Home | Culture | Literature | Patience, Power, and Environment: Rethinking Chinese Character

Patience, Power, and Environment: Rethinking Chinese Character

Three commonly misunderstood traits—patience, indifference, and “old roguery”—are not innate qualities, but products of cultural systems and historical pressures. By tracing their roots to family structure, political insecurity, and philosophical traditions, it challenges the idea of fixed national character and invites readers to reconsider how environment shapes virtue.

Along the river during the Qingming festival, Ming Dinasty

By Lin Yutang

March 4, 2026
4:54 am
Los Angeles, CA

Let us take the three worst and most striking characteristics, patience, indifference and old roguery, and see how they arose. I believe that these are effects of culture and environment and hence are not necessarily a part of the Chinese mental make-up. They are here to-day because for thousands of years we have been living under certain cultural and social influences. The natural inference is that when these influences are removed, the qualities will also correspondingly diminish or disappear. The quality of patience is the result of racial adjustment to a condition where over-population and economic pressure leave very little elbow-room for people to move about, and is, in particular, a result of the family system, which is a miniature of Chinese society. Indifference is largely due to the

That patience is a noble virtue of the Chinese people no one who knows them will gainsay. There is so much of this virtue that it has almost become a vice with them. The Chinese people have put up with more tyranny, anarchy and misrule than any Western people will ever put up with, and seem to have regarded them as part of the laws of nature. In certain parts of Szechuen, the people have been taxed thirty years in advance without showing more energetic protest than a half-audible curse in the privacy of the household. Christian patience would seem like petulance compared with Chinese patience, which is as unique as Chinese blue porcelain is unique. The world tourists would do well to bring home with them some of this Chinese patience along with Chinese blue porcelain, for true individuality cannot be copied. We submit to tyranny and extortion as small fish swim into the mouth of a big fish. Perhaps had our capacity for sufferance been smaller, our sufferings would also be less. As it is, this capacity for putting up with insults has been ennobled by the name of patience, and deliberately inculcated as a cardinal virtue by Confucian ethics. I am not saying that this patience is not a great quality of the Chinese people. Jesus said, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” and I am not sure but that Chinese patience has enabled us to inherit half a continent and keep it. The Chinese also inculcate it consciously as a high moral virtue. As our saying goes, “A man who cannot tolerate small ills can never accomplish great things.” The training school for developing this virtue is, however, the big family, where a large number of daughters-in-law, brothers-in-law, fathers and sons daily learn this virtue by trying to endure one another. In the big family, where a closed door is an offence, and where there is very little elbow-room for the individuals, one learns by necessity and by parental instruction from early childhood the need for mutual toleration and adjustments in human relationships. The deep, slow, everyday wearing effect on character can scarcely be over-estimated.

There was once a prime minister, Chang Kungni, who was much envied for his earthly blessedness of having nine generations living together under the same roof. Once the emperor, T’ang Kaochung, asked him the secret of his success, and the minister asked for a brush and paper, on which he wrote a hundred times the character “patience” or “endurance.” Instead of taking that as a sad commentary on the family system, the Chinese people have ever after envied his example, and the phrase “hundred patience” (po-jen) has passed into current moral proverbs which are written on red paper and pasted on all house-doors on New Year’s Day: “peaceableness brings good luck”, “patience is the best family heritage,” etc. But so long as the family system exists and so long as society is built on the principle that a man is not an individual but attains his full being only in living in harmonious social relationships, it is easy to see how patience must be regarded as a supreme virtue and must grow naturally out of the social system. For in such a society, patience has a reason for existence.