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that lying at the core of Chinese political culture is a fear of chaos and disorder, (1971). I do not pretend to know how to ascertain the presence of this fear among the Chinese population. At least among the spinners, I do not believe it is necessary to resort to psychological reductionism to understand their attitudes. It is sufficiently plain that the spinners' view on organizational dissent in general and trade unionism in particular were derived from a basic conception that power structures should be unitary, not pluralistic. Since they did not accept the possibility of multiple power centres with divided loyalty in an organization, they could speak with the confident voices of B3 and A17 that
'You must be fair and should not be biased. If your actions are reasonable, there will be no conflict.'
'There should not be conflicts. They are not good for the company. In turn that means not good for themselves [the workers], and they should know it.'
Competition and cooperation
External to the firm, conflict assumes the form of competition. How did the spinners feel about this central process of capitalism? Olsen in his opinion survey on Taiwanese school pupils finds that competition was negatively valued. He concludes that the
'major connotation of competition in Taipei business culture seem to be those of excess and harm rather than those of vitality and progress,' (1972: 289).
This is not the picture I have obtained from the Hong Kong cotton spinners. Over half of them, as can be seen in Table 7, believed that competition among mills is needed to encourage people to do their best. Only two respondents thought that competition is unnecessary. The discrepancy between Olsen's and my findings might well reflect the dissimilarities between our samples as well as the respective economic milieux. But in addition Olsen might have prejudiced his results with leading statements such as 'Business firms should get together to stop "cut-throat" competition', (1972: 288-289). On the whole, I am fairly certain that the Hong Kong textile industrialists had little aversion toward economic competition. But the fascinating phenomenon is their
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