways, subtly mocking others as stupid. Then I stubbornly argue that my views are flawless and others’ are worthless. Finally, I might speculate about the other party’s unfalsifiable malicious intentions, resorting to accusations and slander. Basically, I speak in the most hurtful way possible. It’s considered good if I don’t end up creating lifelong grudges, let alone motivating others to discuss a topic clearly and achieve a common team goal. Sometimes, even when speaking with family members, I disregard their feelings, shouting emotionally, using sarcasm, or even cursing. This makes the family unhappy, and I deeply regret it.

2. Chasing Money and Fame, Lacking a Grand Vision

Climbing to the top of large American companies and institutions is very arduous. It basically requires sacrificing personal life and dedicating oneself fully. Driven solely by money, probably not many people would be willing to make such a huge sacrifice. Once money reaches a certain level, its motivational power diminishes. Only those who genuinely identify with the grand vision of the company or institution, possess a sense of responsibility, and love the company’s mission will go all out.

If a group’s traditional culture places money first, with everything else discardable, then when joining a company or institution, this group will primarily focus on money. Once they feel they have enough money, they won’t strive further. If this is an individual’s or a group’s choice, it’s understandable.

3. Fence-Sitting Guests, Lacking an Ownership Mentality

Some Chinese immigrants prefer to sit on the fence, living in the US for decades without becoming citizens. They essentially position themselves as foreigners, not wholeheartedly treating America as home to care for and build, focusing only on their own and their immediate family’s interests, and not participating in community, school district, city, state, or federal affairs. They constantly think about returning to China to cash in if China’s development improves.

Unfortunately, the most eternal truth in the world is: rights and responsibilities are reciprocal; effort and reward correspond. People who live and work with a fence-sitting guest mentality will, at most, receive the treatment of a fence-sitting guest. If this is an individual’s (or a group’s) choice, and they know and accept the corresponding outcome, it’s beyond reproach. However, if one acts like a fence-sitting guest while envying others who receive the treatment and rights of an owner, and simultaneously complains: “My God, why don’t I have it!? Why does America treat me like a second-class citizen?” (without first considering if they’ve naturalized and voted), and cries “Unfair!” – this is somewhat baffling.

A company in the workplace is essentially a small country. The fence-sitting guest mentality has the exact same effect in the workplace. If the main purpose of joining a company is personal financial gain, without adopting an owner’s mentality to care about the company’s operations and overall situation, one is unlikely to be entrusted with significant responsibility.

There are two types of promotion processes in the workplace: a. The standard process: For an employee to be promoted, he/she must already be performing at the level of the position they are being promoted to. That is: based on doing your current job well, you have exceeded expectations and are already meeting the requirements of the higher position. Only then will you be promoted. There’s also an implicit condition: if your current position is critical, someone must be ready to replace you before you can be promoted. Otherwise, what happens to the critical role you vacate? If someone is a technical expert deeply focused only on their niche, and irreplaceable, it’s naturally difficult to promote them to a management position. b. Immature organizations might move you to a higher new position simply because you are doing well in your current role. The risk of this approach is: the company loses a 100% good match between a person and their well-performed role, and there’s a 50% risk that the promoted person will not perform well in the new, higher position.

Which promotion method is more stable and effective should be clear at a glance.

Therefore, when an Indian person is promoted to CEO, assuming no cheating, it’s highly likely that he/she had already been looking at the bigger picture beyond their own job, proactively caring about broader goals, coordinating relationships between various departments, and effectively managing tasks on a larger scale. At the same time, they likely helped the organization plan and prepare by grooming a successor to take over their original position, ensuring the company continues to operate smoothly. A group with a guest mentality, focused only on their “own little acre,” finds it very difficult to achieve these two key elements and, barring cheating, cannot rise to the top.

The overall statistical workplace predicament of Chinese professionals in Silicon Valley is also reflected in their predicament regarding political rights in America. Companies and countries are both institutions; the reasons for limited development and the resulting dilemmas are identical. In the Silicon Valley Chinese workplace discussion groups I’m in, conversations often digress into US politics. It’s not really anyone’s fault; the issues Chinese professionals face in the workplace and in political rights stem from the same traditional, fundamental blind spots in perception and behavior.

4. Taking All the Credit, Lacking Gratitude

The emphasis on individual struggle is a strength of Chinese culture. But taken to an extreme, it becomes a major weakness. People emerging from this cultural atmosphere tend to believe that everything they have today is solely due to their own efforts. People from a culture of mutual help and support are more likely to recognize and appreciate the help of others. In reality, no matter how hard one works, the environment and other people have, to varying degrees, provided favorable conditions that contributed to one’s current middle-class quality of life. Therefore, there are many people and institutions to be grateful for: parents, family, friends, schools, teachers, classmates, colleagues, superiors, community, country (both birth country and adopted country)… I myself fall short in this regard. It was only recently during Thanksgiving that I suddenly realized I had lived for decades without genuinely thanking my family, classmates, and friends. Then, for the first time, I sincerely thanked them. I feel very ashamed.

