google in china case study ethics

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Looking Behind Google’s Stand in China

• China has become more emboldened and self-confident as a result of its increasing economic significance.
• Google acted precipitously without giving due consideration to the impact of its announcement on stakeholders.
• The Google issue has become a cause célèbre that exacerbates the already fragile and festering U.S.-China relationship.

Google, the "do no evil" company, gained entry into the Chinese search engine market last decade by agreeing to ban search results on topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese government. To Google's way of thinking, it could do more good for Internet freedom and the cause of human rights by working inside the country to create value for its Chinese users, employees, and business partners. To critics, Google was selling out its core principles to play in the world's second largest economy.

“Google shot themselves in the foot without gaining the moral high ground."

So it was a shocking turn of events on January 12 when Google announced it would pull up stakes in China unless the country agreed to stop censoring search. The precipitating event: an unsuccessful cyber attack from inside China attempting to burrow into the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents. Since the announcement, little has transpired publicly; the two sides are presumably negotiating.

Who are the winners and losers here? Has China been taught a lesson? Has Google been outfoxed? What can other companies learn from this collision of cultures?

Harvard Business School professor John A. Quelch and research associate Katherine E. Jocz have just published a case study, titled Google in China (Case 9-510-071), based on public sources, that delves into some of these issues. We talked with Quelch last week.

Sean Silverthorne: Some see this as a heroic effort by Google to live up to its "do no evil" pillar. But others note the company is turning its back on its Chinese employees, users, partners, and an incredibly large market opportunity that would benefit Google shareholders. What's your view?

John A. Quelch: Google acted precipitously without giving due consideration to the impact of the announcement on stakeholders, including their Chinese employees, consumers, and business partners.

Google's justification is that they are putting a stake in the ground on behalf of human rights. If Google is forced out of China, this could become a rallying cry for Internet freedom worldwide, to the benefit of the Google brand. And eventually, the Chinese regime might change to a more democratic form of government, in which case Google's stand might go down in history as one of seminal moments on China's road to democracy.

But this upside for Google is relatively speculative. The immediate downside consequences are more certain. Google has some 700 employees in China, the best of whom are already finding alternative employment. So de facto, Google is going to be a much smaller entity in China. It seems unlikely to me that many talented Chinese will be lining up for jobs at Google in China going forward.

Google's announcement has also disrupted the plans of a number of important business partners such as Samsung and Motorola, who were all set to launch Android-platform handsets in China. I doubt those partners were notified ahead of time.

Q: OK then, why did Google take this course of action?

A: The hacking incident was probably the last straw in a rather long line of issues.

Sooner or later, Google had to stand up for its principles. They have always been at odds internally as to whether or not being in China, operating a self-censorship approach, is consistent with their "do no evil" philosophy.

Add to this the business fact that only 1 percent of their revenues come from China. There is no reason to suppose that they were going to do any better by being cooperative with the Chinese government.

Interestingly, a resolution had been reached in the prior week on a separate matter involving the China Written Works Copyright Society, which accused Google of failure to inform or pay authors of books it was digitizing. Google issued an apology. My suspicion is there was thought to be a quid pro quo due from the Chinese that failed to materialize.

Q: One point made by your case, perhaps missed by Google, is that companies doing business abroad must be able to see the world through the eyes of the host government.

A: The Chinese government was taken aback by the Google announcement. True to form, they responded very cautiously initially, while they deliberated what to do. The initial Chinese response came from a mid-level spokesperson at the Foreign Ministry, while the initial response from the United States government came from the secretary of state herself—and that perhaps elevated the conflict.

“China certainly is not going to change its ways because of a threat from Google."

Now the Google issue has become a cause célèbre that encapsulates and exacerbates the already fragile and festering U.S.-China relationship. On the other hand, the concern over human rights in China is a big deal for many in the Western world.

The Chinese argue that they allow and support free information flow over the Internet with some restrictions. They contend that the United States doesn't feel any discomfort hacking into the Internet traffic of U.S. citizens who are suspected terrorists in the United States. Rightly or wrongly, the Chinese view the political dissidents and Falun Gong activists whom they attempt to track as equivalent.

Q: It was interesting that no other companies backed Google in this dispute. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called it "Google's problem."

A: Google's announcement was self-confident and unilateral, but they have the market capitalization to back it up.

Among multinationals doing business in China, many others have endured cyber attacks on their private networks, although it is unlikely those attacks had the same human rights implications as the attacks on Google.

Multinationals doing business in China have been almost universal in their unwillingness to publicly support Google. Their view is that Google has needlessly upset the apple cart for everybody else. For many of these multinationals, China is or will soon be their second most important market in the world. That is not true of Google.

Q: If Google is forced to exit China, will it be a blow financially?

A: I don't think so, although they were looking to make progress in China with other lines of business, such as the Android mobile phone platform.

Q: Do you think Google has at least won the PR war here, and raised the flag of human rights in China?

A: Not yet. Today Google is still self-censoring content exactly the same way as they were on January the eleventh. So Google has shot itself in the foot without gaining the moral high ground.

How can you impress your customers and supporters around the world through this announcement if you don't actually follow through?

Q: Best guess: Will this dispute be resolved, or will Google be forced to keep its word and abandon China? Does China need Google more than Google needs China?

A: The Chinese cannot permit Google's public challenge to go unpunished. However, they need not do anything, as the leading employees of Google China are jumping ship to take jobs with Baidu and other competitors. Google will soon be down to a skeleton shift in China and, if they are permitted to stay, they will have a tough time recruiting new employees.

Q: Are there lessons here for other multinationals doing business in emerging economies?

A: Government relations are critical to business effectiveness in developed as well as in emerging economies. But, in emerging economies, where the public sector and government-controlled enterprises are usually a higher percentage of GDP, managing government relations at the national, provincial, and local levels is even more important.

You have to know what you are getting into. You have to know whom you are dealing with, what their expectations are, what their rules are. And you either have to operate on a "when in Rome do as the Romans do" policy, or, if you have a clear set of global values that cannot be compromised, you have to decide which countries are off limits.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act helps U.S. multinationals protect their employees from being compromised. But we have no rules of engagement that bear upon the defense of human rights of citizens in host countries in which our multinationals operate.

Q: What do you make of China's assertiveness of late, not only in the business sphere but in the political world as well?

A: China has become more emboldened and self-confident as a result of its increasing economic significance. China is reluctant to be badgered by Western companies or Western governments into changing its rules and regulations.

The Chinese do not yet understand international public relations and have perhaps too short-term a view. If they have power and are in the driver's seat today, they act very confident. If, on the other hand, they take a hit or two economically, they become more flexible. There is a very short-term transactional aspect to their diplomacy, which is reflected in their unwillingness to bend on these issues. They certainly are not going to change their ways because of a threat from Google.

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The employee backlash over Google’s censored search engine for China, explained

Google employees are angry that the company is making a censored search engine. They can shut it down.

by Alexia Fernández Campbell

Google is experiencing a “moral and ethical” crisis. That’s the view of hundreds of employees at the tech company, who are protesting the development of a censored search engine for internet users in China.

About 1,400 Google employees — out of the more than 88,000 — signed a letter to company executives this week, seeking more details and transparency about the project and demanding employee input in decisions about what kind of work Google takes on. They also expressed concern that the company is violating its own ethical principles.

“Currently we do not have the information required to make ethically-informed decisions about our work, our projects, and our employment,” they wrote in the letter, obtained by the Intercept and the New York Times.

The existence of the censored search tool — dubbed Dragonfly — was revealed earlier this month by the Intercept , sparking outcry within the company’s ranks and drawing harsh criticism from human rights groups across the world. Internal documents leaked to journalists described how the app-based search platform could block internet users in China from seeing web pages that discuss human rights, peaceful protests, democracy and other topics blacklisted by China’s authoritarian government.

Only a small group of Google engineers are reportedly developing the platform for Beijing, and information about the project has been so heavily guarded that only a few hundred Google employees even knew about it. Google has declined to comment publicly on Dragonfly, but Google CEO Sundar Pichai defended the project Thursday during a weekly staff meeting, saying that the project for China is merely in the “ exploratory ” stage.

The internal backlash among employees represents mounting concerns about whether Google has “lost its moral compass” in the corporate pursuit to enrich shareholders. But it also suggests that the people who make Google’s technology have more power in shaping corporate decisions than even shareholders have. In April, thousands of Google employees protested the company’s military contract with the Pentagon — known as project Maven — which developed technology to analyze drone video footage that could potentially identify human targets.

About a dozen engineers ended up resigning over what they viewed as an unethical use of artificial intelligence, prompting Google to let the contract expire in June, and leading executives to promise that they would never use AI technology to harm others.

The fact that Google employees succeeded in forcing one of the most powerful companies in the world to put ethics before shareholder value is a remarkable feat in corporate America, and signals why workers need an official voice in strategic decisions. Whether or not Google ultimately drops its plan to help China censor information will be a test of how far that power extends.

Doing business in China is good for shareholders, bad for humanity

It’s no mystery why Google executives want to do business with Chinese government officials: It’s profitable. With its population at 1.3 billion, China has the largest number of internet users in the world, so breaking into the Chinese market has been a long-time goal for Silicon Valley tech giants in their quest to find new users and to grow profits.

But working in China inevitably raises ethical issues for any US company. Doing business in mainland China means making deals with an authoritarian government that has a record of human rights abuses and a strict suppression of speech.

Despite this, Silicon Valley tech companies have shown a willingness to put aside their idealism — or rationalize their decisions to court Beijing. LinkedIn, for example, has a presence in China because it agreed to block certain online content.

Facebook is still banned in China, but chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to change that. In 2016, news surfaced that Facebook was building a censorship tool similar to Google’s Dragonfly project: It would allow a third-party to block certain Facebook posts in China in exchange for the government’s permission to operate the social media network there. A backlash similar to the Dragonfly controversy ensued, raising concerns about the potential for government officials to use the platform to spy on dissidents and punish them. These concerns led several Facebook employees who worked on the project to resign. That project was in early stages, too, and there’s no evidence that Facebook ever presented the tool to Chinese officials.

But Google’s decision to enter the Chinese market is more unnerving, for several reasons. It’s a striking reversal of the strong stance the company took back in 2010, when it decided to leave China in protest of Chinese government hacking and its crackdown on free speech. The decision also seems at odds with Google’s once-prominent motto “Don’t be evil” and it clashes with the principles the company adopted in June after the Pentagon contract controversy, in which Pichai promised that the company would not to use artificial intelligence to develop technology “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”

Google employees say these kinds of promises are no longer enough, in light of the news about the censorship tool, and they are demanding a more formal role in decisions about the ethical implications of their work.

