I had lived in China for more than 5 years, Boston, Japan or Korea for more than 9 months each.
In my opinion, minimizing conflict has nothing to do with being poor, and a lot with being Chinese educated.
On the contrary, I volunteer helping poor kids like Spanish gypsies or Subsaharan African and they(and their parents) are ultra confident, and spontaneous. Being open is the default thing for them.
I managed Chinese people in China and there was a world of difference between natives and those Chinese educated overseas.
When living on the US, I was shocked to see parents cheering their kids for the most stupid thing, when in Europe as a kid you are forced to do 4x more effort without rewards at all(like learning multiple languages). It is just what it is expected from you.
In Asia, this pressure over kids is even higher than in Europe.
Family is very important for Chinese almost a religion.
This has advantages and disadvantages. For innovation, it is a big disadvantage. Innovation means taking risks, being close to your family means having to convince lots of people those risk are worth it. Most people won't understand you and it is very hard.
In the US, everybody is on their own, basically, nobody gives a dam, which is great for changing the world.
Minimizing conflict is just one minor tangential point in his essay. The main thing, which I think you might have missed, is the insane pressure of being poor and having no fallback and constantly worrying about money. I do think that since he hasn't been not poor growing up, he doesn't realize that the opposite state in many ways can have its own detrimental effects on motivation
One of my closest friends is Chinese, and what you are saying confirms my observations and what he has anecdotally told me.
After finishing college here in the US, he got a very lucrative job at a consulting firm and was doing very well. Yet his parents (especially mother) kept pressuring him to go back to Hong Kong because, according to him, that's the rightful place of a family's only son. Keep in mind that such a move would mean upending his life and also taking a big pay cut (he compared salaries).
He also told me that Chonese schools reward conformity above all else and strongly discourage (sometimes with physical violence) sticking out or taking initiative.
That's not to say the author's observations and opinions are wrong. In fact what he shared is very valuable - people who come from middle class or above families tend to take their privilege for granted, and in fact can't even imagine what it is like to be poor. I myself only learned it by volunteering at homeless shelters and soup kitchens. It's very heartbreaking that the world's richest and most powerful country has so many struggling people, but it can also be instructive in terms of what one can do to help fix it. So I commend the author for writing this piece.
Re: conformity, the cliche here in Japan is to point out that where the west says "the squeaky wheel gets the grease", Japanese say "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down".
I had lived in China for more than 5 years, Boston, Japan or Korea for more than 9 months each.
In my opinion, minimizing conflict has nothing to do with being poor, and a lot with being Chinese educated.
On the contrary, I volunteer helping poor kids like Spanish gypsies or Subsaharan African and they(and their parents) are ultra confident, and spontaneous. Being open is the default thing for them.
I managed Chinese people in China and there was a world of difference between natives and those Chinese educated overseas.
When living on the US, I was shocked to see parents cheering their kids for the most stupid thing, when in Europe as a kid you are forced to do 4x more effort without rewards at all(like learning multiple languages). It is just what it is expected from you.
In Asia, this pressure over kids is even higher than in Europe.
Family is very important for Chinese almost a religion. This has advantages and disadvantages. For innovation, it is a big disadvantage. Innovation means taking risks, being close to your family means having to convince lots of people those risk are worth it. Most people won't understand you and it is very hard.
In the US, everybody is on their own, basically, nobody gives a dam, which is great for changing the world.