You are a bright, aggressive, experienced executive. You have proven your abilities on the home front by successfully opening many new outlets for your company and now you are finally getting your just rewards.

The head office has just informed you that you will be spear-heading the “China Initiative” and will be expected to open the new overseas Asian operation by the following year.

Moreover, your spouse and kids are encouraged to join you; (the Chinese, the head office has learned, respects family unity). It is such a complete surprise and future challenge that you just cannot gather it all in; and as you have just finished informing your wonderfully supportive spouse you both sit down speechless and dumbfounded at the prospect, staring at each other with mouths open. Your children are gleeful, and return their attention to the television, vaguely expecting a kind of older picturesque version of Disneyland.

“Don’t worry”, the head office informs you, “We will give you lots of training and cultural sensitivity workshops to prepare you.” More often than not, management perceives this initiative in terms of months, or one to two years. Any venture into China should be considered long term: five years minimum to work well. Of course, in some circumstances, with a joint venture partner where supply of goods is the only consideration, trade can take place relatively soon.

So often, though this is a simplified scenario, companies eager to break into the China market, send such promising, enthusiastic young, aggressive executives into the gaping maw of the huge market of China without adequately preparing either the employees or their families. It is a very costly mistake and one that can ruin the reputation of an otherwise successful firm.

Within the next two months of preparation before departure, you have learned through the misguided efforts of your company HR department the polite way to greet the Chinese, the gift giving protocol; the business card exchange, the topic taboos and the ever important “Ni hao” (Hello) and “Xie xie” (Thank you).

Your accommodation has been approved and your official company ‘Interpreter’ will greet you at the airport. Bon Voyage!

The Chinese businessman views his Western counterpart with a curiosity that you might give an innocent neglected child. They are kind, courteous, and exceedingly accomplished hosts, but they are very well versed in the most refined of intellectual maneuverings learned over a history of thousands of years. The North American penchant for the aggressive, “let’s do it” attitude, so valued in our own culture, is looked upon as hasty, emotional and ill advised behavior. The Chinese have been learning for the past 28 years since 1979, how to deal with Westerners and now, Westerners had better learn how to deal with the Chinese businessman; and learn fast.

Language is the basis of all culture and Chinese is not a difficult language to learn to speak but if you are an executive expatriate in China you must learn the language. Of course you will have to rely on an interpreter at first, but the sooner you can speak the language the better. In any event, it makes good sense for any company looking to deal with the Chinese in the future to be training their staff on the rudiments of the language and have at least one person fluent in the language. A Chinese interpreter, though generally helpful, in difficult negotiations, cannot always either understand the nuances of the negotiation or cannot convey your precise point. And, if the interpreter himself or herself is a Mainlander, he or she will always formulate the North American message in a Chinese way, and in the process, distort your intentions. Once this is done, the Westerner may perceive progress but be quite disappointed later on as the negotiations proceed but eventually fail.

Of course you will not become fluent in the language immediately; that will take at least five years. But someone from your firm should be with you who is fluent enough to grasp and convey important points from your company’s perspective. Similarly, and more importantly, the Westerner should pay very close attention to non-verbal language, and watch the Chinese delegation as closely as the delegation will be watching you.

So often, I hear of expatriates that arrive with the best of intentions and greatest degree of integrity, leave for home, defeated in spirit and undertaking. Sometimes, the executive is making progress but the company has neglected to prepare the spouse and children for the cultural shock of China and they become unhappy and feel alienated. The poorly prepared executive is placed in the position of saving his job or his marriage or both. And when the executive, who although not entirely successful, has made many inroads and friendships since his or her arrival, must now abandon those inroads, everything gained, however small, is lost.

The company either regroups and plans to send another executive out, perhaps better prepared, or abandons doing business with the Chinese on their turf.

This scenario is a real shame, since all of business is accomplished in China through relationships. Not simply the “guanxi” that is certainly required, but the friendship that goes along with the reciprocal nature of “guanxi”: the trust. This takes time, of which the Chinese are always prepared to give. Often time is used as a tool to force agreements which are disadvantageous to the Westerner because pressed for time, he or she doesn’t want to return home empty handed.

Such similar stories abound in corporate North American companies. I know of more than one Canadian company and many American companies who have sent their point men ahead to reconnoiter the area, as it were, and who have wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars in living and travel expenses over a year, only to learn that they had been taking the wrong people to lunch.

Asked later, by head office, the expatriates invariably exclaim that they felt that everything was going well. “The Chinese seemed to like our product or service; they introduced us to many factories and logistic chains but we never got to the stage of signing a contract.”

Welcome to China!

I studied Linguistics for undergraduate and graduate work at UBC. I have been in business most of my life and now am teaching at Qingdao University, in China. I am kept busy with writing textbooks, e-books and articles for print and internet publications. I regularly consult with North American and European businesses wanting to enter the China market.

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