The push to make employees corporate stakeholders

For the past few decades, rank-and-file workers have had no real influence in how public companies invest profits or make decisions about new revenue streams.

Modern American capitalism has been driven by a singular mission: to bring value to the people who own company stock. Vox’s Matt Yglesias explains how this mentality leads executives to pursue profit above other worthwhile goals.

Therefore, for executives to set aside shareholder profits in pursuit of some other goal like environmental protection, racial justice, community stability, or simple common decency would be a form of theft. If reformulating your product to be more addictive or less healthy increases sales, then it’s not only permissible but actually required to do so. If closing a profitable plant and outsourcing the work to a low-wage country could make your company even more profitable, then it’s the right thing to do.

While its true that CEOs are required by law to prioritize value to shareholders, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are required to make decisions guided only by what maximizes profits. The Supreme Court made this clear in its 2014 opinion in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby.

“Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not,” the justices wrote in their opinion .

Momentum is starting to build to change this dynamic, by giving employees and consumers more power in C-suite discussions. Just this week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D- Massachusetts) introduced a bill that would require large public companies to make decisions not only based on how it would affect shareholders, but also on how it would affect consumers, employees and the communities where the company operates. The bill, titled the Accountable Capitalism Act , would also require corporations to allow employees to elect 40 percent of a company’s board of directors.

The idea behind the bill is to make sure that US corporations are decent citizens. That seems to be the same idea motivating Google employees to make more demands from their employer, which happens to be one of the most powerful companies in the world.

Google employees want a role in evaluating company projects

The response of Google employees to the company’s Dragonfly project for China gives us a glimpse of what might happen if workers had a more formal role in corporate decision making.

In their letter to executives, Google employees make four specific demands. First, they want the company to create a structure to allow rank-and-file employees to review ethical issues in company projects. Second, they want the company to appoint an ombudsman to oversee the ethics review process, with input from employees over who fills the position. Third, they want a plan to ensure Google is transparent with employees about the purpose of the technology the company is developing, so employees can make informed choices about the ethical implications of the work they do. Fourth, they want the company to publish ethical assessments of their projects, such as Dragonfly, and to communicate regularly with employees about issues of concern.

So far, Google executives haven’t said publicly whether or not they will go along. Based on reports describing Thursday’s staff meeting at the company’s California headquarters, the conversation about Dragonfly didn’t get that far. But if Pichai and other executives do go along with the demands, it would certainly reflect a major shift in corporate priorities. And it would show why workers have more power than shareholders: Employees are the ones who literally create value for shareholders, so they need to be on board with what they are creating.

Brandon Downey, a former Google engineer who says he regrets his role in helping develop the company’s first censorship tool in China (before the company backed out of the Chinese market in 2010), wrote a moving essay about what’s at stake:

Google is acting like a traditional company; one that squeezes every dime out of the marketplace, heedless of intangibles like principle, ethical cost, and even at the risk of the safety of its users...If technology is a tool, then it means the people making that tool have a responsibility to curb their tool’s misuse by playing a role in the decisions on how it gets used. And if the people who are the leaders of the company don’t believe this, they should hear it in plainer and clearer terms: namely, you do not become one of the largest companies in the history of capitalism without the assistance of the workers making those tools.

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Business Under Threat, Technology Under Attack, Ethics Under Fire: The Experience of Google in China

• Published: 09 October 2012
• Volume 110 , pages 469–479, ( 2012 )

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• Justin Tan 1 &
• Anna E. Tan 2  

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Although not frequently regarded as controversial, digital communications industries continue to be sites of CSR conflicts, particularly internationally. Investigating CSR issues in the digital communications industry is pertinent because in addition to being one of the fastest growing industries, it has created a host of new CSR issues that require further attention. This case study examines an incident in early 2010, when Google Inc. China and the Chinese government reached an impasse that produced a large-scale, transnational conflict that reached a head ostensibly over state-mandated censorship, ultimately prompting Google to withdraw from the mainland Chinese market and redirect its activities to Hong Kong. We track Google’s experience in China, both to explore its strategies and to consider the implications for corporate social responsibility. We situate Google’s drastic decision to withdraw entirely from mainland China in the complex multiplicity of ethical, cultural, and political conflicts that affect this particular case. On a broader level, the incident raises the question of how multinational corporations (MNCs) can achieve corporate growth while negotiating the highly sensitive sociopolitical and institutional environments of foreign nations.

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Acknowledgments

The purpose of this case study is to illustrate the managerial issues and their implications for research and practice, rather than comment on the effectiveness of the individuals, companies, and governments in handling the situation. The research was in part supported by grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Research assistance from Sophia Zhang is much appreciated.

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Tan, J., Tan, A.E. Business Under Threat, Technology Under Attack, Ethics Under Fire: The Experience of Google in China. J Bus Ethics 110 , 469–479 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-012-1494-0

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-012-1494-0

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How Google took on China—and lost

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Google's first foray into Chinese markets was a short-lived experiment. Google China’s search engine was launched in 2006 and abruptly pulled from mainland China in 2010 amid a major hack of the company and disputes over censorship of search results. But in August 2018, the investigative journalism website The Intercept reported that the company was working on a secret prototype of a new, censored Chinese search engine, called Project Dragonfly. Amid a furor from human rights activists and some Google employees, US Vice President Mike Pence called on the company to kill Dragonfly, saying it would “strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers.” In mid-December, The Intercept reported that Google had suspended its development efforts in response to complaints from the company's own privacy team, who learned about the project from the investigative website's reporting.

Observers talk as if the decision about whether to reenter the world’s largest market is up to Google: will it compromise its principles and censor search the way China wants? This misses the point—this time the Chinese government will make the decisions.

Google and China have been locked in an awkward tango for over a decade, constantly grappling over who leads and who follows. Charting that dance over the years reveals major shifts in China’s relationship with Google and all of Silicon Valley. To understand whether China will let Google back in, we must understand how Google and China got here, what incentives each party faces—and how artificial intelligence might have both of them dancing to a new tune.  

The right thing to do?

When www.google.cn launched in 2006, the company had gone public only two years before. The iPhone did not yet exist, nor did any Android-based smartphones. Google was about one-fifth as large and valuable as it is today, and the Chinese internet was seen as a backwater of knockoff products that were devoid of innovation. Google’s Chinese search engine represented the most controversial experiment to date in internet diplomacy. To get into China, the young company that had defined itself by the motto “Don’t be evil” agreed to censor the search results shown to Chinese users.

Central to that decision by Google leadership was a bet that by serving the market—even with a censored product—they could broaden the horizons of Chinese users and nudge the Chinese internet toward greater openness.

At first, Google appeared to be succeeding in that mission. When Chinese users searched for censored content on google.cn, they saw a notice that some results had been removed. That public acknowledgment of internet censorship was a first among Chinese search engines, and it wasn’t popular with regulators.

“The Chinese government hated it,” says Kaiser Kuo, former head of international communications for Baidu. “They compared it to coming to my house for dinner and saying, ‘I will agree to eat the food, but I don’t like it.’” Google hadn’t asked the government for permission before implementing the notice but wasn’t ordered to remove it. The company’s global prestige and technical expertise gave it leverage. China might be a promising market, but it was still dependent on Silicon Valley for talent, funding, and knowledge. Google wanted to be in China, the thinking went, but China needed Google.

Google’s censorship disclaimer was a modest victory for transparency. Baidu and other search engines in China soon followed suit. Over the next four years, Google China fought skirmishes on multiple fronts: with the Chinese government over content restrictions, with local competitor Baidu over the quality of search results, and with its own corporate leadership in Mountain View, California, over the freedom to adapt global products for local needs. By late 2009, Google controlled more than a third of the Chinese search market—a respectable share but well below Baidu’s 58%, according to data from Analysys International.

The Chinese government cracked down on political speech in 2013, imprisoning critics and instituting new laws against “spreading rumors” online—a one-two punch that suffocated political discussion.

In the end, though, it wasn’t censorship or competition that drove Google out of China. It was a far-­reaching hacking attack known as Operation Aurora that targeted everything from Google’s intellectual property to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The attack, which Google said came from within China, pushed company leadership over the edge. On January 12, 2010, Google announced, “We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.”

The sudden reversal blindsided Chinese officials. Most Chinese internet users could go about their online lives with few reminders of government controls, but the Google announcement shoved cyberattacks and censorship into the spotlight. The world’s top internet company and the government of the most populous country were now engaged in a public showdown.

“[Chinese officials] were really on their back foot, and it looked like they might cave and make some kind of accommodation,” says Kuo. “All of these people who apparently did not give much of a damn about internet censorship before were really angry about it. The whole internet was abuzz with this.”

But officials refused to cede ground. “China welcomes international Internet businesses developing services in China according to the law,” a foreign ministry spokeswoman told Reuters at the time. Government control of information was—and remains—central to Chinese Communist Party doctrine. Six months earlier, following riots in Xinjiang, the government had blocked Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube in one fell swoop, fortifying the “Great Firewall.” The government was making a bet: China and its technology sector did not need Google search to succeed.

Google soon abandoned google.cn, retreating to a Hong Kong–based search engine. In response, the Chinese government decided not to fully block services like Gmail and Google Maps, and for a while it allowed sporadic access from the mainland to the Hong Kong search engine too. The two sides settled into a tense stalemate.

Google’s leaders seemed prepared to wait it out. “I personally believe that you cannot build a modern knowledge society with that kind of [censorship],” Google chairman Eric Schmidt told Foreign Policy in 2012. “In a long enough time period, do I think that this kind of regime approach will end? I think absolutely.”

Role reversal

But instead of languishing under censorship, the Chinese internet sector boomed. Between 2010 and 2015, there was an explosion of new products and companies. Xiaomi, a hardware maker now worth over $40 billion, was founded in April 2010. A month earlier Meituan, a Groupon clone that turned into a juggernaut of online-to-offline services, was born; it went public in September 2018 and is now worth about $35 billion. Didi, the ride-­hailing company that drove Uber out of China and is now challenging it in international markets, was founded in 2012. Chinese engineers and entrepreneurs returning from Silicon Valley, including many former Googlers, were crucial to this dynamism, bringing world-class technical and entrepreneurial chops to markets insulated from their former employers in the US. Older companies like Baidu and Alibaba also grew quickly during these years.

In 2017, the government launched a new crackdown on virtual private networks, software widely used for circumventing censorship.

The Chinese government played contradictory roles in this process. It cracked down on political speech in 2013, imprisoning critics and instituting new laws against “spreading rumors” online—a one-two punch that largely suffocated political discussion on China’s once-raucous social-media sites. Yet it also launched a high-profile campaign promoting “mass entrepreneurship and mass innovation.” Government-funded startup incubators spread across the country, as did government-backed venture capital.

