The Chinese and Anglo-American cultures are in a sense, two opposing sides on one cultural continuum. Although the East and West have recently gained a strong amount of cultural integration, at their cores, they exhibit original assumptions that are entirely distinct in dealing with the roles of the individual in the context of his society. While American culture forms one of the most thoroughly individualistic societies on the globe, the historical model of China has always been one focused on the collectivity and civilizing influence of society.
Starting out in terms of moral values, the Confucian ideals were that morality should be tabulated in terms of social relations. Moral behavior for individuals was dealt with in its social context guided by the Five Relationships. The principle goal of this was the constant maintenance of social harmony and it was quite a pragmatic one without conjugate appeals to the black-and-white moral dichotomy common in religious dualism in the west. In Christendom, moral behavior found its justification not in its direct utility for society, but in the spiritual edification and salvation produced by righteousness. The hallmarks of individual morality in the west are not appeals to social relationships, but to an individual's tempering of his own behavior in a somewhat climactic battle between good and evil. Morality in China is exalted for its good for society, whilst in the west, its benefits expressed are those for the individual.
In Confucian relationships, piety is primary in one's dealings with his family while gradually in the west, perhaps especially in the United States, the collective of the family has lost much of its value to the independence of its members. In nations where freedom of assembly and self-determination are prominent, family obligations may oft emit an aura of arbitrariness and non-consensuality. Still for Chinese, this "arbitrariness" is what defines individual identities; people and their obligations interact to create society and all-important relations that are not to be ignored. Because of the societal and familiar influences on one's life, Chinese, even youths have little problems in readjusting or inventing life-plans and goals in accordance with the wills and needs of their family and important friends.
The value of families, friends and other guanxi is the creation of micro-civilizations which aid their members and constitute a greater value than the sum of their parts. This framework is quite distinct from the American desire for independences, self-reliance and a level of personal isolation. Americans may view collectivism and extended relations as burdensome and unnecessary liabilities and an infringement of "negative face," but in China, it is the power of the limitations created by Hobbes' Leviathan that had made China into the middle kingdom and center of the civilized world, head and shoulders above the encircling barbarians.
This is likely why China's "creation myths" did not revolve so much around the creation of man himself, only around the forging of the Chinese political order based on social interconnection, relations and mutualism. China's primeval Culture Heroes, the inventors of agriculture, early bureaucracy and basic civilizing technologies are the some of the closest the culture has to creative gods; what was important was not the creation of man, but the creation of his civilization and government which kept him from barbarism and societal nudity.
In this west, such governments have been viewed especially in the modern world as a necessary evil and a force which must be perpetually critiqued and checked by outside intellectuals and demagogs; the way western thinkers have spoken of government may have led many to view it as an entirely superfluous organization whose only objective is to immiserate. This said, the Chinese have viewed government as a function of the society in which it is formed. Even before the coming of democratic movements, Chinese thinkers had acknowledged the dependence of the rulers on popular sentiment in the concept of the Mandate of Heaven and had as well interpreted statecraft as a subject interconnected with all communities in a natural way. A government, in this view, is a natural outcome of a given society and thus anti-government sentiment is equivalent to anti-social behavior or self-depreciation.
In China, the individual has a set of obligations to his government, community and family; this is so because such institutions secure his livelihood and not free of cost. In the west, the opposite is emphasized; individuals demand social services, security, livelihood and satiation by appeals to their human rights, based not on social practicality, but on a moralistic appeal to the dignity of the individual human. Chinese open a genuine social cost-benefit analysis on the net goods of free speech, press, economic action and the like whilst westerners often consider these issues with given, obvious and irrevocable answers which can only be defied in the gravest of circumstances.
This divide between the rights and duties of the individual and society is so broad that it has made Chinese and westerners think differently even of ideas on which they are totally agree, albeit for different reasons. As an interesting note, the Daoist notion of "no unnatural action," wuwei can be used in modern contexts to describe the latter western idea of laissez-faire, both being concepts which recommend against unnatural intervention in society. Strangely enough, both Chinese and westerners can successfully spin this idea to their own underlying ideas about society. Wuwei in Chinese thought expresses the grand solvency of society: that it functions so well in creating and maintaining civilization that state-crafters ought not to impede that is essentially a quasi-biological organism. In the west however, laissez-faire is a glorious proclamation of the individual: the idea that selfish individual agents acting rationally form society's backbone and framework; it is seen as the greatest vindication of cultures focused on the importance of the self.
In addition to this clashing over the interpretation of unaction, Chinese have shown their cultural preferences in their favored aspects of thought adopted from the west, especially in socialism. Westerns now typically think of Marxism as a highly collectivist line of thinking, but this would ignore some of the most biting criticisms of Marx and his successors; the capitalist mode of production was seen as deplorable because it reduced the romanticized individual to a position in an assembly line, alienated from self-actualizing and controllable work. This loss of individuality seemed only to appeal to European thinkers for the most part with their brother Maoists monopolizing their emphasis in the collective struggle and social solidarity, thus mirroring earlier Chinese values.
The end result of all of this is that this fundamental difference of conception of the self and society in the east in the west manifests itself to such an extent that even after the allegedly equalizing and homogenizing forces of globalization, Chinese maintain an ideal for society which is contrary, although not necessarily dangerously so to the western standard. Modern economies have produced similar opportunities and challenges for of their participants and indeed students and professionals across the globe share many common denominators in their common needs and purposes. However with this, these two cultural conceptions can interpret the same events with different outcomes and have both molded to the needs of the modern world.
With China having regained its face, esteem and power in the international community, perhaps the social solidarity and flexibility of the Chinese body politic will prove a superior cultural model in many terms to the western, which must at all times be at the mercy of the many differing individuals that make up its society. Still any Chinese flexibility extended in recent decades has been to adjust to the factor of individual initiative in the economic arena so neglected in the earlier communist days. The misfortunate fact of historical analysis is that a full narrative cannot be constructed without first having known the future, thus, one can only wait to see how self and society play out in the modern world to fully comprehend their importance.