Business in China: An NAI Guide to Chinese Business Culture Part II

Dress professionally as you would here. In China, females tend to dress up for work (like going to church) more so than the males. Female workers love to wear heels even when they have to walk on mud or gravel roads (if you are a westerner, they probably don’t expect the same). For myself, if I were in a business meeting, I dressed up. If I were working in the field, I dressed down a little because of the long travel and work environment. But be prepared that the local leaders who receive you will be all dressed up, and they would welcome you as a leader and show you off to their people. It all depends on how you would like to present yourself as a western representative. (Note: the designation of volunteer is not likely to garner very much respect. Your status is directly proportional to your income and your social influence).

You may address the female as "Madam [Last name]"(e.g., Mme. Lucia) regardless of their position. For the male, you may address the person as "Mr. (Last name)" (e.g., Mr. Hu), or "[Last name] [Position title]" (e.g,. Hu Deputy Manager). The Chinese will address you as "Madam [First name], or "Mr. [Last name], or "Dr. [First name]" (e.g, Dr. Nancy).

Chinese people have high respect for foreigners and especially the experts. They do not feel comfortable to call you by your first name. When they are willing to do that, you know you have broken the barrier, and they consider you as one of them.

Productivity is important and that’s how they judge if you are a suitable expert for them. The Chinese are often extremely efficient and produce high quality work. They value hard work, and you will find a lot of this in the leaders, and that’s why they are leaders. You may have to really work on how to motivate the staff. The staff is used to having their leaders to tell them what to do, when to do what, etc. They have a very different learning style and work approach. When the leaders are not around, you will have a lot of staff management problems from tardiness, absenteeism, etc. So try to incorporate all these in your project management work.

When the Chinese leaders or staff consistently do not give you the work that you have asked for by the deadline, you can safely assume that they are not willing to do that task. So go back to find out what the barriers are, and encourage the needed level of communication to get the work done.

Depending on where you work, some (hot) places in China have a 1.5-2.5 hour lunch break. Workers will eat quickly and nap then go back to work. They may find it very strange if you do not take a nap, but will not be offended if you don’t.

The reason that you are an oversea representative is because the Chinese partners want to learn something from you (your country) that they cannot get from their own people/resources. So your knowledge, education, experience, leaderships, hard work, creativity, personable etc. are all important. If you do not have these to offer, the Chinese can dismiss you very quickly. They expect a lot from the foreign experts.

I would encourage that the oversea representatives work closely with a Chinese counterpart. This will avoid the Chinese leader saying that the foreigner did not understand their system, and therefore could not integrate/implement the project etc.

Build a strong rapport with your staff, and maintain on-going communication with them and assess what feedback the recipients (consumers) will give you re: your work performance. Check the validity and reliability of the feedback you get (verbal and written). Written evaluations are frequently misleading if not untrue. The Chinese partners are accustomed to writing very flowery reports, and they also believe that they should only say positive things to the "strangers".

In my experience, I noted that the new-thinking leaders in China are adopting more and more the western management styles.

Often, the leaders will ask for feedback and input from their immediate workers (middle management people), then they will finalize the plan and give directives to the staff as an order. The middle management people do all the groundwork.

In doing a project, it is important for the Canadian representative to know who are the power people - the decision makers and who has influence on the leaders and works with these people. If there is a conflict situation, talk to the middle management people casually, convince them, help them understand your approach/difficulties, and they can do a lot of talking for you with their own leaders, more powerful than what you could do for yourself. Of course, you will still meet with the leaders to finalize the resolutions.