Translating Intervention: When Corporate Culture Meets Chinese Socialism

Abstract

Under socialist development, the contemporary Chinese Communist Party (CCP) refashions thought management with a changed message. The Party increasingly promotes Chinese cultural values, through a policy of designed corporate culture programs within state-owned and private enterprises. The culture is one that inculcates corporate cultural values “imported” from corporate culture discourses in the Western business world. A curious “translation of ideas” has occurred, ideas that have traveled from the Korean Peninsula and War, through the boardrooms of corporate America and into the mundane practices of the CCP, to build corporate culture. At the core of this culture are practices that Schein has termed coercive persuasion. This article discusses the role of coercive persuasion in two sites: (a) China’s state-owned enterprises and (b) private businesses and social organizations. We conclude that as ideas travel, they may change in substance, whereas in form and functionality, they remain surprisingly similar.