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Q: Has China's one child policy produced more narcissists than anywhere else in the world?
Narcissists are delusional. They refuse to confront reality. Like a child, they use illusions and distortions to maintain their fantasy about themselves and the world around them. And everyone is expected to play along. If you refuse to play your role in the narcissist's fantasy production then the narcissist child screams, cries, and stomps her feet declaring that something is wrong with you.
Narcissists are not delusional in the sense that they see little green men or hear disembodied voices telling them to kill the local sports team or have worms living under their skin. They aren’t schizophrenic or hallucinating. No, narcissists simply don’t deal in the truth. They have fantasy perceptions of themselves and the world around them (and the people in it) that they convince themselves are real. Rather like a child, they live in a pretend world. And like a child with an invisible friend, it is very, very real to them.
Narcissists are very good at projection. They are good at rewriting history to suit their ends. They are masters of taking a grain or two of truth and cooking up a huge messy pot of lies. And they are positively brilliant at making themselves believe it all, even to the point of trying to destroy those who would drag them kicking and screaming into reality.
Has your interaction with Chinese people led you to believe there are more per head of population than any other country in the world?
It has for me.
8 years 51 weeks ago in Relationships - China
It is the parenting, not the policy, that is to blame. The 1CP does not stipulate, for example, that Chinese parents sit passively, beaming like morons, while their insolent brat says rude things to dinner guests.
I was raised among many only children who were brought up to be well-adjusted, socially responsible, independent adults. The difference between those only children, and the multitudes in this country that turn into self-absorbed miscreants, is that Chinese parents do not view children as little people. They are more like little pension plans. As a consequence, Chinese children are simultaneously raised with parents and grandparents slavishly tripping over themselves to fluff up their egos, provide for their every need like servants (I mean, kids here don't even have to hold their own water themoses...when they drink from them!), and give them everything they point their fingers at...but they are also raised with the pressure to study, study, study, and be number one at everything so that they can be better prepared for the onerous task of taking care of the parents, potentially the grandparents, a spouse, a child, and the spouse's family.
This is a textbook example of how to raise a narcissist (typically, adults with NPD were either abnormally worshipped by theirparents as children, or were raised by worthless individuals who depended on their child for EVERYTHING. You can see how either scenario would contribute to delusions of grandeur in an adult. Chinese parents, marvels that they are, do both). It is as if Chinese culture, in its infinate wisdom, actually sat down, perused the DSM VI, found the passage on children who are at risk for NPD, and said, "Hao, hao, this is how we will raise our perfect children."
RiRi also raised the point of other social factors. I imagine that the ethnic nationalism and resultant cultural myopia doesn't help people's egos, any. If the Han people are a blessed people with 5000 years of history who do not need to change ANYTHING, AT ALL, EVER, and anyone who says otherwise should respect China's culture and traditions or risk hurting the feelings of the Chinese people...what kind of individuals are then produced by such thinking?
Don't get me started on face. Chinese mothers here will pay through the nose to buy brand name baby clothes that their kids will grow out of in months. Children are just another way for some parents to flaunt wealth to pick up some face. I've actually seen parents encourage their children to misbehave...because it shows that they are in a position to get away with it. Conversely, no one calls out bad parents on the playground, because they do not want to risk causing loss of face (parallels exist for other asshole behavior in the Middle Kingdom).
gouxiong:
I agree with you that Chinese parenting has a lot of flaws (at least from European point of view).
Nevertheless reading all of this from a person having following life attitude towards problems:
-----------QUOTE-----------
I'm selling her shitty furniture, and then cutting the cord off her refrigerator so that she won't find the damage until after I am long gone. And, no, I won't feel guilty if she actually gives me part of the deposit back because she hasn't seen the damage to her fridge.
-----------UNQUOTE-----------
puts your 'analysis' into the perspective ...
The real question is: will they recognize themselves when they attempt to read your post?
laowaigentleman:
I'll bet they think this song is about them, won't they, won't they, won't they? They're so vain...
