Business în China

We have chosen for the country China. China is world’s most populous country, with a population of over 1.38 billion people. They also had the largest economy in the world for most of the past two thousand years. China has been trough a lot, which makes it interesting for us to make us more familiar with this country.

Cultural specifics China

We will explain the cultural specifics from China due to: the cultural dimensions from Hofstede & Pinto theory, relationships, time, environment and communication.

Pinto theory

According to Pinto’s analysis about China, the structure of its rules behavior is related to a fine mesh. What characterizes a fine mesh culture is the high number of detailed and strict rules for behavior and communication. Structure could be different even between regions within the same country, but even the big size of China fine mesh is dominant in most of the country, according to the four determining factors: economical, religion, social environment and genetic make-up of the individuals.

There are many China’s cultural fine mesh implications that may have impact on relationships:

- Greater need for clarity and less need for nuance, in all aspects of life, including human and business relations. Doing business with China we have to go to the important points and not talk a lot about nuances, the important are the relations and feeling with others.

- Stronger group identity: the important core is the group, not the individual. When you dealing with Chinese people you have to take in the point that you have to manage with the whole group as a unit.

- They give more importance to relationship with people rather than the substance, everything is personal for them, so it’s important to don’t make any offense to them. Their highest aim for them is honor and they really value this issue. Differentiated with the members of coarse mesh cultures, Chinese and F-mesh cultures don’t have self-development as the highest aim.

- About time perception they give more importance to past and present, what can be a drawback for us Europeans to do business there, as we usually don’t give so much importance to the past and focus more about present and future.

- They have a subordinate position view on relations, so they may expect you to bring the initiative of the conversation and relation. Taking into account this fact could be even a kind of advantage as we have the chance to drive in some way the conversation to the point we want.

Hofstede theory

Power Distance

Power Distance is defined as the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organisations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally.

At 80 China sits in the higher rankings of PDI. China is a society that believes that inequalities amongst people are acceptable. The subordinate-superior relationship tends to be polarized and there is no defense against power abuse by superiors. Individuals are influenced by formal authority and sanctions and are in general optimistic about people’s capacity for leadership and initiative. People should not have aspirations beyond their rank.

If we look at the Chinese culture we see that Hofstede is right here. The rank within the Chinese culture is extremely important in business relationships and you must keep rank differences while communicating. For example, when you go to a place where Chinese business partners meet each other, you have to find someone with a higher rank and greet them first. It is also important that you can’t start eating before the highest person starts.