That confluence of forces brought results. Services like Meituan flourished. So did Tencent’s super-app WeChat, a “digital Swiss Army knife” that combines aspects of WhatsApp, PayPal, and dozens of other apps from the West. E-commerce behemoth Alibaba went public on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2014, selling $25 billion worth of shares—still the most valuable IPO in history.

Amidst this home-grown success, the Chinese government decided to break the uneasy truce with Google. In mid-2014, a few months before Alibaba’s IPO, the government blocked virtually all Google services in China, including many considered essential for international business, such as Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Scholar. “It took us by surprise, as we felt Google was one of those valuable properties [that they couldn’t afford to block],” says Charlie Smith, the pseudonymous cofounder of GreatFire, an organization that tracks and circumvents Chinese internet controls.

The Chinese government had pulled off an unexpected hat trick: locking out the Silicon Valley giants, censoring political speech, and still cultivating an internet that was controllable, profitable, and innovative.

AlphaGo your own way

With the Chinese internet blossoming and the government not backing down, Google began to search for ways back into China. It tried out less politically sensitive products—an “everything but search” strategy—but with mixed success.

In 2015, rumors swirled that Google was close to bringing its Google Play app store back to China, pending Chinese government approval—but the promised app store never materialized. This was followed by a partnership with Mobvoi, a Chinese smart-watch maker founded by an ex-Google employee, to make voice search available on Android Wear in China. Google later invested in Mobvoi, its first direct investment in China since 2010.

In March 2017, there were reports that authorities would allow Google Scholar back in. They didn’t. Reports that Google would launch a mobile-app store in China together with NetEase, a Chinese company, similarly came to naught, though Google was permitted to relaunch its smartphone translation app.

Then, in May 2017, a showdown between AlphaGo, the Go-playing program built by Google sibling company DeepMind, and Ke Jie, the world’s number one human player, was allowed to take place in Wuzhen, a tourist town outside Shanghai. AlphaGo won all three games in the match—a result that the government had perhaps foreseen. Live-streaming of the match within China was forbidden, and not only in the form of video: as the Guardian put it, “outlets were banned from covering the match live in any way, including text commentary, social media, or push notifications.” DeepMind broadcast the match outside China.

During this same period, Chinese censors quietly rolled back some of the openings that Google’s earlier China operations had catalyzed. In 2016, Chinese search engines began removing the censorship disclaimers that Google had pioneered. In 2017, the government launched a new crackdown on virtual private networks (VPNs), software widely used for circumventing censorship. Meanwhile, Chinese authorities began rolling out extensive AI-powered surveillance technologies across the country, constructing what some called a “21st-century police state” in the western region of Xinjiang, home to the country’s Muslim Uighurs.

Despite the retrograde climate, Google capped off 2017 with a major announcement: the launch of a new AI research center in Beijing. Google Cloud’s Chinese-born chief scientist, Fei-Fei Li, would oversee the new center. “The science of AI has no borders,” she wrote in the announcement of the center’s launch. “Neither do its benefits.” (Li left Google in September 2018 and returned to Stanford University, where she is a professor.)

If the research center was a public symbol of Google’s continued efforts to gain a foothold in China, Google was also working quietly to accommodate Chinese government restrictions. Dragonfly, the censored- search-engine prototype, which has been demonstrated for Chinese officials, blacklists key search terms; it would be operated as part of a joint venture with an unnamed Chinese partner. The documents The Intercept obtained said the app would still tell users when results had been censored.

Other aspects of the project are particularly troubling. Prototypes of the app reportedly link users’ searches to their mobile-phone number, opening the door to greater surveillance and possibly arrest if people search for banned material.

In a speech to the Dragonfly team, later leaked by The Intercept, Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, explained Google’s aims. China, he said, is “arguably the most interesting market in the world today.” Google was not just trying to make money by doing business in China, he said, but was after something bigger. “We need to understand what is happening there in order to inspire us,” he said. “China will teach us things that we don’t know.”

In early December, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told a Congressional committee that "right now we have no plans to launch in China," though he would not rule out future plans. The question is, if Google wants to come back to China, does China want to let it in?

China’s calculus

To answer that question, try thinking like an advisor to President Xi Jinping.

Bringing Google search back certainly has upsides. China’s growing number of knowledge workers need access to global news and research, and Baidu is notoriously bad at turning up relevant results from outside China. Google could serve as a valuable partner to Chinese companies looking to expand internationally, as it has demonstrated in a patent-sharing partnership with Tencent and a $550 million investment in e-commerce giant JD. Google’s reentry would also help legitimize the Communist Party’s approach to internet governance, a signal that China is an indispensable market—and an open one—as long as you “play by the rules.”

Google’s exit in 2010 marked a major loss of face for the Chinese government. If leaders give the green light to Project Dragonfly, they run that risk again.

But from the Chinese government’s perspective, these potential upsides are marginal. Chinese citizens who need to access the global internet can still usually do so through VPNs (though it is getting harder). Google doesn’t need to have a business in China to help Chinese internet giants gain business abroad. And the giants of Silicon Valley have already ceased their public criticism of Chinese internet censorship, and instead extol the country’s dynamism and innovation.

By contrast, the political risks of permitting Google to return loom large to Xi and his inner circle. Hostility toward both China and Silicon Valley is high and rising in American political circles. A return to China would put Google in a political pressure cooker. What if that pressure—via antitrust action or new legislation—effectively forced the company to choose between the American and Chinese markets? Google’s sudden exit in 2010 marked a major loss of face for the Chinese government in front of its own citizens. If Chinese leaders give the green light to Project Dragonfly, they run the risk of that happening again.

A savvy advisor would be likely to think that these risks—to Xi, to the Communist Party, and to his or her own career—outweighed the modest gains to be had from allowing Google’s return. The Chinese government oversees a technology sector that is profitable, innovative, and driven largely by domestic companies—an enviable position to be in. Allowing Google back in would only diminish its leverage. Better, then, to stick with the status quo: dangle the prospect of full market access while throwing Silicon Valley companies an occasional bone by permitting peripheral services like translation.

Google’s gamble

Google does have one factor in its favor. If it first entered China during the days of desktop internet, and departed at the dawn of the mobile internet, it is now trying to reenter in the era of AI. The Chinese government places high hopes on AI as an all-purpose tool for economic activity, military power, and social governance, including surveillance. And Google and its Alphabet sibling DeepMind are the global leaders in corporate AI research.

This is probably why Google has held publicity stunts like the AlphaGo match and an AI-powered “Guess the Sketch” game on WeChat, as well as taking more substantive steps like establishing the Beijing AI lab and promoting Chinese use of TensorFlow, an artificial-intelligence software library developed by the Google Brain team. Taken together, these efforts constitute a sort of artificial-intelligence lobbying strategy designed to sway the Chinese leadership.

This pitch, however, faces problems on at least three battlegrounds: Beijing; Washington, DC; and Mountain View, California.

Chinese leaders have good reason to feel they’re already getting the best of both worlds. They can take advantage of software development tools like TensorFlow and they still have a prestigious Google research lab to train Chinese AI researchers, all without granting Google market access.

In Washington, meanwhile, American security officials are annoyed that Google is actively courting a geopolitical rival while refusing to work with the Pentagon on AI projects because its employees object to having their work used for military ends.

Those employees are the key to the third battleground. They’ve demonstrated the ability to mobilize quickly and effectively, as with the protests against US defense contracts and a walkout last November over how the company has dealt with sexual harassment. In late November more than 600 Googlers signed an open letter demanding that the company drop the Dragonfly project, writing, “We object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable.” Daunting as these challenges sound—and high as the costs of pursuing the Chinese market may be—they haven’t entirely deterred Google’s top brass. Though the development of Dragonfly appears to have, at the very least, paused, the wealth and dynamism that make China so attractive to Google also mean the decision of whether or not to do business there is no longer the company’s to make.

“I know people in Silicon Valley are really smart, and they’re really successful because they can overcome any problem they face,” says Bill Bishop, a digital-media entrepreneur with experience in both markets. “I don’t think they’ve ever faced a problem like the Chinese Communist Party.”

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Please note you do not have access to teaching notes, google and the government of china: a case study in cross-cultural negotiations.

Publication date: 20 January 2017

Teaching notes

Based on the negotiation between Google and the Chinese government to allow access by Chinese citizens to a high-speed Chinese version of the Google search engine. In order to reach agreement with the Chinese government, Google had to agree to allow the government to censor access to some sites turned up by Google's search engine. In agreeing, Google compromised its open-access policy. There were inquiries into the agreement by the U.S. Congress and some outcry from U.S. citizens.

To learn how to analyze a negotiation from the perspective of each party when one is a government and the other a private-sector organization; a subpoint here is the difference between short-term and longer-term interests. To address the difficulties of balancing business ethics and financial objectives; an important point here is to address what it means to be ethical in a for-profit business environment. To understand the long-term effects of short-term actions.

• Negotiations
• Negotiation Strategies
• Business and Politics
• Conflict Management
• Cross-Cultural Relations
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• International Business

Grogan, C. and Brett, J. (2017), "Google and the Government of China: A Case Study in Cross-Cultural Negotiations", . https://doi.org/10.1108/case.kellogg.2016.000140

Kellogg School of Management

Copyright © 2006, The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University

You do not currently have access to these teaching notes. Teaching notes are available for teaching faculty at subscribing institutions. Teaching notes accompany case studies with suggested learning objectives, classroom methods and potential assignment questions. They support dynamic classroom discussion to help develop student's analytical skills.

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• Published: 24 August 2024

Connecting gender role attitudes among China’s youth to perceptions of the state: a bottom-up approach

• Tingting Hu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6479-0337 1 ,
• Tianru Guan 2 &
• Yilu Yang 3  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  1082 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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The present study examines the gender–state dynamics in the Chinese context through a bottom-up approach by adopting an online survey method. We find four indicators, which are male priority, child suffering, gender ideology, marriage and fertility, could reflect one common factor—gender egalitarianism, and we utilize this scale to measure gender role attitudes among China’s youth, as well as explore their psycho-political antecedents including system justification theory, national identification, and life satisfaction. The survey findings suggest a close interconnection between the construction of family and nation. The study’s outcomes offer valuable insights into the ongoing progress and challenges relating to gender equality as perceived by young people in China. Furthermore, these findings establish a refined measurement instrument for future empirical studies in this domain.

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Revisiting gender and the state.

