[Q&A] Why do Chinese bosses think African workers are lazy?

Dear Eric and Cobus,I worked for a Chinese company for six months in Lusaka and it was not fun. The Chinese boss pushed us very hard and said we were ‘lazy’. My friends also said their bosses called them ‘lazy’ too. We worked hard but they still thought we were lazy. I hear it all the time and it really makes me angry. Why do the Chinese have this mindset that they are the only ones who know how to work hard?

- Sonny in Lusaka, via Facebook Messenger

I want to start by trying to make you feel better about the bad experience you had working for a Chinese company in Lusaka.

There’s a pretty good chance that the bad attitude your boss was throwing your way wasn’t personal, but represented a big culture divide between China and the rest of the world.Now, I don’t know you and I’ll just assume that you work hard, OK? The issue here is that the Chinese have a very different attitude towards work than most other people.

You see, in a country of over a billion people that’s been terribly poor for most of its history, there are two powerful forces that drive the Chinese to succeed: bitterness and scarcity.The ‘bitterness’ part comes from a sense that life is tough, brutal, competitive and in a country of over a billion people that have been dreadfully poor for most of its history, one has to ‘eat bitterness’ （chi ku 吃苦）or suffer if you want to get ahead. And for most Chinese, that suffering, so to speak, comes through work, hard work.That’s why you see in Lusaka’s food markets or on the constructions, the Chinese are there before sunrise, they work seven days a week and push themselves really hard.

Your late president, Michael Sata, who was one of China’s biggest critics in Africa, even had to acknowledge that the Chinese work harder than anyone else: “the Chinese don’t care about working hours, they just work until the sun goes down,” he said.Disciplined, hard work should be a good thing, right? It is, absolutely, but problems arise when the Chinese apply their rigid working standards to other people who either aren’t used to it or simply have a different outlook on work (like most Europeans for example).

Combine this with Chinese managers who are too often totally inexperienced when it comes to managing people in different countries where they often speak the local language and know very little about the culture. The combination of those strong Chinese about work combined with limited, even bad, inter-cultural skills leads to lots of big problems between Chinese managers and their subordinates.While bitterness-driven work ethic of the Chinese works extremely well for them in China, I think it’s going to take them some time for Chinese managers overseas to become more sophisticated about how to productively engage their local employees and abandon this notion that just because everyone doesn’t want to work seven days a week, 12 hours a day and on public holidays, does not make them lazy. That make take some time though so I think we’ll need to be patient.Are there lazy workers in the Lusaka and elsewhere in Africa? You bet! Just like there are pretty much everywhere else.

So I can’t tell you if your former boss was justified in pushing you so hard, but I do think, based on my own experience working for Chinese companies, the chances are that a big culture divide probably had more to do with their attitude than anything else.

Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden are the duo behind the  and hosts of the popular . With "Africa-China Q&A" they answer your most pressing, puzzling, even politically incorrect questions about all things related to the Chinese in Africa and Africans in China. If you want to know something, anything at all… just hit them up and they’ll tell it to you straight:  questions@chinaafricaproject.com