What is the meaning of Gong Xi fa cai?

Gong Xi Fa Cai ("Wish you enlarge your wealth") is a common saying Chinese use over the Chinese New Year – even a toddler would say this to you when you visit a Chinese family during new year celebrations.

While all cultures celebrate the new year, Chinese are probably one of the few that use these money-related words as their greetings in the biggest festival of the year.

Why do Chinese people value money so much?

Every culture loves money, but Chinese love money so much that they even create a money god, “The God of Fortune”, and worship him, especially during the Chinese New Year.

An American emeritus professor of finance once said:

“I felt like I was teaching religion when I taught Chinese students finance. They were serious, and eager to put my teaching into practice.”

From the perspective of cross-cultural management, the love of money reflects the values of Chinese societies. And values are the core of a culture. This leads us to the following question: Why do Chinese value money so highly?

Values are unconscious human creations that trigger attitudes and behaviours to meet society’s survival needs. To understand the Chinese love of money, we need to understand the survival contexts of mainland China, the epicentre of all Chinese cultures that has had 6000 years of history as a civilisation, of which about 3500 years have been as a nation.

While contemporary history looks at China as the biggest communist country and an emerged economic and political superpower, China is also a nation that has survived from, braved out, and prospered after many mega-disasters.

For example, one of its two biggest rivers in the nation, the Yellow River, is estimated to have flooded some 1500 times since the 2nd century BC, creating unimaginable human and economic costs.

The most destructive of these floods occurred in 1931, when 88,000 square kilometres of land (about a quarter of the size of Malaysia, or the same size as Portugal) were destroyed, leaving 80 million people homeless. Estimates of the total casualties directly caused by the flood, or by the subsequent disease and famine, ranged from 850,000 to four million, making it one of the deadliest disasters in recorded history. A more recent one that occurred in 1938 was associated with 500,000 to 900,000 deaths.

To ensure Chinese people learn from historical disasters, many Chinese schools incorporate in their history lessons the Great Flood of China, an event that allegedly took place in about 2000 BC, but was believed to be a myth of ancient China.

Given the absence of a social safety net, Chinese are left to take care of themselves. Hence, saving for the future has become an essential value of Chinese societies, and so has individuals’ love of money.

Collective experience is passed along through myths and stories from one generation to another by families, schools and other socialisation agents. These collective teachings have morphed into various survival-based, long-term-focused behaviours, such as savings for winter, accumulation of assets, and frugality.

China’s dependence on the family to provide social welfare adds to the practical needs for love of money. Chinese governments, even at times when they were rich, have never provided a social safety net at a level similar to that in today’s Western countries.

Just look at Hong Kong, a rich Chinese city with three-quarters of the United States’ GDP per capita. Its citizens have no automatic right to any state unemployment benefits. Only people with very limited savings and family support are eligible for an unemployment allowance from the government.

Similar practices are applied to retirees. Retirees from the private sector may get about US$200 per month as an old-age allowance without going through financial checks. If a Hong Kong person did not accumulate enough through the provident funds they co-contributed to, they need to depend on their own savings or children’s financial support during their retirement years.

Therefore, Hong Kong people hardly receive any state retirement benefits or unemployment financial support.

The social benefit systems of other parts of China appear to apply similar principles. Family and personal savings provide the safety net.

Given the absence of a social safety net, Chinese are left to take care of themselves. Hence, saving for the future has become an essential value of Chinese societies, and so has individuals’ love of money.

Once a value has become part of a culture, members of that culture would cease to ask why, and just practise it. If you ask Chinese people why they say “Gong Xi Fa Cai” during the new year, they probably cannot give you an explanation. But they probably won’t be shy about wishing you good fortune.

Next time, when your Chinese friends say “Gong Xi Fa Cai”, think about the cultural meaning behind this saying, and the collective, brave survival experience of the Chinese people.

Gong Xi Fa Cai in the Year of the Tiger!

How do you reply to Gong Xi Fa Cai?