Matthew Billington
Young Chinese People Have Become Bicultural
There are signs that the culture has changed since 1978’s Reform and Opening policy.
- By
- December 22, 2025
- CBR - Behavioral Science
It has been nearly 50 years since China opened its economy to the rest of the world. Since then, international tourists have poured in, and Western eateries such as KFC and Starbucks now populate street corners.
This openness has helped China become the world’s second-largest economy, and it may also have changed the way some of its residents think. College students in mainland China are now bicultural, simultaneously holding both Chinese and American cultural identities, according to research by Northwest Normal University’s Yi-meng Wang (a visiting PhD student at Chicago Booth when the research was conducted), Nanjing Normal University’s Feng-yan Wang and Yi-qun Chen, and Booth’s Thomas Talhelm. Both identities influence the students’ values and how they think, relate to others, and behave.
People often talk about multicultural societies, but psychologists argue that a person can be multicultural too. Some of the research establishing this was conducted in Hong Kong, which for more than a century was a British colony with a majority Chinese population and a hub of international trade. In 1997, Ying-yi Hong (then at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), and Chi-yue Chiu and Tracy Man Kung (then of the University of Hong Kong) demonstrated that showing Hong Kongers symbols of Chinese culture or Western culture could activate one identity or the other.
These findings, and others that followed, influenced cultural psychology, says Talhelm. “It’s been a big change to the field to think of culture not as something that’s ingrained but as something that people can switch into and out of like an outfit,” he says. “People can flip between different cognitive styles that are characteristic of different cultures.”
Two cultural points of view
An experiment that involved showing Chinese participants these two images, of a lone fish swimming in front of and behind others, revealed a bicultural mindset. Participants who viewed Chinese cultural symbols before seeing the images said the fish was being chased or rejected, while those who instead viewed American symbols said the fish was leading or choosing to be independent.
Decades later, conducting similar experiments with about 100 college students in Hong Kong, Wang, Wang, Talhelm, and Chen confirmed the earlier findings. Then they turned their attention to mainland China, where they showed nearly 300 college students pictures representing Chinese or American culture, such as chopsticks, Confucius, knives and forks, and Abraham Lincoln. After that, they conducted a test—also used by Hong, Chiu, and Kung—designed to measure cognitive style. It involved displaying images of a cartoon fish swimming either in front of or behind a group of other fish and asking the students to explain the creature’s behavior. Their results suggest that in Chinese culture, people tend to attribute an individual’s behaviors to external factors such as stress or social pressure, whereas in American culture, they tend to focus more on internal factors such as thoughts and desires.
Exposure to Chinese cultural symbols increased the students’ view of the fish as behaving according to external attributions (the fish is swimming alone because it’s being chased by or rejected by the group, for example) while the American symbols increased their sense of its internal attributions (the fish is leading or independent of the group).
Could the students shown American symbols have been simply drawing on stereotypes of the culture? To help rule out this possibility, the researchers ran a similar experiment with about 250 adults who had grown up in mainland China and were born before 1978, the year Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping launched the Reform and Opening policy. This older generation showed no signs of biculturalism.
“It’s not enough to simply know about a culture, you do actually need some amount of openness and exchange for this to run deep enough that it’s influencing how people are thinking,” says Talhelm.
Young people living in mainland China today have been exposed to Western cultures their entire lives as a direct result of the 1978 reforms, he says. Many watch Hollywood blockbusters, eat at McDonalds, and have iPhones. They interact with American visitors and have opportunities to visit the United States. All of that robust cultural exchange has made them bicultural, says Talhelm. “Chinese society and people’s way of thinking has changed over time,” he adds. “It’s evidence of cultural change in China, and that’s worth marking.”
- Ying-yi Hong, Chi-yue Chiu, and Tracy-man Kung, “Bringing Culture Out in Front: Effects of Cultural Meaning System Activation on Social Cognition,” Progress in Asian Social Psychology, January 1997.
- Yi-meng Wang, Feng-yan Wang, Thomas Talhelm, and Yi-qun Chen, “New Evidence Finds Young People in Mainland China Are Now Bicultural,” British Journal of Psychology, January 2025.
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