Recently, I suddenly found myself connecting a lot of things.
On the surface, these things seem completely unrelated: why so many middle-class families in Beijing want Filipino domestic helpers, why some Chinese salespeople offend customers the moment they open their mouths, why some luxury retail staff manage to insult clients while trying to sell them something, and why many of the most successful Chinese companies of the past decade, in restaurants, real estate, and e-commerce, all have something to do with service.
The more I think about it, the more I feel that the real cultural difference between China and the West often does not lie in the grand concepts people love to discuss: collectivism versus individualism, East versus West, tradition versus modernity. The real difference lies in something smaller, subtler, and much more ordinary.
My conclusion is this:
In many modern commercial settings, what is truly scarce in China is neither demand nor supply, but service itself.
But by “service,” I do not mean smiling, politeness, submission, or ingratiation. What I mean is a very strict kind of professional ethic:
- Can you treat another person’s goal as the priority within your role?
- Can you help someone steadily without losing your own dignity?
- Can you avoid interpreting a customer’s request as a challenge to your status?
- Can you maintain boundaries, instead of injecting your emotions, ego, aesthetic judgments, or lifestyle into the relationship?
This, in China, is actually very rare.
1. Why does every middle-class family in Beijing want a Filipino domestic helper?
One of the scarcest things in Chinese big cities today, with some of the strongest demand, is Filipino domestic help.
In Beijing, many upper-middle-class families want Filipino helpers. Visas are difficult, so there are always people trying to figure out how to bring this kind of service into mainland China legally. The reason is not just that they are hardworking, and not just that they speak English. Deep down, many people know something else: they often have clearer boundaries and a stronger sense of what their role actually is.
In Beijing, there is a very common saying:
Hiring a nanny is like bringing home a mother-in-law.
In theory, a domestic helper is there to cook, clean, and care for children or the elderly. But in reality, something else often happens: she may stop you from ordering takeout, judge you for keeping a cat, criticize you for staying up too late, try to change your habits, and keep making demands of her own.
This is not some isolated anecdote. It is an experience many urban families know very well.
The problem is not just “bad attitude.” The problem is role invasion. Instead of understanding herself as “someone hired to complete a clearly defined set of tasks,” she easily slips into the role of “someone here to correct you, guide you, and take over your life.”
But the core of service is exactly this:
You do the job you are paid to do. You do not take over someone else’s life.
2. Why does “service” feel so awkward in the Chinese context?
In modern Chinese culture, words like “servant” or “maid” have almost no positive or respectable place in everyday life. In China, you do not tip in restaurants; if you actually try to tip a waiter, they may even feel offended.
At the same time, Chinese women entered the workforce very early and on a massive scale. Many people grew up with the idea that “women hold up half the sky.” For many Chinese women, being a housewife is not a naturally acknowledged social role; it feels more like retreat, idleness, or even failure.
And if you go one layer deeper, there is also historical memory. The Cultural Revolution did not end that long ago. The core language of that era was class struggle. Many Chinese families were directly swept up by it. Once a society spends decades understanding “serving others,” “employment relationships,” and “division of labor” through the lens of class oppression, loss of dignity, or even political danger, that distorts its imagination of service for generations.
So the problem for many Chinese people today is not that they are unwilling to work, not that they are unintelligent, and not that they do not try hard. It is that they have never truly internalized a modern professional ethic:
In this role, I am here to help you achieve your goal, not to use this role to express myself.
That sentence sounds simple. It is actually very hard.
3. Why have the most successful Chinese companies of the past decade all been “selling service”?
Ten years ago, China’s biggest e-commerce platform still operated according to seller logic. If you bought something unsatisfactory and wanted a refund, you had to negotiate with the seller. If the seller did not want to cooperate, they could drag things out, wear you down, or simply refuse.
That made sense in an earlier era, because what China truly lacked was supply. Platforms had to satisfy merchants first. They had to get manufacturers and sellers online. Without supply, there was no flywheel.
But then the situation changed.
Supply was no longer scarce. Sellers became abundant. What started to matter was the consumer experience.
That was when a new generation of platforms emerged. What they did was simple, but radical: reduce the buyer’s decision cost as much as possible, reduce the friction of refunds as much as possible, and push the burden of responsiveness onto merchants. For the first time, Chinese consumers began to experience things like this at scale: you type a single phrase asking for a refund, and the system returns your money immediately; if the merchant does not respond within two hours, they are penalized.
Many people still look down on these platforms, but I have always thought they are among the most important Chinese companies to study from the last decade. They rose not because Chinese consumers do not care about service, but precisely because they care about it so much and have been deprived of it for so long.
Whoever can turn “actually caring about the buyer” into process, rules, and systems will win.
The same logic applies elsewhere.
The most successful hotpot chain in China over the last decade built its reputation on service. One of China’s most successful real-estate agencies entered the market with something astonishingly basic: real listings. Why? Because the entire industry had been using fake listings to lure customers offline.
What does that tell us?
It tells us that service in China is not unimportant. It is so scarce that the moment someone takes it seriously, it creates enormous premium.
4. It was only after sitting in on a sales meeting that I was truly shaken
A few months ago, I sat in on a sales meeting in Shanghai.