Taking face into account, I would say egocentric.
But I would not blame the one child policy for this. But that's because I largely believe in the one child policy.
Maybe has more to do with the grandparents having had nothing in the past, and they now want to spoil their grandkids. My wife remembers the hard times as a kid, and she is not that old. But older than the 20 to 30 year old urbanites, who never experienced it (Edited for spelling).
laowaigentleman:
Do you think the egocentrism comes from Mao Zedong thought perhaps? Many of my pushier students seem to admire him, not for what he achieved, but because he was a peasant who won the world with his pushiness.
What a role model!
ScotsAlan:
Wow. I was just trying to be smart Laowaigent. You caught me out by questioning my answer. 
Did Mao produce egocentrics? I think not. I think it is a cultural thing that was always here. But maybe Mao did contribute to it not being reduced.
Go back to about 1956 (I think), there was a party conference in Nanning. A couple of years before Mao had launched the little leap forward, but it had failed.
In those days the revolution was in full swing, the party was still led by committee, and although Mao was the number one, he did not have total and complete power. That changed in Nanning. He outmanoeuverd his opponents, and he forced them into exactly what they did not want...having an infallible leader.
And I think that to an extent carries on till this day. The concept that a high boss (in any organization) is infallible. That sort of culture breed sycophants, and sycophants feed egocentrics. They feed from each other and flourish.
So Maybe Mao did start China down on the path. He wanted his way, he wanted to be in charge. He believed he was correct. Wither he was or not is open to debate.
So maybe Mao did have an effect. But I think the egocentric culture was already there. The Emperors and the lords were all powerful, and they had plenty of people Kow towing to them to feed their ego. What Mao did was he stopped the idealist revolutionaries in their tracks from getting rid of this old fuedal thinking.
Maybe the Mao effect was big, maybe zero. I don't know.
I guess that's a mix of diverse elements, the one child policy being one, but not the only one.
Education is another. Kids learn to become delusional because the people above are also delusional. So of course you can only expect the kids to learn that ignoring reality is the normal state of things.
Ever read some hardcore pieces of press releases from the central gov? Trust me, they rarely do give a damn about making sense or be coherent about anything, but they sure are very picky about the world they imagine for themselves. But then companies also find themselves to replicate this behavior, then people.
laowaigentleman:
Real estate development companies in particular fit this bill.
liking your general thoughts, for the most part
They have fantasy perceptions of themselves and the world around them (and the people in it) that they convince themselves are real. Rather like a child, they live in a pretend world. And like a child with an invisible friend, it is very, very real to them.
this would be me.... living in my own little world .... and loving it I have no delusions about destroying anything. I do have delusions about a happy life and a happy world.
my interaction with Chinese has lead me to believe that they have little to do with global reality. all for one and one for all, only relates to immediate family.
my 48 year old (fat ass) wife was starving as a child, something I have never experienced
I detest Freud, because he was not scientific, but a great deal of his work was copied/rephrased knowledge of his contemporaries, which he claimed as his own before setting the field of human psychology back a century.
Anyway, what he said about childhood phases was often true, and every child goes through a stage of narcissism. You may recall some embarassing things you did, said or thought when you were a teenager, struggling to assert your worth to others. You may even have looked in the mirror too often, overvalung the importance of your looks to your worth as a human being. You may have been preoccupied with blossoming sexuality to the point that you couldn't get anything useful done. Thoughts of the way people perceived you may have launched you into a hissy fit against people who caused you to lose FACE.
Chinese have a rigid understanding of reality. It's binary. You're either a one or a zero. A one counts, makes a difference, means something, matters. A zero is nothing, worthless, doesn't count, makes no difference. From that viewpoint, the importance of asserting yourself as someONE is more important than anything else. And yes, it's very juvenile.
