A Home for Culture Vultures

Working with the Chinese?

Then you need to make a good impression from the get go!

Do you work with the Chinese?

If so, there are some fundamental cultural concepts you need to be aware of.

Do you work with the Chinese?

A common challenge many foreigners come across is how to handle the word ‘no’.

It’s fair to say that most countries stereotype others.

Whilst stereotypes can provide some sort of understanding of another's culture, they are generally unhelpful and misleading.

As COVID-19 continues to spread around the globe, China has claimed relative success in dealing with the virus.

On closer inspection, much of this success comes down to Chinese culture.

Do you work or do business with the Chinese?

Then you really need to get to grasp with the importance of face – mianzi – in Chinese culture.

Doing business in China? Then you'll be attending lots of meetings!

If you’re attending meetings in China, then it’s important to understand a little about Chinese culture and how meetings are run.

Wherever you travel in the world, getting someone’s name wrong can be the difference between making a good impression or a bad impression.

If you’re travelling to China on business, it’s important that you take the time to understand the naming structures.

If you want to know how easy it is to do business with China, then look no further than the Business Culture Complexity Index ™ (BCCI), a tool which provides some great insights for expanding businesses.

The BCCI uses a number of data comparisons to produce a single ‘ease of doing business’ score for the world’s largest 50 economies, culturally speaking that is.

We hear a lot in the news about cultural differences with Western companies going East, but rarely about Eastern companies coming to the West.

A great little article in the South China Morning Post by Mark Magnier suggests that when it comes to navigating different business cultures, Chinese companies are finding very similar challenges when working on the global stage, especially in the USA.

With so many cultural differences between China and the West, the decision to relocate to China as an expat can be a difficult one.

Although expats do indeed have some complex cultural differences to navigate however, there are a huge number of positives for people taking the move.

Doing business with the Chinese?

If so, then it’s more than likely that food will be involved at some point!

We are delighted to announce the release of our latest online cultural awareness training course - on China.

The new addition to our catalogue of online courses offers lots of fantastic insights into Chinese culture, the people and of course, Chinese business practices.

As many Chinese tourists only pay a brief visit to the city, local Boston companies are now getting training to increase their appeal to this important group of visitors (and revenue stream).

According to The BBC, many Chinese tourists travel to the United States for their holidays. The top three American cities they visit are New York, Los Angeles and Washington DC, but Boston isn’t far behind.

However, the Chinese often only visit this city to check out universities like Harvard and the MIT, resulting in very short visits that aren’t very beneficial for the local Boston businesses.

If Chinese visitors could stay longer, the boom to the local economy could be massive.

Jolin Zhou, who works for the Chinese tour operator Sunshine Travel in Boston, tells a story about a Chinese man and his teenage son who had come to Boston to look at universities. "One day he asked my co-worker, 'Can you recommend a meal, a good restaurant and bring me there? The best restaurant in Boston, no matter how expensive.' My co-worker brought him to a restaurant; they spent $1,000 for two of them for dinner."

Zhou told this story to participants of a tourism workshop that was set up by the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism. The Office wants to attract more Chinese people to the region as the middle class in China consists of about 300 million people who are spending more and more time abroad. In terms of most visitors per country, they are the ninth biggest group in the US, and the fastest growing one. They even rank third in the biggest spenders when travelling abroad.

Do you export?

AstraZeneca's Stuart Anderson offers some insights into the importance of understanding and adapting to the local culture in order to maximise success.

Expatriate relocation can be a challenge regardless of the new home country.

However, it's fair to say that some countries are more challenging for Western expats than others - with China being one such example. 

A true story: when a US telecoms giant decided to replace its manager in Thailand several years ago, it chose an ABC - 'American-born Chinese' - in the belief he would be more culturally attuned to doing business in Asia.

He was not shy about telling his colleagues how to behave and one evening berated a couple of European rivals who had been caught engaged in financial shenanigans.

They decided to play a joke on the new arrival.

They told their driver to follow him and tell him he was going to be killed.

Three Korean films and a cartoon have been translated for immigrant workers and foreigners married to Koreans to help them understand Korean culture. 

About 10 immigrants from Southeast Asian countries participated in the translation project to help people settle down in Korea more easily.

Three movies, ``Wolf Daddy,'' ``Stand by Me’’ and ``Walking in the Rainy Day’’ and a cartoon cooking guide were translated into four languages, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Chinese and English.