Gender and the state are integrally bound, and the dynamic interplay between the two has long been studied in various disciplines including gender and cultural studies, feminist studies and political studies. Feminist approaches — such as radical, liberal, socialist, post-structural and Nordic feminisms — have offered a strong strand among such disciplines, all of which confirm the significance of China’s state impact on gender. To be specific, liberal feminists view the state as reflecting the interest groups that control its institutions, which are dominated by men and adopt male-preferred policies (e.g., Enloe, [1990] 2014 ). Whereas liberal feminists regard the state in terms of its political functions, radical feminists extend their interest to the broader structures of the state and society by showing the practices’ patriarchal nature operating within broader decision-making processes (Mackinnon, 1989 ). By distinction, socialist feminists pursue a particular focus on class oppression, and understand the state as a dual system of capitalist and patriarchal oppression (Eisenstein, 1979 ). While all of these approaches tend to generalize the state as a unitive notion, post-structural feminists and Nordic feminists highlight the differences between states, and call for ways of thinking about the state that move beyond the narrow understanding of a monolithic entity (Kantola, 2006 ). For post-structural feminists, the state is a distinguished set of institutions, agencies and discourses, which is not inherently patriarchal but is culturally constructed as such through the political process (Connell, 1987 ). Hernes ( 1987 ), as a key scholar among Nordic feminists, deemed Nordic states as being potentially women-friendly societies where state policies support women’s political and social empowerment.

The state apparatus is often seen to be a leading force in shaping the gender relations that affect social change. Connell ( 1990 , pp. 519–32) summarized six perspectives through which to see the dynamic interplay between the state and gender issues: (1) the state operates within gender relations as the central institutionalization of gendered power; (2) the state is a gendered institution marked by its internal gender regime; (3) the state has the capacity to regulate gender relations; (4) state activity helps to form the social categories that define gender relations; (5) the state is a major stakeholder in gender politics; (6) as a gendered institution, the state is liable to transformation and crisis. Further, Young ( 2002 ) proposed that gender works along three irreducible axes: the sexual division of labor (or the allocation of productive and reproductive activities by sex), normative heterosexuality, and hierarchies of power. Hence, it can be seen that gender relations in a society are predominantly driven by hierarchal power, with the state playing a primary role. We consider the same to be true of the gender discourse in China.

Gender discourse in china

Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism are regarded as the three major influencers on traditional Chinese gender discourse, with Confucianism being the most dominant. For more than two thousand years, as the state ideology in China, Confucianism maintained the features of heterosexual hegemony, male dominance and female subordination. Although banished in 1949 with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC hereafter), and remaining in theoretical exile for the 30 years that Marxism was the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP hereafter) guiding ideological principle, the canonization of Confucianism returned in the reform era, gaining prominence once again in the 1990s. In Confucian discourse, gender division can be understood through the nei-wai framework, which is founded on assigning men to the realm of wai (the public sphere, where extra-familial relations and personal accomplishment mainly take place) and women to the realm of nei (the domestic sphere, which primarily refers to concealment, familial and kinship relations, and practical household management) (Rosenlee, 2006 ). This framework is quite similar to the Western feminist perspectives that also emphasize the division of private and public spheres that stem from the early industrialization context.

In the new millennium, instead of being abandoned as an obsolete theory, Confucianism has been continuously upheld by the government as an essential component of Chinese culture, with PRC authorities attempting to reclaim control over the use of Confucius and Confucianism as national icons (Chua, 2001 ). The PRC has utilized some particularly favorable aspects of Confucianism, such as respect for authorities, devotion to the state, social harmony, obedience to superiors, and protection of the family to regulate the people and stabilize society (Chen, 2011 ; Song, 2003 ). In this way, women’s domestic roles have been advocated under the umbrella of marriage by connecting the CCP’s political purpose with re-engaging Confucian values. This has been viewed as a necessary measure for preserving social stability and Ji et al. ( 2017 , 768) have called this phenomenon ‘socialism-and Confucian-patriarchy hybrid gender (in)equality’.

Based on this consistent gender inequality, along with changing gender ideologies in China, Ji et al. ( 2017 ) have framed the two-sphere division in mainland China in light of Song’s ( 2011 , 2012 ) model of ‘private embedded[ness] in the public sphere’ and Zuo and Jiang ( 2009 ) model of ‘construction of family and state’ (cited in Ji et al., 2017 , 766-7). In doing so, they argue that the apparent gender equality of the socialist era was enforced by the state and then further justified by changing gender ideologies. Being context-specific, while the pathways toward two-sphere division rely on a society’s specific historical situations and institutional configurations, the Chinese state’s path has been facilitated primarily by the withdrawal of social services and a decided muting of its egalitarian gender ideology.

While studies by Ji et al. ( 2017 ) and Song ( 2011 , 2012 ), as well as Zuo and Jiang ( 2009 ) models, have theorized China’s gender-state dynamics from top-down perspectives, the current study engages in the discussion from a bottom-up vantage point. As Mamonova ( 2019 ) contends, propagandistic messages without a pre-existing social base tend to be ineffective and are ultimately rejected. From this perspective, we believe that gender inequality in contemporary China is not only driven by top-down state regulation, but also necessarily coexists with public opinions toward gender role attitudes. It attempts to develop a comprehensive and operational scale through which to evaluate gender role attitudes among China’s young people (age group 18–35), as well as investigate the psycho-political antecedents of such attitudes. This study focuses on China’s youth for two reasons. On the one hand, young people are at a stage in life where they are actively forming their beliefs, attitudes, and values. Investigating gender role attitudes during this formative period allows us to understand how Chinese societal norms and expectations influence the development of these attitudes. On the other hand, young people are often at the forefront of social and cultural change, and may challenge traditional gender norms and contribute to the evolution of more inclusive and equitable attitudes. Given the long-term education of China’s youth is emphasized by a top-down, traditionalist approach, studying their attitudes toward gender roles can offer insights into the extent to which compliance or resistance to gender role attitudes may relate to their perception of the Chinese state.

Literature review

The gender–state interplay in China has long been debated in the literature. Studies have predominantly approached the matter from a top-down perspective, exploring ways in which the Chinese government has constructed the gender inequality discourse, and how gender relations have been shaped by gender-related policies and state-promoted norms such as birth planning policies (e.g., Wong, 1997 ) and the resurgence of Confucianism (e.g., Ji et al., 2017 ). Top-down studies typically argue that state policies, such as birth planning, have played a key role in shaping China’s gender inequality. Studies from the bottom-up perspective, by contrast, remain limited. A few scholars have paid attention to regional comparisons among gender role attitudes in the Chinese context. For instance, comparative research on Taiwan and mainland China suggests that the latter region shows a higher tendency to support women working for pay and is less inclined to relegate women solely to domestic roles, in comparison to the Taiwanese respondents. On the other hand, Taiwanese individuals are more likely than their Chinese counterparts to approve of women working both outside the home and choosing to stay at home (Yang, 2016 ).

Besides regional comparisons, women and youth have long been the study foci of gender role attitudes in China. Women-centered studies are predominantly conducted from the perspectives of women’s education, marital status and motherhood roles. Shu ( 2004 ) suggested that individuals with higher levels of education tend to endorse more egalitarian gender attitudes, and this influence is particularly pronounced for women, indicating a significant empowerment effect for them. According to Zhang ( 2015 ), marital happiness showed a negative correlation between wives’ relative incomes to that of their husbands and a positive correlation with traditional breadwinner role attitudes. Zhang et al. ( 2007 ) also indicated the connections between mothers’ attitudes toward gender and educational aspirations by arguing that mothers who adhere to traditional gender values tend to exhibit more pronounced gender bias in their aspirations for their daughters. By contrast, mothers with sons are more responsive to their children’s school engagement when forming educational aspirations compared to mothers with daughters.

More importantly, young people have long been a focus group for scholars to engage with the socio-psychological effects of gender role attitudes. For instance, Gui ( 2019 ) investigated the correlation between gender role attitudes and psychological well-being among undergraduates living in either rural or urban areas. The study revealed that female students exhibited more gender egalitarian attitudes than their male counterparts, highlighting a rural–urban disparity. In another study, Koo et al. ( 2020 ) delved into the gender ideologies of youth in post-socialist China, identifying three distinct gender ideology profiles: egalitarian, essentialist, and neutral groups. The research showcased a co-existence of continuing egalitarian attitudes in families and a surge of essentialist attitudes in employment in China. These findings underscore the complexity of evolving gender role attitudes in different societal domains.

These works collectively demonstrate that youth are not merely a convenient sample for research, but a dynamic group influenced by various demographic factors. They actively participate in gender-related social activities, providing valuable insights into the changing landscape of gender role attitudes for future research.

The authors find three interrelated gaps in the current literature. The first involves extending the investigations of China’s gender issues beyond the top-down perspective. The majority of research on the relationship between China’s gender inequality and state intervention focuses on policies and strategies adopted by the government, as well as their ideological functions. Much less attention has been paid to the bottom-up perspective on China’s gender-related issues. The authors believe that research on public opinion, and of young people in particular, toward China’s gender–state interplay contributes to sketching out a comprehensive understanding of the current gender norms in China, which can provide insights into the feasibility, durability and social impact of gender-related policies.

Second, extant studies on Chinese gender attitudes from the bottom-up approach, which usually adopt a survey method, tend to be apolitical and look at youth mentation from cultural and demographic perspectives. Such studies, be they sociological or psychological, rarely incorporate individuals’ political ideations into their research design or measurements. Since, in the Chinese context, the state has created gender policies and significantly shaped gender ideologies, the gender–state dynamic should also be considered from the bottom-up — we want to know the nature of the political and psychological forces that shape gender role attitudes in China.

Third, as the majority of research on China’s gender attitudes relies on measurements provided by the World Value Survey (WVS), or the European Value Survey (EVS, full details can be found here: http://www.europeanvaluesstudy.eu/ ), an important dimension of Chinese people’s gender ideology — individual viewpoints regarding marriage and fertility — is usually omitted. Due to the heavy influence of traditional Confucian thought on young people’s education and gender values, marriage has been regarded as a significant and legitimate form of social recognition through which to define a person in Chinese society. Therefore, a more comprehensive measurement scale that incorporates the nuances of Chinese gender values is still absent.

The current study, therefore, aims to fill these gaps by building up a more comprehensive and operational measurement scale to better delineate various indicators of young Chinese people’s gender role attitudes. Then, it also investigates the psycho-political antecedents of youth’s gender role attitudes, specifically focusing on three aspects: system justification theory, national identification, and life satisfaction.

The psycho-political antecedents of gender role attitudes among china’s youth

System justification.