Is it education/government? Is it culture/parenting? Is it OCP? They are all not as separate as they might seem. There would be no need for OCP if people didn't feel the need to havbe many children. They wouldn't believe children were so important if Chairman Mao hadn't told them to multiply. And the Chairman wouldn't have believed outnumbering other nations was the key to success if his culture wasn't based on a feudal system where peasant levies were the backbone of armies.
Slightly off-topic, I believe the feminine focus of Chinese culture (safety and stability before morality or fairness) may have had something to do with it. If all you care about, is a safe and stable environment to raise a family, then you will have less problems with corruption, injustice, oppression and incompetence.
Cargo-cultism, the belief that having nice things makes you a nice person without effort/self-improvement, also plays its part. It is present everywhere in the world, but nowhere as strongly as in China. Red Guard families definitely played their part in promoting Cargo-cultism: If you are a shameless informant, who has taken part in the murders of countrymen for personal gain, and the only thing you have is a pile of money, then OF COURSE you want everyone in your society to respect ONLY money and nothing else. They did a pretty thorough job of it.
Wanting safety, stability, freedom, fairness and ethics is an innate human impulse. We are social animals, and we realize that we are part of the society we live in. It takes a lot of indoctrination to cause people to stray far from that path. This is one thing that the CCP can be credited for, though it is only useful for researchers of population management. This is why the Chinese-American friendship has me worried for the future.
ScotsAlan:
We may often disagree, but this is an excellent well thought out post :)
laowaigentleman:
You sum them up so well. Especially the cargo-cultism. I have always laid that at the feet of Deng Xiaoping, but after reading this, I'm convinced this is yet another problem that can be attributed to that cultural revolution and the fact that no-one will face up to it so future generation can examine it and eventually learn from it so it doesn't happen again. I've a feeling it could repeat itself.
I have to admit I was always fascinated by Freud and thought of his ideas as a great contribution to literary criticism. I know his ideas are not scientific, but this was established quite some time ago. I'm now very curious as to how you detest Freud. I think it's enormously flawed work and he was a messed up guy, but a lot of the non-scientific ideas of his about sexuality are broadly accurate, because he tried too hard to explain everything that he couldn't prove and made a lot of assumptions to complete his systematic model of human behaviour.
How did this set back the science of psychology given psychologists would have always been aware of the empirical shortcomings of things like the Oedipus complex and sublimation?
I read Popper as a student, and I'd assume most scientists would too. Just being familiar with his work undermines any real damage a guy like Freud could do to science, in my opinion. I'm sure philosophy of science has moved on considerably since then.
Love to hear your views because Freud is one idol it would be nice to bring in the twilight of if he is as you say he is.
coineineagh:
I'm not a psychologist, so I base my impressions on little actual knowledge. Popper came a long time after Freud, and Freud had already gained a cultesque following for generations by then. My dislike of him is largely based on his abuse of the merit system in science, which was developing at the time.He stole research conclusions, fudged his numbers, convinced his own patients they'd suffered abuse as children to service his own hypotheses. Unable to admit to any error, he went about science as one would gain influence in business, religion or politics. And his widespread following in psychology produced a huge amount of bad research, due to basing their method's on Freud's.
laowaigentleman:
@coin
I completely agree with all of that, but I don't think he set psychology back a century. He certainly set it back a little though with his cult followers who employed his non-scientific methods.
I credit Freud for popularizing psychology. Chances are, if it wasn't for the broad appeal of his crude methods, western people would be as oblivious to small penis behaviour as mainland Chinese are.
Buying a BMW with one kuai notes might be cool here, but it's thanks to Freud that in the west it's a cry for help of some kind.
It is the parenting, not the policy, that is to blame. The 1CP does not stipulate, for example, that Chinese parents sit passively, beaming like morons, while their insolent brat says rude things to dinner guests.