That day, one of the visiting customers was an entrepreneur who runs a chain restaurant business with annual revenue exceeding 100 million RMB. He also has a technical background. He explained his request very clearly: he wanted to embed a certain hardware device into the restaurant’s existing tabletop in order to improve customer experience. He had already thought through the details: the outer casing was unnecessary and could be removed; in fact, doing so might even reduce cost for the supplier.
This was an extremely clear, mature customer request.
And then something happened that genuinely shocked me.
The salesperson receiving him responded in a weirdly condescending tone. What he said, in essence, was: “I’m not sure that can be done. Maybe you don’t understand, the software and hardware are integrated. Otherwise it wouldn’t work.”
I was sitting there almost unable to believe what I was hearing.
The customer had already explained his needs clearly. He had done his homework. He understood how the product worked. And yet the salesperson’s first instinct was not to receive the request, not to clarify the constraints, and not to think about next steps. His first instinct was: educate the customer.
Why?
Later, I realized what was going on. The salesperson was not hearing, “What is the customer trying to achieve?” What he was hearing was: “This customer is making a request that will make my work more complicated, and he may be using it to negotiate price.”
So he immediately went into a defensive mindset: I need to prove that I am not easy to push around.
This, I think, is the deepest problem with many Chinese salespeople.
It is not just that they are bad at speaking, or low in emotional intelligence. It is that they have never truly understood their role as:
I am here to help the customer succeed.
Instead, they are much more likely to understand the customer relationship as:
- a negotiation;
- a status contest;
- a test of boundaries;
- a psychological game in which neither side should let the other gain too much.
Once the mindset shifts there, sales is no longer service. It becomes confrontation.
5. Why do luxury stores also insult customers?
Last year, I was in a Jimmy Choo store in a shopping mall in Beijing. I said I wear a size 42 and wanted to buy a pair of shoes.
The sales associate laughed and said she would probably have to call every Jimmy Choo store across Greater China to find a pair that large. Then she added that for feet of that size, some high heels might not look very good anyway.
So I walked into a luxury boutique and not only failed to buy shoes, but also got mocked for having large feet.
What made me angriest was not her malice. Quite the opposite: it was the fact that she had no malicious intent at all.
She did not even think she had said anything wrong. She probably thought she was being funny, maybe even charming.
That, to me, says everything.
The real cultural difference often hides in exactly this kind of place: the other person is not trying to offend you. She simply has never understood herself as “someone whose job is to help the customer complete a purchase while also protecting the customer’s dignity.”
Without realizing it, she has placed herself in the role of commentator, evaluator, even aesthetic judge.
And that is exactly what service is not.
6. So what does China actually lack?
The more I think about it, the more I feel that China lacks good salespeople in the same way it lacks good domestic help.
And even more broadly: what China truly lacks is not talent in one specific industry, but trustworthy service that can be replicated at scale.
This kind of service has several critical features:
- it is not servility;
- it has strong professional boundaries;
- it does not interpret customer requests as humiliation;
- it does not bring ego into the job;
- it genuinely cares whether the customer achieves their goal;
- it makes the other person feel understood, respected, and properly received.
None of this requires groveling. None of it requires lowering oneself.
The highest form of service is actually this:
You retain dignity, while also having the discipline to place someone else’s interests ahead of your own within the boundaries of your role.
But in China, many people in many jobs have neither been trained that way nor institutionally required to act that way.
In many teams, commissions are low, supervision is weak, processes are opaque, and management cares only about outcomes, not how those outcomes are produced. In that kind of environment, employees naturally do not see themselves as “providers of high-standard service.” They see themselves as ordinary workers: avoid trouble, avoid responsibility, avoid extra work, and do not get taken advantage of.
And once that becomes the default, deceiving upward, deceiving downward, becoming defensive with customers, dismissing requests, and misrepresenting information all become very natural behaviors.
7. Why is this so hard to change?
The most difficult part is that this is not the kind of problem a boss can solve simply by scolding employees.
Of course a manager can go back and criticize the team for being unprofessional, for not understanding customers, for disrespecting people. But a few days later, things will revert. Because this is not a matter of one employee having a bad temper. It is something deeper: how a society actually understands service in the first place.
Many Chinese people understand:
- hierarchy;
- face;
- friction;
- bargaining;
- emotional expression;
- self-protection.
What they do not fully understand is:
service as a serious professional ethic.
It requires you, within your role, to receive another person steadily, consistently, and with restraint.
This is not a matter of talent, and it is not a slogan about morality. It is a complete capability that has to be formed jointly by organizational training, process constraints, incentive systems, and culture.
8. Hidden, and yet obvious
So the more convinced I become, the more I feel that the most hidden, and most obvious, cultural difference between China and the West is not surface politeness, not who says “thank you” more often, not who seems warmer or colder.
The real difference is this:
Does a society have enough people who can, within their professional roles, serve others sincerely and with restraint?
China absolutely does have such people. And whenever they appear, they tend to become unusually successful. Because the market lacks them so badly, and the demand for them is so strong, everyone can immediately feel the difference.
Whoever can truly do this can charge a premium. It does not matter whether they work in domestic service, sales, restaurants, real estate, customer support, or cross-border trade.
And that is also why many of the most successful Chinese companies of the last decade were not merely selling products. At a deeper level, they were selling something much rarer:
trustworthy service.