Curture Differences at Work

During my training class, I received a phone call from a plant engineer that I'd been working with on a project. He said that it was urgent for me to meet his manager as soon as possible. At 5pm, I met the manager, who confronted me regarding an email that I wrote to my manager regarding the status of a project. In the email, I stated that one of the shop technicians would contact central enginnering outside of the plant for more advice.

The dialogue went something like this (in Chinese):
Manager: "It's not customary for someone from the shop to contact central engineering. That is the plant engineer's job."
Me: "I didn't contact central engineering. I just wrote an email saying someone else would. If you have a problem with that, you should talk to the shop technician."
Manager: "Well we will talk to him too, but you should know that we don't do that here."
Me: "Sorry, I still don't understand why we are having this conversation."
Manager: "Well you shouldn't have written the email. This may upset the foreigners [a.k.a his manager] because we are breaking the rules. Do you have any other questions?"

I walked away frustrated for the following reasons:
1) He did not deal with root cause, that perhaps people don't understand this "rule", or that it is not well controlled or communicated.
2) He put the blame on the messenger of the situation (me), who was trying to improve communication between different parties, while he tried to hide something that was done "incorrectly".
3) Rather than spending his time on value added work, he wasted my time and his to deal with something that gives the company absolutely no gain.
4) The confucianist ideology prevented the engineer that I was working with to talk to me directly about something that he was not confortable with. Rather, he went through his manager to talk to me.
5) The bureaucratic and heirarchical way of working causes people to work through many different people, rather than going directly to the source (the most efficient way)
and finally, 6) I talked to the western manager of this manager and asked if this rule was true. He said, "No its not a problem for you to contact central engineering, as long as we don't duplicate work."

From just this one instance, you can tell that in the culture, the concept of saving face is perhaps more important than moving forward with an issue at hand, and because of that, there is a strong lack of communication between the chinese and western managment. Also, the Chinese still operate in a very bureaucratic system, often leading to undefined relationships and roles and inefficiencies.

Growing up in the Chinese culutre, I can parially understand the importance of saving face, but my American upbringing makes me believe that if projects, timelines, and investments are on the line, then you shouldn't spend time covering mistakes, but rather move forward. It seems that for the Chinese, if a mistake is made, it is personal and very shameful. In America, it is more often seen as a learning experience for someone to grow. The cultures between the west and east are drastically different, and both will have to adapt to accomplish the challenges to come.