People who lack gratitude are unlikely to be helped or promoted by others. A major concern among Chinese professionals in companies is: “If I promote you, you won’t be grateful, and you might even stab me in the back later.” Thus, some Chinese executives in the US prefer to promote people of other ethnicities rather than risk promoting fellow Chinese employees. One famous example I heard involved a Chinese executive at Intel years ago who openly boasted, very proudly, that he didn’t have a single Chinese employee under him!

People lacking gratitude also lack a spontaneous desire to give back to others and the community. Chinese professionals are less likely to spend their precious time participating in various volunteer activities within companies and communities. Regarding charitable donations, I feel the participation rate among Chinese is also the lowest. I checked recent statistics from charitynavigator.org: in 2017, US national donations accounted for 2.1% of GDP, totaling $410 billion. With a population of 325.7 million, this translates to an average annual donation of $1,259 per person. For a family of four, that’s $5,035. Some Chinese professionals in Silicon Valley often boast online that annual incomes below several hundred thousand dollars constitute the poverty line, far exceeding the US average and median income levels. But how many Chinese families reach the US average annual donation amount? My family hasn’t reached it yet; although we are still below the “poverty line,” that’s not an excuse.

Another source for US household charitable donation data: IRS statistics show that in 2017, 37 million tax returns claimed an average charitable deduction of $5,508. The statistics for Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) ranges versus average charitable deductions are as follows:

Income Range (AGI) Average Charitable Deduction
Under $15,000 $1,471
$15,000-$29,999 $2,525
$30,000-$49,999 $2,871
$50,000-$99,999 $3,296
$100,000-$199,999 $4,245
$200,000-$249,999 $5,472
$250,000 or more $21,364

5. Envying Others’ Success, Inflicting Reputational Harm

I feel that within the Chinese community, the common reaction upon seeing or hearing about someone’s success is often an immediate surge of jealousy (like overturning a vinegar jar), followed by finding fault: “This person succeeded because they are from a rich family (富二代 - rich second generation),” “This person got lucky,” “This person is good at hyping things up,” “This person was built up by a team,” “This person’s stuff is actually fake”… This mentality leads to two detrimental consequences: 1. Losing the opportunity to humbly learn from others. 2. Causing significant psychological harm to those who achieve success.

When I hear about others succeeding and getting rich, my instinctive reaction is also envy, jealousy, and resentment. Then I puzzle over why this detrimental genetic trait, unfavorable to my own and others’ survival and development, exists within me. Fortunately, I am slowly correcting it: first, by becoming aware of my negative reaction, and then by positively guiding myself: Step one, sincerely praise the person. Step two, learn what they did right.

6. Getting into a Top University Means Life Success

This is one of the most short-sighted family education concepts in the Chinese community: believing that once a child gets into a prestigious university, their life is a success. People with this mindset are essentially still stuck in a feudal society, their metaphorical queue (long braid) yet to be cut. They think that a child’s success in university entrance exams (金榜题名 - name on the golden list) guarantees a path to officialdom through scholarship (学而优则仕) and a lifetime of wealth and honor. If someone’s child gets into a famous school, they are met with endless admiration and praise. If someone’s child doesn’t, they are considered a failure, bringing shame upon the parents. Consequently, the primary focus in the Chinese community is “pushing kids” (推娃) into various tutoring classes and employing all sorts of strategies to get them accepted into famous schools, sacrificing everything else. And then… there’s nothing after that.

In reality, life is a marathon, and the university experience is just a small part of it. Foundational education is important, and a good university can ensure an above-average income and standard of living. But to reach higher levels, one needs patience to find and cultivate genuine passions and interests, develop good habits, including lifelong learning, seeing the bigger picture, collaborating with others, handling conflicts, and learning to leverage institutional resources. Lacking these long-term driving forces makes future career bottlenecks highly likely.

7. Not Participating in Rule-Making

I believe that the efficient operation of an organization, community, institution, company, or even a country requires basically three levels of talent: bottom, middle, and top.

  • The bottom level performs the most repetitive, least skill-intensive tasks, largely due to human intellectual limitations.

  • The middle level consists of white-collar workers, intellectuals, and skilled technicians – talent requiring higher education to perform skilled work; software engineers are an example.

  • The top level is the core leadership, responsible for strategic planning, creating and optimizing the organizational structure, and defining internal and external operational rules. The core competitiveness of an institution/company/country lies in its structure and operational processes (algorithms), ultimately determining how efficiently it can deploy human and financial resources to achieve goals. Competition among groups is fundamentally a competition of the superiority of their internal structures and process algorithms.