According to system justification theory (SJT), system-justifying beliefs serve a psychologically palliative function that can fulfil individuals’ underlying needs through the justification and defence of the current system, even when that system is unfavorable to them or others (Jost and Banaji, 1994 ; Jost et al., 2004 ). From this perspective, activities that resist or counter the status quo can motivate system-justifying individuals to justify their view of the current system as legitimate and desirable (Jost and Banaji, 1994 ; Jost et al., 2004 ). System justification beliefs have been viewed as a significant psycho-political driving force in influencing individuals’ gender role attitudes. For instance, Yeung et al. ( 2014 ) sought to identify the role of system justification in Western rejections of feminism, concluding that anti-feminist backlash can be motivated by system justification.

As discussed in the last section, the public and private realms in China have long been intertwined, with the resurgence of Confucianism in post-socialist China reinforcing patriarchal dominance and encouraging women’s retreat from the public realm back to that of the family. Based on the state’s long-lasting intervention with gender relations, we presume that people who favor the socio-political system might have higher levels of acceptance toward the current situation of gender inequality and be more likely to advocate traditional Confucian values. Hence, we are interested in examining the correlation between young people’s gender role attitudes and their system justification beliefs from a bottom-up approach.

Question 1: Are gender role attitudes among China’s youth influenced by system justification beliefs?

National identification

Studies have shown gender norms and identities that are negotiated with national identification in cultures such as the United States (Rice, 2018 ), Northern Europe (Tienari et al., 2005 ), Germany (Himmel and Baptista, 2016 ), Ireland (MacPherson, 2012 ), Australia (Wickes et al., 2006 ), the Muslim world (Moghadam, 1994 ) and Africa (Smith, 2013 ). Yet, none have tested the correlation between gender role attitudes and national identification. As Confucianism has long been upheld as the cultural pride of Chinese civilization, we postulate that those who value their Chinese national identity more might be less resistant to the CCP’s Confucian cultivation and more likely to accept traditional gender values, thereby showing more tolerant attitudes toward the current situation of gender inequality in contemporary China.

Particularly for young people, China Daily reported a survey in 2018 showing that Chinese youth possess an extremely high degree of national identity (China Daily, 2018 ). Further, Dai and Chu ( 2019 ) showed that the strength of national identification and intergroup attitudes of Chinese youth is predominantly affected by Confucian ethics, media influence, and historical complexities. Based on such foregoing ideas, we would like to examine whether Chinese young people’s gender role attitudes are correlated with their national identification.

Question 2: Are gender role attitudes among China’s youth influenced by the extent to which they value Chinese national identity?

Life satisfaction

Studies have shown gender role attitudes to be related to psychological well-being, with life satisfaction being one of the most frequently researched aspects. Specifically, gender role satisfaction has been proven to positively correlate with life satisfaction in Iran and Norway (Soltanpanah et al., 2018 ), and in Turkey (Çetinkaya and Gençdoğan, 2014 ). While the relationship between traditional gender role attitudes and satisfaction with those roles is affected by culture, greater gender role satisfaction is not always predicted by more egalitarian gender values (Burns and Homel, 1986 ). Indeed, some studies have found that women’s life satisfaction might be negatively correlated with their egalitarian attitudes — women who work longer than their husbands have a significantly lower degree of life satisfaction (Lepinteur et al., 2016 ). Also notable, while women’s employment status has a positive impact on their life and work satisfaction, their marriage and family life are shown to suffer from it (Park, 1991 ). Gui ( 2019 ) claims that in the Chinese context, women having traditional gender role attitudes tend to possess worse subjective health and lower life satisfaction. These results are consistent with the research findings from studies conducted in the UK (Sweeting et al., 2014 ) and the Netherlands (van de Vijver, 2007 ). Thus, inspired by the idea that China’s youth might be more gender egalitarian, and that people with more gender egalitarian attitudes do not always have a higher level of life satisfaction, we are interested in studying how young people’s life satisfaction in China correlates with their gender role attitudes.

Question 3: Are gender role attitudes among China’s youth influenced by the level of life satisfaction?

Participants and design

This study has two aims: to develop a comprehensive, operational scale to capture and measure gender role attitudes among China’s youth, and to investigate some psycho-political antecedents and motives for their attitudes on gender issues. To achieve these aims, we conducted an online survey of young Chinese respondents and analyzed the data through exploratory factor analysis and correlative and regression models.

A total of 1200 participants were initially recruited from online access panels, with a quota procedure of age, gender and educational levels being applied. After eliminating ineligible participants, duplicates, and anyone who took <180 s Footnote 1 to complete the survey, 932 participants were retained. Then, as this paper focuses on the youth’s gender attitudes, we further eliminated participants aged over 35 years Footnote 2 . Finally, 885 participants were retained. All respondents were Chinese citizens. Recruitment of participants and the collection of data were conducted through the crowdsourcing platform Wenjuanxing during October and November 2019. Wenjuanxing is widely acknowledged as a professional online survey tool in China, frequently employed for China-related social studies. To ensure the integrity of our data, we engaged Wenjuanxing’s paid sample service, which boasts a registered membership exceeding 2.6 million users. Wenjuanxing offers a pragmatic solution that fuses online surveys with local Web 2.0 services. The questionnaires hosted on Wenjuanxing could be directly distributed via WeChat, accompanied by virtual cash incentives enclosed as red packets. This innovative approach has proven highly effective in motivating respondents to complete online surveys. Compensation for our participants amounted to 6 Chinese RMB (refer to Table 1 for demographic information below).

Wenjuanxing emerged as an optimal choice for this online survey due to several factors: (1) the availability of a free version; (2) the capability to distribute virtual cash incentives via WeChat — a versatile and immensely popular instant messaging application in China; and (3) the extensive prevalence of smartphones and online applications throughout the country. It is important to acknowledge, however, that despite its practical utility, Wenjuanxing does not provide a random sample of the Chinese population. Consequently, the results derived from this sample should be interpreted with this limitation in mind.

Variables and measurement

Gender egalitarianism.

The term ‘gender role attitudes’ refers to the views held by individuals regarding the roles men and women should play in society. The term is mostly used with respect to the distinction between paid and unpaid work, as van der Horst ( 2014 ) illustrated. When individuals agree that a traditional division of labor between men and women – with men in the role of breadwinner and women in the role of homemaker – is advisable, they are considered to have traditional gender role attitudes. When they do not agree with such a division of labor, and instead want a more equal division of labor, they are considered to have egalitarian or modern gender role attitudes. ‘Gender egalitarianism’ is “the degree to which a collective minimizes gender inequality” (House et al., 2004 , 30) for the present study concerns the extent to which the participants hold gender role attitudes toward gender equality in the Chinese context.

The measures of gender role attitudes included in many representative international and national omnibus surveys have been being developed since the 1970s, with most focusing on the traditional roles of men and women. Quantitative studies examining the change in gender role attitudes since the end of the 1970s have shown that traditional gender role attitudes have declined, and that egalitarian attitudes have increased (e.g., Cotter et al., 2011 ; Lee et al., 2007 ). Although gender role attitudes vary between different groups in a society, people who are well-educated, less religious, unmarried, and post-materialist are found to be more egalitarian (Inglehart and Norris, 2003 ). Also, shifts toward industrial and postindustrial society have been shown to lead to more egalitarian values (Walter, 2018 ).

Most studies evaluating gender role attitudes rely on the measures provided in surveys, with the EVS being the most frequently used. For instance, data from the EVS has been adopted to study age and sex differences in gender role attitudes in Luxembourg (Valentova, 2013 ), women’s roles in the public sphere in Italy (Lomazzi, 2017a ), and gender role attitudes toward female employment, fertility and religiosity across diversified countries (Arpino et al., 2015 ; Guetto et al., 2015 ). In measuring attitudes toward gender roles, the EVS is considered a trustworthy cross-national survey program used prolifically to investigate European values in an increasing number of countries (Lomazzi, 2017b ).

This study adopts the indicators developed by Shorrocks ( 2018 ) based on the EVS to measure gender role attitudes among China’s youth: the male priority indicator a typical question is ‘Men have more right to a job than women’; the child suffering indicator (a typical question is ‘A preschool child is likely to suffer if his or her mother works’); the home and children indicator (a typical question is ‘A job is alright, but what most women really want is a home and children’); and the housewife indicator (a typical question is ‘Being a housewife is just as fulfilling as working for pay’).

It is demonstrated that the home and children indicator and the housewife indicator focus on some similar and essentialist beliefs about women’s preferences toward the trade-off between employment and family life, which are sometimes referred to as ‘gender ideology’ (e.g., Braun et al., 1994 ). Therefore, this study combines the above two indicators with one gender ideology indicator.

Considering that marriage and fertility have long been an important concern in Chinese attitudes toward gender issues, the authors then added a new indicator — marriage and fertility . In the traditional Chinese context, men are allocated the public sphere and women the private, with women serving limited functional roles — daughter, wife, and mother — which are regarded as subservient to and perpetuating the patrilineal line. In this circumstance, unless being attached to a male leader (a husband, a father or a son) or situated in a familial structure, the female personhood is barely realized. The distinction between men and women in the Chinese social system is bespoken by the disparity between the public and private realms (Rosenlee, 2006 ). In this discourse, with the privileged man regarded as the sole bearer of the patrilineage, it is rare for a woman who is able to be endowed with a permanent social place of her own to achieve this without getting married. Thus, marriage becomes a woman’s only legitimate social recognition. However, men do not confront this situation, which is to say that a definitive marker of womanhood is marriage (Rosenlee, 2006 ). Thus, with the revitalization of Confucianism in contemporary China, marriage and fertility are still considered predominantly in terms of gender issues.

The newly added marriage and fertility indicator consists of three questions to measure Chinese attitudes and stances toward marriage and fertility. Typical items include: ‘A female is a failure if she is over 27 years old but does not have a husband or boyfriend’. Participants indicated their degree of agreement or disagreement with each item on a 7-point scale.

It is necessary to note that in Shorrocks ( 2018 ) and some other research, the distinctive indicators of gender role attitudes are shown to be weakly related to each other, and are often used separately (e.g., Crompton and Harris, 1997 ). However, this study empirically tests through exploratory factor analysis whether or not the abovementioned four indicators could be treated as a holistic index in the Chinese context.

System justifying beliefs

In measuring general system-justifying attitudes, the study used a brief version of Kay and Jost’s ( 2003 , 282) system justification scale (SJS): ‘In general, I find society to be fair’; ‘In general, China’s political system operates as it should’; ‘China is one of the best countries in the world to live in’; ‘Most policies in China serve the greater good’; ‘Everyone has a fair shot at wealth and happiness’; and ‘The Chinese society is set up so that people usually get what they deserve’. Conventionally, when justifying the legitimacy of a given system, a crucial notion is the ‘fairness’ of the given system. However, the Chinese context also emphasizes the ‘efficiency’ of the system — namely, its capacity to develop the nation and improve individuals’ lives. As such, the author has included two additional items to gauge the general system-justifying beliefs of the Chinese people: ‘Compared with other nations, China’s polity has a distinctive advantage in developing the country and implementing policies’; and ‘The Chinese people’s dramatically rising living standard should be mainly attributed to the Communist Party of China and the government’. Participants indicated their degree of agreement or disagreement with each item on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Higher scores indicate greater general system-justifying attitudes ( M  = 4.75, SD  = 1.04, Cronbach’s α = 0.89).