I was raised among many only children who were brought up to be well-adjusted, socially responsible, independent adults. The difference between those only children, and the multitudes in this country that turn into self-absorbed miscreants, is that Chinese parents do not view children as little people. They are more like little pension plans. As a consequence, Chinese children are simultaneously raised with parents and grandparents slavishly tripping over themselves to fluff up their egos, provide for their every need like servants (I mean, kids here don't even have to hold their own water themoses...when they drink from them!), and give them everything they point their fingers at...but they are also raised with the pressure to study, study, study, and be number one at everything so that they can be better prepared for the onerous task of taking care of the parents, potentially the grandparents, a spouse, a child, and the spouse's family.
This is a textbook example of how to raise a narcissist (typically, adults with NPD were either abnormally worshipped by theirparents as children, or were raised by worthless individuals who depended on their child for EVERYTHING. You can see how either scenario would contribute to delusions of grandeur in an adult. Chinese parents, marvels that they are, do both). It is as if Chinese culture, in its infinate wisdom, actually sat down, perused the DSM VI, found the passage on children who are at risk for NPD, and said, "Hao, hao, this is how we will raise our perfect children."
RiRi also raised the point of other social factors. I imagine that the ethnic nationalism and resultant cultural myopia doesn't help people's egos, any. If the Han people are a blessed people with 5000 years of history who do not need to change ANYTHING, AT ALL, EVER, and anyone who says otherwise should respect China's culture and traditions or risk hurting the feelings of the Chinese people...what kind of individuals are then produced by such thinking?
Don't get me started on face. Chinese mothers here will pay through the nose to buy brand name baby clothes that their kids will grow out of in months. Children are just another way for some parents to flaunt wealth to pick up some face. I've actually seen parents encourage their children to misbehave...because it shows that they are in a position to get away with it. Conversely, no one calls out bad parents on the playground, because they do not want to risk causing loss of face (parallels exist for other asshole behavior in the Middle Kingdom).
gouxiong:
I agree with you that Chinese parenting has a lot of flaws (at least from European point of view).
Nevertheless reading all of this from a person having following life attitude towards problems:
-----------QUOTE-----------
I'm selling her shitty furniture, and then cutting the cord off her refrigerator so that she won't find the damage until after I am long gone. And, no, I won't feel guilty if she actually gives me part of the deposit back because she hasn't seen the damage to her fridge.
-----------UNQUOTE-----------
puts your 'analysis' into the perspective ...
In short, yes I think it has created a huge surge of people that think the world revolves around their every action.
But actually, no matter how much you are in denial and deluded...somewhere in the back of your mind and in your heart... humans ALWAYS know the truth.
This is also why I think Chinese are among some of the most insecure in the world.
It sure has helped, but it's also the style of parenting. Remember guys, Vicky has siblings.
Thanks guys.
A lot of interesting answers and food for thought.
Those of us who are involved in education in China have met a wide range of individuals who have varying degrees of issues: when working in a training school I met a psychotic 14 year old (he had very good English and a knife) and as he was much larger than me I was concerned about personal safety so I refused to be pressured into doing a one-to-one class that his mother wanted.
It is interesting to note that at times despite crap treatment by schools, the teachers here still show a degree of concern of their students.
We all know the lack of involvement when accidents occur, and how locals stand back and watch rather than intervene, lack of empathy being a common issue.
It is even noticeable on this forum when a member admits having a BCD that people are quick to show support, differences are put aside, whereas the Chinese members are less than forthcoming.
In a society that is very resistant to change (traditional), China has so many explosions waiting to happen on so many fronts, mental health not being the least of them.
One wonders what the next generation will be like giving the methods of parenting still popular, as mentioned by Rachel.
ok enough blah blah blah
thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Hulk:
America has a mental health problem as well.
The FBI routinely sets up paranoid schizophrenics, trying to get them to commit crimes, then praising themselves when they finally stop those individuals from the plans the FBI created to begin with. And then the schizos face life imprisonment. Awesome, huh?
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/31/china/china-three-child-policy-intl-hnk/index.html
perhaps narcissism was a good thing short term, but long term may be different, what a change in a decade.
