We've all seen it—or even been it. A public area in Anywhere, China. A foreigner engaged in conversation with a local man or woman in the service industry. The foreigner's body language gets more aggressive—a finger pointed in the air near the seller's face, straightened shoulders and a wide-set stance to the feet.

The foreigner's conversation is at first inaudible to passersby. The volume begins to mount. The local person shakes her head more often and shoots short quick nervous smiles. The volume escalates but the situation is still at an impasse. A crowd gathers, making the foreigner more agitated and the locals more embarrassed.

It's anger, and in part it's a normal reaction from the shock of negotiating in a culture that is not your own.

Common, often-given advice to expatriate newcomers to Asia is that their hosts will often curb their emotions more than is normal in the West and that foreigners visiting should avoid public displays of anger as it will not help their cause. This may be, along with the admonition to pack light, one of the least-followed pieces of advice ever given to travellers to China. However, scientists say there's solid reasoning behind it.

Where culture and science collide

Psychologists and behavioural scientists have been looking at the way that different cultures perceive and exhibit emotions like anger since at least the time of Charles Darwin.

American neuropsychologist Michael Potegal notes that “cultural differences in preferred modes of angry expression regulation provide strong implications for misunderstandings in intercultural interactions” in his 2009 book “An International Handbook of Anger.”

In most Asian cultures, close-knit family and friends relationships—often referred to in China as guanxi—and the teachings of the philosopher Confucius have led to societal pressure to control anger while in public. As anyone who has seen a really good Guangdong hawker bargain knows, however, the anger sometimes does leak out. But why are our cultures so different?

“If I see my primary identification as a group member, then considerations about face involve my group. Direct confrontation or problem-solving with others may reflect poorly on my group, or disturb overall community harmony. I may prefer to avoid criticism of others, even when the disappointment I have concealed may come out in other, more damaging ways later,” writes professional mediator Michelle LeBaron in her July 2003 essay on Cross-Cultural Communication, published on Beyondintractability.org. “Since no direct confrontation takes place, face is preserved and potential damage to the relationships or networks of relationships is minimized.”

This is the all-important Chinese guanxi—if you are brought up to be a networker, preserving the web of family relationships might take precedence over your annoyance that you got shortchanged at the grocery market again or even that some arrogant foreign colleague is targeting you to blow off steam.

“Silence is the true friend that never betrays,” Confucius taught. And also, “when anger rises, think of the consequences.”

Losing more than just face

Psychologists and anthropologists theorise that foreigners from cultures that focus on the individual often feel that they can display their emotions more freely than people from cultures such as China, the collectivistic nature of which requires people to respect social norms and family duties. 

“Anger and shame are discouraged within this culture due to the view that it holistically threatens authority and relationship harmony,” Dee Ann McKinnie Burney writes about Asian American teens' cultural differences in respect to anger. Even after they immigrated to the United States and after depression spiked among those adolescents pressured to do well in school, she states that “value continues to be placed on emotional calmness, especially control over negative emotions, such as anger, jealousy, hostility, aggression and self-pity.”

Expats seem to lose their cool in China when they are faced by things that have been ingrained in them from childhood as incorrect behaviour. Spitting, littering, queue-jumping and fibbing are all commonly cited by foreigners as triggers of annoyance in China. This, in essence, is culture shock, but stressors can amplify the emotion from mere annoyance to the other end of the spectrum—near rage.

Unfortunately, getting angry in these situations is about as productive as banging your head against the Great Wall.

“Expressing anger may be perceived as relatively appropriate in Western cultures, but as relatively inappropriate in East Asian cultures,” Hajo Adams, Aiwa Shirako and William W. Maddux wrote in their paper on the effects of anger in cross-cultural business negotiations, published by the Association for Psychological Science.

In experiments with European-American and Asian participants, they found that the European-Americans were likely to back down in the face of anger when negotiating, but that Asians, if they budged in angry bargaining, would make a smaller concession than the European-Americans.

Anger finds new outlets

While these cultural differences may be influenced by Confucian teachings, when the master was preparing sage advice two thousand years ago he couldn't have taken into account high pressure jobs, one-child families, school leaving exams or modern tragedies. Nowadays, Chinese people also have to deal with feelings of anger arising from stress. 

To stop the rise of school bullying and to ameliorate student depression—which in extreme cases ends with the students harming themselves—schools in some provinces such as Zhejiang have opened “venting rooms” where the students can take turns punching dummies or crying to get rid of anger before it manifests in other ways. 

It seems that public events such as the Wenzhou train tragedy in July, when faulty signal systems caused a high-speed train to be hit from behind by another train, has also lifted the cultural restriction for showing anger. Both trains derailed over a viaduct, injuring about 200 people and killing about 40. The outpouring of anger on social networking sites was unprecedented—one figure has it that popular microblogging site Weibo had over 4 million posts about the accident in the 24 hours following the crash. 

But for the foreigner struggling through a tough day in China, the knowledge that the culture is different is not always enough to calm their inner tiger.

Cultural transition coach Heather Markel has written about different cultures' anger responses on her blog at Survivaltipsforexpatsandspouses.com. In the US, she wrote, “The louder you yell, and the higher you escalate, the more likely it is that you will get what you want.” But travellers, she acknowledges, sometimes just have to grin and bear it, though she notes, “It’s pretty tough to tuck away years of cultural habits, even if you have to in order to get what you want.”  
 

Related links
5 Signs it’s Time to Pack up and Leave China
‘Crazy Foreigners’: What Makes Chinese Laugh or Cry
6 Things Foreigners Often Get Wrong about Chinese People

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