National identification, satisfaction with life, and demographics

When measuring national identification and satisfaction with life, this study used adapted versions of the National Identification Scale (Huddy and Khatib, 2007 ), and the Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener et al., 1985 ), respectively. Typical items include ‘Being Chinese is very important to me’ (national identification, M  = 5.63, SD  = 1.17, Cronbach’s α = 0.84) and ‘In most ways, my life is close to my ideal’ (satisfaction with life, M  = 3.92, SD  = 1.23, Cronbach’s α = 0.84). The answers ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Higher scores indicate greater identification with China and higher satisfaction with life. Full items are shown in the online supplementary data. In addition, participants also provided their demographic details, consisting of sex, age, and highest educational qualifications.

To investigate whether the four indicators of gender role attitudes ( male priority , child suffering , gender ideology , and marriage and fertility ) could reflect a common factor, which is a holistic index in the Chinese context, this study first computed an exploratory factor analysis to examine the factor structure. The number of factors to be extracted was determined by factor eigenvalues above 1.0. The size of the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy, KMO = 0.81, and Bartlett’s test of sphericity, (6) = 1817.31, p  < 0.001, indicated that the items had an adequate common variance for exploratory factor analysis. A principal components analysis was conducted on four indicators of the scale: male priority , child suffering , gender ideology , and marriage and fertility . The scores of the four indicators were calculated as the mean of the items of each concept. The results of the exploratory factor analysis indicated the existence of one factor with >1.0 and a corresponding value of 4.47. As reported in Table 2 , factor loadings indicated that all four indicators loaded onto the dominant factor, which explained 72.30% of the variance. Based on these results and the criteria indicated above, the unidimensional factor structure was preferred. An overall score of belief in gender role attitudes was, therefore, calculated as the mean of the four indicators’ scores. Cronbach’s for this overall factor was very good (0.87).

The results of exploratory factor analysis illustrate that the four indicators of gender role attitudes are strongly related to each other, and thus reflect a common factor. While in most Western contexts, ‘male priority’, ‘child suffering’ and ‘gender ideology’ seem to reflect some conceptually distinct indicators that can be only weakly related to each other, and thus are often treated separately (e.g., Crompton and Harris, 1997 ; Shorrocks, 2018 ), our study demonstrates that for the contemporary Chinese generation, these three indicators are strongly connected, along with our identified indicator of ‘marriage and fertility’. The four indicators jointly reflect and configure the Chinese people’s perceptions, ideological stances, and beliefs regarding gender issues.

To examine the associations between gender role attitudes among the respondents and the other remaining variables, bivariate correlations were then conducted (see Table 3 ). The correlation coefficients indicate that gender role attitudes are correlated with all political variables at different significance levels. This is negatively associated with system justification, satisfaction with life and national identification. Demographic variables matter as well: gender egalitarianism has negative correlations with both gender and age, while it has positive correlations with educational qualification. The results demonstrate that Chinese people who endorse a higher level of egalitarian gender role attitudes hold more negative attitudes toward the social and political system, weaker national identification, and are less satisfied with their lives. On the contrary, Chinese people who show a lower level of egalitarian gender role attitudes (‘gender chauvinism’) tend to believe that their society and polity are in the right order, maintain greater national identification, and are more satisfied with life.

Multiple regression analyses — with intercepts — were conducted to estimate the relationship between gender role attitudes among the respondents and all other predictor variables. The result of regression analysis is shown in Table 4 . The ordinary least squares estimation results indicate that the overall regression is significant (F(6, 878) = 58.01 , p  < 0.001). According to the Table 4 , system justification has significant effect on gender role attitudes. In addition, satisfaction with life, gender, and age have significant negative effects on gender role beliefs, confirming our findings from the bivariate correlation between these variables. Remarkably, our female participants demonstrated a significantly higher level of egalitarian gender role attitudes than male participants.

Discussion and conclusion

In this article, we first found four indicators, which are male priority, child suffering, gender ideology, marriage and fertility, could reflect one common factor which is gender egalitarianism. This approach sets up a new, refined measurement instrument for future empirical studies of gender role attitudes widely applicable in a Chinese context. Then, we investigated the correlation between young people’s gender role attitudes and their perception of the state. In this way, it can be explained that these four aspects are closely related to the youth mindset regarding gender issues, which are highly influenced by the state-advocated culture and socio-political system. This is essentially consistent with the traditional division between the realms of nei and wai (Rosenlee, 2006 ), where women who are positioned in the nei realm are allocated domestic work and household management, while men are expected to engage in the extensive wai realm, where literary learnings and the political sphere are primarily involved. Such a division echoes China’s current revitalization of Confucianism in the new millennium, advocated by the PRC authorities as an essential component of Chinese culture and used to reclaim control over the use of Confucius and Confucianism as national icons (Chua, 2001 ). Particular elements of doctrine include respect for authorities, devotion to the state, social harmony, obedience to superiors, and protection of the family, and are utilized to regulate the people and stabilize society (Chen, 2011 ; Song, 2003 ). This revitalization also bespeaks the current perception of gender role attitudes among China’s youth as these attitudes are heavily influenced by such cultural discourse. Such phenomenon has been called ‘socialism-and Confucian-patriarchy hybrid gender (in)equality’ by Ji et al. ( 2017 , 768), who argue that the apparent gender equality of the socialist era was enforced by the state and then further justified by changing gender ideologies. The theorization of nei - wai contributes to understanding the cultural and historical spatial binary of men and women corresponding to Confucianism, whilst the newly added marriage and fertility indicator helps to ameliorate the scale of gender role attitudes in the Chinese context by measuring a consistently existent and heavily influential socio-cultural discourse.

Further, we elucidate the complicated and dynamic pathways through which young people’s gender role attitudes in China correlate with their general system-justifying beliefs, national identification, and life satisfaction, respectively. Although young people in China are believed to be more gender-egalitarian than the older generation (Koo et al., 2020 ), their degrees of gender egalitarianism vary, revealing different levels of support toward the current political system. Echoing Zuo and Jiang ( 2009 ) model of ‘construction of family and state’ (cited in Ji et al., 2017 ), our results show that gender role attitudes perceived by China’s young are essentially impacted by their stance toward the current political system and the values that the state is promoting. This implies a strong relationship between family and nation in the Chinese context.

For the first research question on whether young people in China with less gender-egalitarian attitudes are more likely to be motivated by system justification, the results suggest they are more likely to have the mindset of justifying the existing socio-political system. In other words, as the Chinese state plays a key role in constructing the present gender norms, young people who favor the current socio-political system tend to support the gender relations it shapes, as a part of supporting the general system. As we discussed in the introduction, Chinese tendencies toward traditional perceptions of gender are derived not only from the long-lasting cultural worship of Confucian thought but also by the state-supported revitalization of Confucianism as a national strategy to stabilize the society and regulate the people. From a top-down perspective, the domestic roles of women are reinforced to promote a retreat to the domestic arena, as marriage is believed necessary to maintain social stability through connecting the government’s political purposes with Confucian values. Restless young single men are seen as a threat to the foundation of Chinese society, while young single women are seen not only as a threat to its moral fabric, but also as free agents, unnatural in failing their duty to carry a child and tame a man (Fincher, 2016 ). In addition, calling for women’s familial roles and compliance with men and the nation is seen as the central power’s systematic strategy to handle the employment crisis, financial pressures and the working-age labor’s decrease (Fincher, 2018 ). From a bottom-up perspective, our study corroborates the coherence of public opinions toward traditional gender values and system support among China’s youth, where the top-down state reinforcement of gender inequality aimed at solving social problems and achieving social stability is shown to be working, at least to those who embrace traditional gender values.

For the second research question on whether young people with more gender-egalitarian attitudes are more or less likely to value their Chinese national identity, the results indicate those who are less gender egalitarian tend to exhibit stronger national identification. That is to say, they have a stronger sense of being Chinese. As the Chinese nation has long been represented as ‘a big family’ for Chinese people, President Xi has become established in the media as the father presiding over the family nation. This is to say that a strong, masculine leadership, represented by Xi as ‘the paternalistic patriarch’, is needed for the nation, which is regarded as a big, male-dominated family (Fincher, 2018 , 65). To maintain the harmony of the ‘big family’, small families also need to be harmonious. Instead of the individual, a family is seen as a stable social unit in both traditional and contemporary China under the CCP’s governance. Beyond the basic socio-economic functions, a family constitutes a unique social security system that takes responsibility for its ageing members (Eastman, 1988 ). In China, as a country characterized by a hierarchical power structure, the family is a social institution that bespeaks a cultural value possessing a set of norms that encourage the social practices of individuals. As Ning ( 1993 ) illustrated, particularly in the CCP-ruled contemporary China, Confucianism has sanctioned such hierarchical power relations within the patriarchal family structure. Thus, it can be seen that conceiving of self-belonging to the family nation might lead to the acceptance of the state-driven, Confucian-oriented, traditional gender values. Put simply, the more people that acknowledge themselves to be a part of this ‘big family’, the more likely they are to comply with the current condition of gender inequality.

At this point, the media and educational institutions play a significant role in shaping attitudes and beliefs in the context of mainland Chinese, where the media and educational systems may reinforce the idea of a strong national identity, especially emphasizing collective values and unity, which is prioritized over gender egalitarianism. On the one hand, China’s young people “have deep-seated emotional attachments to their national identity” (Gries, 2007 : 18). On the other hand, modern historical consciousness in China is largely characterized by the ‘one hundred years of humiliation’ from the mid-1800s to mid-1900s, when China was attacked by imperialists. This cultural memory has been reinforced by the regime’s educational socialization, particularly through the national ‘Patriotic Education Campaign’ started in 1991, through which the party-state has continuously cultivated in young citizens a sense of the superiority of the one-party system (Wang, 2008). Under the long-term media and educational influences of pro-nationalism, China’s young people might have consciously or unconsciously internalized the authoritarian rules believing in the state’s goal of stability maintenance, disagreeing but refraining from taking further action, holding private truths but telling public lies (Lagerkvist, 2010 ), lacking viable alternative frames, or being misled to support the regime through its inherent framework (Han, 2015 ).