Many Chinese professionals (myself included), due to historical and cultural reasons, have cognitive and behavioral habits primarily confined to the bottom and middle levels: obeying orders, following rules. They dare not and do not know how to participate in setting up the structures and rules of their communities, companies, cities, states, or the country. Thus, discussing the workplace ultimately leads back to the political issues of not seeking citizenship and not voting. I’ll stop here on this point.

8. The Right Way to Break Through

In conclusion, I think we should first look at the bigger picture: Chinese immigrants in America are generally law-abiding, hardworking, tax-paying, value family integrity, and prioritize children’s education. Their economic income is already upper-middle class, and their crime rate is low. They have made many contributions in various fields and have received a certain degree of recognition from American society, even earning the reputation of a “model minority.” These are the results of the excellent parts of traditional Chinese culture being passed down. We should be very proud of this and continue to promote these aspects. However, if we are not satisfied with the status quo and hope to reach a higher level, we should frankly identify our shortcomings together and humbly learn from the strengths of friends from other ethnic groups, including our Indian friends. Ultimately, by incorporating their strengths and addressing our weaknesses, we can explore better paths for survival and development for ourselves and future generations, creating broader opportunities.

Given the high intelligence of Chinese Americans, I think understanding how to break through is not difficult at all; the difficulty lies in implementation – the core challenge is “knowing is easy, doing is hard” (知易行难). Here are a few key points summarized:

  • Adopt an Ownership Mentality: Chinese people are excellent owners of their own lives and immediate families. To advance further, gradually broaden your perspective: think about how you would think, decide, and act if you were the owner of your community, company, city, state, or even America. Only by fulfilling the obligations of an owner can one hope to gain the rights of an owner. There is no truly free lunch.

  • Cultivate Knowledge and Skills Beyond Individual Technical Abilities: Start by learning how to talk to others, learn how to motivate and collaborate with others, utilize people’s strengths, and empower them. Also, learn about the functions of surrounding institutions and various departments and how to engage (“call”) them. In essence, become a “super programmer” (or super coder): a programmer who only knows how to call array or class interfaces is a low-level or mid-level programmer, at best a senior programmer. Learning the functional characteristics and interface calling methods of people and institutions, becoming familiar with and creating human and institutional process algorithms – this makes one a super programmer (CEO) capable of deploying human, financial, and institutional resources.

  • Find a Company with a Vision You Genuinely Love to Work For: Or work on projects and products within a company or institution that you genuinely love. Reaching the top of an institution (including a company) ultimately depends on whether you genuinely believe in and love its vision. Only then can you, like Warren Buffett, jump out of bed in the morning and tap dance your way to work. If you don’t feel this way, it means you’re not truly working for the institution but for other reasons. The institution will not let you reach a high level to manage the big picture.

  • Cultivate Gratitude: Sincerely think about which people and institutions have helped you in your growth, life, and work. Then, genuinely feel grateful and give back: express thanks in person, donate, volunteer, participate in maintenance and construction. More importantly, never stab a benefactor in the back for personal gain.

  • Sincerely Congratulate Others on Their Achievements, Overcome Envy: This creates opportunities for oneself to learn from others’ strengths and fosters a positive feedback environment in the community, allowing successful people to advance further. Ultimately, a large body of water sustains more fish, and a rising tide lifts all boats.

  • Participate in Rule-Making: Examples include company and department restructuring, development of management procedures, and elections and legislation at all levels of US government.

  • Transcend Ethnic Prejudices, Learn from Others’ Strengths: The success of Indian-origin top CEOs is generally something we should congratulate and learn from. Of course, specific instances of cheating encountered must be contested. Why can Chinese professionals feel at ease when a White person is CEO, but become restless when an Indian-origin person takes the role? The subconscious reason might be an ethnic hierarchy bias, believing they should be inferior to Whites but superior to Indians. The correct approach is to start with oneself, not limiting oneself or viewing others differently based on skin color. This also sets a good example for children, inspiring future generations to pursue their ideals without being constrained by ethnicity.

  • Don’t Make Ivy League Admission the Ultimate Goal for Children’s Upbringing: An Ivy League acceptance is like a shiny golden sesame seed – very valuable, and we can continue to pay attention to it. But there are many large watermelons in a child’s development, such as the points mentioned above.

The above are all my current, limited insights. I am continuing to think, read, discuss, and practice, and I expect to have new understandings in the future. The reality is that becoming a CEO of a top company is achieved by only a few. Everyone’s ideals are different; not everyone needs to climb the career ladder, and a balance with family life is also necessary. As long as one is doing something they genuinely like, are good at, and that has value to society, it should be considered a very good life pursuit. Whether I can ultimately grasp the truth and break through my own developmental limitations remains unknown. I remind myself to learn to enjoy the process of thinking, learning, and practicing, rather than fixating on any particular outcome. I also hope to discuss these ideas with like-minded friends.

Original Chinese version: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/rm9US1bQ8cqb4HrOkTKfZA