Collectivism verses Individualism

To understand the struggles of the central character in The Other Shore, it is important to recognize that the playwright was writing about the experience of living in a collectivist culture (communist China in the late 20th-century).

American culture is highly individualistic and therefore is markedly different than the collectivist culture of China in 1986 (the year that The Other Shore was first performed). Individualistic cultures place great value on independence, individual initiative, uniqueness, and competition. In contrast, collectivist cultures place great value on committment, loyalty, conformity, and cooperation. To learn more about these concepts, read pages 160-163 in Jandt, Fred Edmund. An Introduction to Intercultural Communication: Identities in a Global Community. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007.

To examine how your own individualistic or collectivist perspective affects your perception of the world, do the exercises in section 1.3 of this Online Cultural Training Resource for Study Abroad at the University of the Pacific website. As you read your survey results, remember that, although Americans as a group tend to be individualistic, each American person exhibits collectivist behaviors in certain situations. This is why, even though The Other Shore is the product of a society very different than our own, we can each see some glimpses of ourselves in the central character of the play.

It is important to note that China has undergone significant social and economic change in the 25 years since Gao Xingjian wrote The Other Shore. As China becomes more "westernized," some studies are finding a corresponding tendency toward increasing individualism in Chinese culture (for example, see Cao, Jia-Xue, "The Analysis of Tendency of Transition from Collectivism to Individualism in China."Cross Cultural Communication 5.4 (2009): 42-50).