For the third research question on whether young people with more gender egalitarian attitudes have a higher or lower level of life satisfaction in China, our results show that gender role attitudes among China’s youth are negatively correlated with their life satisfaction. This point can also be explained by the consolidation of state-driven gender norms, in which youth with more egalitarian gender role attitudes are aware of mistreatment due to unequal gendered regulations such as the birth control policies (Wong, 1997 ), women’s double burden (Thornham and Feng, 2010 ) and the pay gap (Ji et al., 2017 ), thereby reducing life satisfaction. By contrast, those with weaker egalitarian gender role attitudes might be more tolerant of this inequality, or perhaps even unlikely to realize that such inequality exists.

Lastly, for demographic factors, our results demonstrate that gender role attitudes are negatively associated with age, which is consistent with the aforementioned studies suggesting that the younger generation tends to be more gender egalitarian in China (Shu and Zhu, 2012 ; Koo et al., 2020 ). Moreover, people with higher levels of education are found to be more gender egalitarian, which is consistent with previous research both in the Chinese context (Shu, 2004 ) and worldwide (e.g., Pampel, 2011 ). This finding responds to the social condition in China where, due to marketization, young people are more able to access higher education than the senior generation. Additionally, young women demonstrated significantly higher levels of egalitarian gender role attitudes than young men, as shown in Table 4 . This finding is consistent with results from worldwide research showing young women to be increasingly better educated than young men (OECD 2023 ). In China, by 2020, 18.0% of Chinese women had received a college education or higher. This is 1.6% higher than that of men (Liu and Du, 2023 ), which to some extent explains the higher level of egalitarian gender role attitudes of young women than men in our findings.

In summary, our results have some important implications for gender discourse and policies in contemporary China. Although young people tend to receive higher education and embrace more gender egalitarian attitudes, favoring the political system and feeling satisfied by life seems to either consciously or unconsciously reinforce their tendencies toward existing gender inequalities. If supporting the system means opposing gender equality, not only does this imply that women’s status is in a dire position, it also positions those who desire gender egalitarianism against the state. For policymaking, the Chinese government may need to consider how to balance the public’s growing gender egalitarian opinions and the intention of implementing unequal gender policies in order to avoid potential discontentment from the gender egalitarian group.

In conclusion, this study complements the understanding of gender role attitudes in contemporary China. As one of the first explorative studies to apply the survey method to gender-state dynamics in a (semi-) authoritarian context, the findings merit further research. For instance, the psycho-political antecedents predicting Chinese gender role attitudes, as outlined in this article, are by no means exhaustive. Further research that examines other political, social, cultural and ideological antecedents for gender role attitudes is very much welcomed. Moreover, this study is not without limitations. The data presented in Table 1 illustrates that a significant majority of our participants fall within the 18–35 age bracket, and more than half hold bachelor’s degrees. This suggests that our research findings are primarily applicable to the Chinese youth demographic with relatively high levels of education. As a result, it is prudent to exercise caution when attempting to generalize these research findings. We used an online survey method to keep respondents’ private identification information anonymous to the researcher and other participants, which is expected to encourage more sincere answers by respondents. However, considering the Chinese people’s decade-long self-censorship practices, there is some possibility that they have manipulated some ‘politically correct’ responses in order to avoid potential risks. Therefore, the findings of this study are based on the assumption that survey answers reflect the respondents’ true beliefs and feelings.

Data availability

The data supporting the findings of this study are available via the supplementary attachment. Participants’ information has been meticulously anonymized, and the survey data have been desensitized.

For the items this study measured, 180 s was used as a standard finish time. Participants who took less than 180 s were considered to not spend enough attention or mental effort on the survey. Their answers were thusly eliminated to ensure the quality of the research sample data.

As this study focuses on gender role attitudes among the youth, here we need to acknowledge that there were not enough older people in our sample regarding the Chinese population, which also makes comparison impossible.

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Tingting Hu

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Why Tipping Is Everywhere

In the united states, many say tipping is expected in more places these days. here’s how tipping culture exploded..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

Hello. Excuse me?

My name is Sabrina. This is Claire. We’re journalists. Could we ask you a question?

You just did.

[LAUGHS]: Another one. [UPBEAT MUSIC]

What is your view of tipping?

I think it’s become excessive. Whatever they do, they got that jar and they’re wanting you to put a tip in there.

They have the iPad. And it’s like, all right, how much you want to tip? And it’s like you bought a $5 coffee. It’s like, all right, well, tip $3.

There’s a lot of pressure. You feel like you have to tip. And I feel like people are watching you at that moment.

Yeah, yeah. I feel a lot more pressure to tip more. Wages haven’t kept up, so I feel like I should be tipping more. And it’s annoying because my wages haven’t gone up either, so it’s annoying.

The other day I just bought a loaf of bread, and the tip thing came up, gave me the option of 15 percent or 20 percent. Do I really have to tip somebody to buy a loaf of bread?

I went to the self-service machine. And it was like, add a tip. And it’s like add a tip for what? I’m the one that did the work, you know what I’m saying?

You’re like, I should be tipping myself.

I actually am a tip worker. We’re literally paid less wages in order for the customers to pay us.

What do tips mean for you and your work?

It’s how I feed my family.

Yes. 100 percent.

Unless you work in the service industry, you don’t really understand how crucial tipping is.

Tips mean a lot. They are 60 percent, 50 percent of my paycheck. And my hourly is pretty low to begin with.

Whatever I get at the end of the night goes towards dinner. Or for example, I didn’t have money for sanitary pads one time. And then that tip, grabbed it.

I feel like a lot of people feel like you did nothing for me. You just put a cup on the counter and I took it. Like, why should I pay you extra for that?

What do you say to someone who says that? You didn’t do anything, you just put my food in a bag.

If you knew what my paycheck looked every week, you would think different. Or maybe not, maybe you don’t feel bad for me and you’re like, get a different job. But like, this is a job I’m good at and the job I like. And I’d like to be able to make a living off of it. That extra dollar or two really makes a difference.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise and this is “The Daily.”

Tipping, once contained to certain corners of the economy, has exploded, creating confusion and angst and now even becoming an issue in the presidential campaign. Today, economics reporter, Ben Casselman, cracks open the mystery of this new era of tipping.

It’s Thursday, August 29.

So Sabrina.

Can I ask you a personal question?

What is your philosophy on tipping?

[LAUGHS]: Exactly.

Sabrina, I think I’m a sucker. Look, I’ve always tried to be a good tipper in restaurants. It feels like part of the deal.

I worked as a waitress for many years. That was the only way I actually made money. If there’s no tip, there’s no salary. Restaurants, it’s a rule.

Absolutely. But now tipping is everywhere. You see these tip screens in places you never would have tipped before. I mean, never mind the coffee shop, you see it at the fast food place. You see it at the oil change place. I’ve heard stories of people seeing it at the self-checkout line. Who’s even getting that tip?

And every time a tip screen pops up, I always tip.

Oh, my god, Ben, so do I.

It’s totally irrational. I hate it. But there’s some part of me, and I don’t love this about myself, that is just convinced somebody is going to be sitting there judging me or I’m terrified that they’re going to. And, oh, my god, if I click No Tip, am I a bad person?

And someone behind me in line might see that.

I can’t click that No Tip button.

I am exactly the same. Every single time I’m presented with this iPad screen thingy, the tips come up. I press max, 30 percent. My husband, an economist, thinks this is ridiculous.

He says, you’re tipping 30 percent on a bottle of water someone just handed you. Don’t do that. That is crazy. But I keep doing it because I can, so I should. I don’t know, I have guilt about it.

Your husband is objectively correct. This is crazy. But tipping is not about objective cold economic logic. It’s emotional. It’s cultural.

There are norms around it. And right now, we have no idea what those norms are. And so we’re all stuck in this panicked moment of trying to decide which button you press and whether you should be expected to tip in this circumstance.

OK, so we are both suckers. We’ve established that. What we need to do now is figure out this panicked moment. I want you to explain this to me, Ben. Why has tipping exploded?

I think there are three reasons. The first of these is just technology. Several years ago, we started to see these tablet-based checkout systems everywhere. And it’s very easy to just add a tip screen onto there, that little, do you want to add a tip, 10 percent, 15 percent, 20 percent.

Right. And as I had less cash and then no cash in my wallet, this was always the way I paid for things.

Yeah, so it became very easy technologically to add tipping. But then the real shift came in the pandemic.

If you think back to that moment, many of us were lucky enough to be able to work from home and to be relatively safe. And we felt a lot of gratitude for the people who weren’t able to do that, who were bringing us food and delivering groceries. And so there was an explosion in tipping. And an explosion in tipping, even in places where we didn’t used to tip.

If you go and pick up takeout at a restaurant, you probably always tip your delivery driver. But if you went to the restaurant and you picked it up, you didn’t tip there. But now in the pandemic moment, they add a tip screen saying, would you like to tip? And yeah, of course, I’d like to tip. These people are risking their lives out there to make my chicken tikka masala.

Right. You basically wanted to tip the UPS guy.

Yes. And so we were tipping everybody. And so that allowed tipping to spread into these new areas. It got a beachhead in places where it didn’t used to be.

And maybe if the story ended there, it would have been this moment in time and then it all would have gone back to the way it always used to be. But that didn’t happen because we had this intense worker shortage when things started to reopen.

And how does that fit into this?

Businesses start to reopen. They need workers. They’re having a hard time finding them. Workers are reluctant to come back for all sorts of reasons. And tipping became a way of attracting workers.

Businesses were paying more, but they were also looking for other ways to get workers. And saying, we’ll add a tip screen that’ll boost your pay further. And if there’s one coffee shop where there’s a tip screen and there’s another coffee shop where there isn’t, you can be pretty sure which one you’re going to go work at.

Completely. I mean, we were talking to workers yesterday, and they were very specific about which chain stores allowed tips and which ones didn’t. And they much preferred working for the ones that allowed tips. I mean, it makes sense.

And I asked them, as a proportion of your earnings, how much are tips? Tips are a lot. Does that mean you make less in the place that doesn’t have the screen that allows it? Absolutely.

We saw workers demanding this. In fact, when some Starbucks stores were unionizing, one of the things they demand is, we want to be able to take tips on credit card payments.

Interesting, yeah.

This became a source of negotiation between businesses and their workers. And the thing is, once that happens, it’s really hard to put the genie back in the bottle.

But why? I mean, this all sprung up into our lives in the matter of a couple of years. So why can’t it go back to the way it was just as quickly?

Imagine that coffee shop worker that you were talking to yesterday, who’s now making, in many cases, 20 percent, 30 percent, even 40 percent of their earnings in tips. The business can’t just say, never mind, we’re going to get rid of the tip screen. Maybe, we’ll put out a tip jar and people can leave $1 or $2 when they want to. That’s a huge pay cut for that worker.

