Chinese Business Culture
Oct 18, 2009 Business Communication
I just experienced first-hand a glimpse of business culture in China.
Many people would have long heard that contracts and agreements in mainland China doesn’t hold much weight.
In fact, signing a contract only signifies the beginning of business negotiations. To a mainland Chinese, signing an agreement just means that they are ready and interested to deal with you. It says nothing that a deal has really been done.
In the western world and developed countries, signing an agreement SEALS the business deal and the details of the deal are specified in the agreement. I believe this is one of the major assumptions that has caused much grief for businesses trying to enter China.
I was recently asked to provide sponsorship for a magazine that a student organization, which I will not name here, wanted to publish. This publication is meant to inform new students of the university about the student organization and in turn, to attract them to join their activities in the years to come. In fact, other than monetary sponsorship, they asked for advice on how to improve the publication.
Since the student organization is of a career development nature which is in alignment with what I do, I agreed to the sponsorship and provide a fair amount of advice on how they can improve their publication to attract readership.
However, I wasn’t interested to just give (the money and advice) and forget. I know that if I do that, it’ll just be a once-off “donation” and the neither the student organization nor their members will receive any sustainable benefit. So, I decided that I’d like the student organization to do some “work” to ensure continuity of their value to the university student body. This culminated in a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) which was signed by myself and the President of the student organization.
Interestingly enough, after the money was sponsored and the magazine published (i.e. I have fulfilled my end of the bargain), I didn’t even get any regular updates on the progress of work agreed upon. I actually had to email them to ask about what’s happening.
Shortly after, I heard from the President’s Assistant. I guess the President is now too busy to deal with me. His assistant was apologetic about the lack of communication and proceeded to give some updates, citing problems and issues, blah blah blah…then, she asked me to introduce my company and to let them know what we do so that they can arrange the necessary cooperation work accordingly.
At that moment, I could feel a sense of anger rising up in my stomach. But I had to remind myself that I am dealing with students. It is at this moment that I was reminded of the Chinese business culture and the significance (or the lack of it) of an agreement.
I’ll now have to figure out how to deal effectively with them such that our MoU is honoured.
Tags: agreement, business culture, chinese
October 21st, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Whatever, the cooperation with the organisation found by students should look more before you leap, I think. Students are full of vigor actually, but they are lack of thorough and careful plan. Students may do have a great beginning.However, since they may be distracted from many other new and exciting things,so they are likely put less heart in the former business they promised to do.
Moreover, you tried to calm down yourself for the reason that you just dealt with students. So the students who asked for your sponsorship might think like this way, even they had known this business had many problems to deal with. And I want to say that if you invest on students, that means you are really on a high risk~ haha~ And please do not blame to the Chinese culture =)
Anyway, I want to know what kind of culture are you in? I am curious about that. Thanks!
October 27th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Good points! I appreciate that.
I do think that being “students” should never become the excuse for not honouring agreements.
Although I am not a China Chinese, I am still a Chinese by descend and so, know what YI4 (righteousness) means. Suo3 Wei4 Yi4 Yan2 Ji4 Chu1 Si4 Ma3 Nan2 Zhui1. I suspect that these values have been diluted and no longer highly regarded by Chinese who are so much influenced by western cultures today.
The facts remains that each of us plays a myriad of roles in our daily lives. We are busy and can be “distracted” with many things everyday. I say “can be distracted” because we actively CHOOSE what we want to work on and pay attention to. Nobody can say that “Oh, it is my boyfriend who is distracting me” because each of us must make our own decisions and thus, take responsible for them.