China Travel Tips

Business Culture/ Some Tips for Doing Business with Chinese (1)

Doing business in China? Having a basic understanding of Chinese business culture and etiquette will definitely helps a lot. The following tips may help you succeed.

Guanxi (relationships between people)

Guanxi is what glues Chinese people together in their social life. For Chinese, if you have a good guanxi (personal relationship) with him or her, everything becomes easy to do. It’s also true to Chinese companies. Therefore, if you want to sell products to Chinese companies, you must establish a good personal relationship with your target company’s purchasing manager.

Compared with people from America and Europe, Chinese people are more emotional. In a way, They will decide a business deal based on how much your personal relationship with them. A good personal relationship also means a kind of trust from Chinese to you.

There are many ways to develop a good relationship with your Chinese business partner. The typical way is to invite him or her to have dinner.

The eating and drinking is an important communicating medium in China and is often used by Chinese themselves, especially when they want to establish or develop a good relationship with a business partner, a local influential official and so on.

When eating, you may talk about business, but your emphasis should be on some light topics, like your family, your hobbies, your aspirations, etc. Just treat your guest like a friend rather than a business partner, and in this way, your guest feel that you are close to him or her, you are as sincere as a friend, gradually, he or she will trust you and develop a good personal relation with you, then, it’s much easier to talk business deals with him or her.

While eating with your Chinese business partner, drinking and toasting is a must. To learn the subtle details, you may need to hire a Chinese interpreter to help. (Chinese interpreter can also be hired from a Chinese translation company or any agency that offers Chinese translation service).

In conclusion, Chinese people base their business relationships on trust and honesty, like to mix business with social life, appreciate modesty and respect for the elderly and those with higher social position and titles.