OK, they could instead say we’re going to get rid of tipping and we’re going to raise your pay. Instead of paying you $15 an hour and $5 in tips, we’ll give you $20 an hour. But now the business is going have to raise prices as a result.

And you, Sabrina, the coffee-drinking public are going to say, no way, I’m not going there and paying $8 for my latte or whatever the price may be. And so for the business, they can’t just get rid of the tip, because they can’t just cut off the pay and they can’t raise prices enough to raise pay accordingly.

Right. Nonstarter for the business.

Can’t work for them. And the worker is certainly not going to stick around if they try to do that.

So has there been some experimentation with this? I mean, have restaurants actually tried to go tipless?

Yeah, so we’ve seen an example of exactly this. A few years back, Danny Meyer, a big New York restaurateur, and a bunch of other restaurants as well tried getting rid of tipping completely. They said, this system is unfair, it’s unequal. We’re going to raise wages for everybody, for waiters, but also for cooks.

We’re going to raise our prices, accordingly, to pay for that. And customers will understand. They’ll understand that they’re paying the same amount at the end of the day, it just is in the form of a direct cost instead of a cost plus a tip. And it didn’t work.

For a bunch of reasons. But mostly because customers looked at the price on the menu and people didn’t want to pay it. I also think, look, we all complain about tipping. But customers also kind of like the tip. They kind of like looking generous.

You get to show off to your date or to your father-in-law. And, of course, you can, at least in theory, express your dissatisfaction by withholding a tip or by tipping less. Not you and me, we apparently don’t do that. But some people do, I hear.

The restaurant’s like, suckers, OK, great. Yeah, we don’t even have to worry about them.

Customers rebelled against the idea of not tipping. And most of those restaurants eventually went back to the old model.

Interesting. So we do have this love-hate relationship with tipping.

Yes. We hate being asked, but we like the control. And I think that is part of why all these changes feel so difficult for so many people, because it doesn’t necessarily feel like you have the control anymore.

That screen in front of you with the barista watching you, with the person in line behind watching you —

Oh, my gosh, I’m sweating already.

— you don’t feel like can press the No Tip button. Or at least suckers like you and me don’t.

Exactly. The choice is gone.

The choice is gone. Or the choice, at least, is sort of psychologically more taxing.

Right. [LAUGHS]

You feel pressured to do it.

OK, so that’s the customer experience. But with this new uptick in tipping, one question I always have is, is the worker on the other side of the screen getting this tip or will the business owner pocket it?

The worker is getting the tip with some caveats. By law, the business owner or the managers, they can’t take the tips. If you click a Tip button or you leave $1 in the tip jar or you tip in any way, if that ends up in the pockets of the business owner or the general manager or what have you, that is wage theft. It happens. We certainly hear stories about it happening, but it’s certainly not legal and it’s certainly not the norm.

That doesn’t mean that the worker, the person who hands you your latte, is the person getting your dollar. It often gets pooled across all of the workers who are working that shift or even all of the workers who work over an entire week. But it’s going to the workers.

People like us can rest assured that the workers are getting the full benefit of that tip that you’re pushing.

In many ways, what you are doing as the customer is you are subsidizing the wage. If you, you coffee shop worker, want to get $25 an hour, you don’t care whether that’s $20 in pay and $5 in tip or $25 in pay or any breakdown of that.

$25 is $25.

$25 is $25. When I leave a tip of $1, on some level, that’s $1 less that coffee shop has to pay you, the barista. Tips are helping the business pay their workers. They’re shifting. The business is shifting some of the burden for paying its workers off of its revenue onto its customers.

In other words, you and I, Ben, we are kind of helping foot the bill for these wages.

Absolutely. And from the businesses’ perspective, that’s a pretty great deal, because they basically get to charge, say, $4 for the latte and then for the customers who are willing to pay more, they’re basically charging more. Those people throw on the tip.

It’s a way of the business getting the maximum dollars that it can out of the maximum number of customers that it can attract.

But for workers, this system where they’re increasingly reliant on customer tips carries some real risks.

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

We’ll be right back.

Tell me about these risks of our tipping system.

Look, tipping has always had a lot of problems associated with it. If you think in restaurants, they’re often really big pay disparities where the servers at the front of the house, who are getting tipped, often make a lot more money, especially at a nice restaurant, than the cooks and dishwashers and all of the people at the back of the house.

You hear these stories of people going to cooking school and then basically bailing on the cooking career and becoming waitresses and waiters because it’s just more money.

Yeah. And then within tipped occupations, there’s a lot of inequity here. There have been studies that have shown that a pretty young woman gets tipped better than other people, that white people often get tipped better. There are tons of problems around sexual harassment, because if your earnings are dependent on the table that you’re serving liking you, then maybe you put up with things that workers shouldn’t have to put up with.

Those are the problems that have always existed in this system. But then as tipping spreads, the risk is, first, just more workers have to deal with this, but also that more workers become more dependent on tips for their earnings.

In the short term, this has all worked out pretty well for workers. This has been a period where they’ve been in hot demand, and so their wages have been rising. And at the same time, they’ve gotten all these tips on top of that. And that’s been really great.

But it’s not clear that that’s true over the longer term. Over the long run, you could imagine that all of these businesses get to just raise wages more slowly, that tips sort of eat away at wages over time. And then if we ever see customers pull back a little bit, tip less, then all of a sudden, all of these workers could really suffer.

Basically, you’re describing a system in which the earnings are just more vulnerable, more dependent on the kindness of strangers.

Yeah. And more at risk if those strangers become a little less kind.

Yes. And this issue has become so much a part of the national conversation that it’s actually entered the presidential race. Both former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have announced policy plans to help service workers. And essentially, they’re calling for no tax on tips.

Yeah, that’s right. So President Trump announced this several weeks ago as his big new “no taxes on tips” proposal. Kamala Harris followed up and basically endorsed that proposal, again, a little while later. We don’t have a lot of details on how this would work. But essentially, it would mean that if you earn tips, those tips are exempt at least from federal income tax.

What would that mean?

Let me tell you, economists hate this idea. Left-wing economists and right-wing economists, this is one point they can kind of all agree on.

And why do they hate it?

Because they say it’s unfair. It singles out this one group of workers for special treatment. The person who works at McDonald’s who doesn’t get tipped, they don’t benefit from this. The retail worker doesn’t benefit from this. It’s just this one group of workers who get this special treatment where they don’t have to pay taxes.

Right. Right.

But there’s also maybe an even more fundamental issue, which is that if you think you hate tipping now, if these proposals go through, you’re going to see so much more tipping.

Uh-oh, I’m holding on to my hat.

Because it’s basically a subsidy for tips.

As a worker, we said before, you don’t care whether you make, $25 an hour or $20 plus $5 an hour in tips, except that if some of that money isn’t taxed, you want more of that. You want more tips.

Basically, you want your entire salary to be a tip.

Ideally, right? And so that works great for the business perspective. Great, I don’t need to pay my workers.

[LAUGHS]: Wee!

It’s all tips now. Workers happy about that. What that means is you’re going to see more businesses looking for ways to have their workers count as tipped. Maybe you start to see tips in places that we’re not seeing them at all. Maybe you really do start to pay tips at a retail outlet, at a gas station.

Grocery store?

At a grocery store, why not? And the issue there, beyond just it being annoying for you and me, is that it further ingrains this system. All those problems that we were talking about in tipping now involves even more workers across the economy. And they’re even more vulnerable to that possibility that you and I start tipping a little bit less.

Ben, how would you describe where we are in this tipping moment? Is this just the new normal?

I think we’re still in a period of transition here. The fact that we’re having this conversation on some level tells you that we’re not totally in a new normal yet. You don’t leave a restaurant and say to yourself, man, I can’t believe I was asked to tip. But we’re still all the time having this conversation about, you wouldn’t believe I got asked to tip at the self-checkout.

Right. The bakery, for god’s sake.

It’s still a transition. It’s still happening. Over time, norms will develop. We’ll figure out the places where we tip and the places where we don’t, and how much and all of that.

But the dust hasn’t quite settled yet.

It hasn’t settled. But I think what we do know is that we’re not going back. We’re now going back to a world where we only tip in those set of circumstances where we used to. And remember, this whole transition has happened during a period of relative economic strength, when people have had money to go out and spend and to tip. The question is, what happens when that’s no longer true?

Right. When there’s a recession, people are going to be nervous about their pocketbooks and probably won’t be as generous.

Whenever we get to the next recession, it will be the first one in this new era of tipping.

And there’s a whole new group of workers who are going to lose out when that happens, who are dependent on tips and will suffer when customers start pulling those tips back.

Ben, thank you.

Sabrina, thank you so much. And the screen is just going to ask you a couple of questions at the end here.

[LAUGHS]: Ben, 30 percent.

Here’s what else you should know today. On Wednesday, at least 10 Palestinians were killed when hundreds of Israeli troops launched major raids overnight in the occupied West Bank, targeting Palestinian militants, after what Israel said was months of rising attacks. The operation, the largest since 2023, followed months of escalating Israeli raids in the occupied territory, where nearly three million Palestinians live under Israeli military rule.

And the Supreme Court maintained a temporary pause on a new plan by President Biden to wipe out tens of millions of dollars of student debt. The plan was part of the president’s approach to forgiving debt after the Supreme Court rejected a more ambitious proposal last year that would have canceled more than $400 billion in loans. The scaled-down plan was directed at certain types of borrowers, including people on disability and public service workers. The court’s decision leaves millions of borrowers enrolled in the new plan in limbo.

Today’s episode was produced by Mooj Zadie, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Eric Krupke, and Clare Toeniskoetter. It was edited by Lisa Chow and Brendan Klinkenberg, contains original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, and Rowan Niemisto, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

[THEME MUSIC]

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. See you tomorrow.

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Tipping, once contained to certain corners of the economy, has exploded, creating confusion and angst. Now, it is even becoming an issue in the U.S. presidential campaign.

Ben Casselman, who covers the U.S. economy for The New York Times, cracks open the mystery of this new era of tipping.

On today’s episode

Ben Casselman , a reporter covering the U.S. economy for The New York Times.

Background reading

How to deal with the many requests for tips .

Former President Donald J. Trump called Vice President Kamala Harris a “copycat” over her “no tax on tips” plan.

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Michael Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson, Nina Lassam and Nick Pitman.

Ben Casselman writes about economics with a particular focus on stories involving data. He has covered the economy for nearly 20 years, and his recent work has focused on how trends in labor, politics, technology and demographics have shaped the way we live and work. More about Ben Casselman

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