Understanding different approaches

It is accepted that Australians and Chinese have different approaches to negotiation, and Australian companies and government bodies encounter problems in negotiating with the Chinese. Attempts to improve cross-cultural communication are hampered by incomplete knowledge of the reasons for, and implications of, the differences. The overall strategies of our project were to:

The importance of the project was more than theoretical. The isolated nature of Chinese society between 1949 and 1979 means there are few Australian businesses that have longstanding relationships or experiences with their Chinese counterparts. Australian businesses have only dealt with mainland China, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), since the ‘open-door’ policy began in 1979 (Png 1992). From 1949 to 1979 the PRC had very limited trade with the international community and there was also very little cultural and information exchange (Schauble 2001).

Since 1979 there has been very rapid development of both industrialisation and trade in China. The Chinese have effectively undergone their Industrial Revolution four or five times faster than Western countries did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The speed of Chinese modernisation has correlated with an increase in the importance of China to Australia, as clearly shown in rapidly increasing trade figures. Since 2007 China has been Australia’s largest trading partner.

Culture and its impact on negotiation

This project was obviously part of a more general increase in China business research. A speaker (Bush 2008) at a 2008 conference, whose justifying theme was that ‘China is still disconnected from the West by confusing and complex cultural exchanges’, suggested the aim of research should: (1) be historically accurate; (2) bring to light things that are unknown; and (3) understand better those things that currently seem insufficiently understood or appreciated.

The authors of this chapter contend that cross-cultural negotiation between the West and China is ‘insufficiently understood’ rather than ‘unknown’ because it has been the subject of previous research. Existing studies of the negotiation process between the West and China have established that there are differences between the way the two different cultures communicate intra-culturally (Adler, Braham, and Graham 1992); and such insights have led to examination of what happens when the different cultures attempt to communicate with each other (Lee, Yang, and Graham 2006a; Adler, Braham, and Graham 1992).

These studies, based on simulated negotiations and/or interviews and questionnaires (Lee, Yang, and Graham 2006) have attempted to analyse behaviour in terms of cultural characteristics from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including linguistics (George, Jones, and Gonzalez 1998); psychology (Triandis 1996; Ulijin et al. 2005); and the more general field of business negotiation (Adler and Graham 1989; Fisher, Ury, and Patton 1991; Pye 1982).

One of the most important findings of these studies relates to the importance of Confucian culture, which is shared by people in the PRC and other Chinese nationalities, is the distinctive nature of Confucian culture, which constitutes an entire philosophy of life, makes China more different (vis-à- vis Australia) than the other post-Communist examples arising out of the disintegration of the Soviet empire. Typically, existing studies focus on Confucian concepts, discussed further below, such as harmony, collectivism, face, guanxi and hierarchy.

In terms of Hall’s (1976) continuum of high and low context cultures, China is a very high context culture. In low context culture, the speaker uses the minimum level of words and every word used has a specific meaning. Low context Australians use a small number of words to provide a high level of content, whereas high context Chinese people use a large number of words but they have a low level of content.

In high context culture the meanings a communicator seeks to convey come not only from the many more words used, but also from the impressions created by a large amount of background information. Both parties expect meanings will be derived from reading between the lines, which means they are required to understand the entire context.

It’s not just what is said, but how

The differences between high and low context cultures extend beyond the number of words used, to the ways in which they are used. High context people organise their information in a different order to low context people (Hall and Hall 1990). In terms of logical order of presenting information, high context people present their evidence first and build up to their conclusion at the end by the accumulation of the evidence and implications arising from it (Chung 2008). Because of this the listener may misunderstand the evidence presented as the final argument or vice versa.

In contrast, low context culture people present their conclusion first and then the evidence to support it (Chung 2008). This way the argument is strong and the purpose of the evidence is clear. In presenting evidence, precise words are used for exact meanings in supporting the argument.

The different ways that information is presented create two major problems in cross-cultural negotiation processes:

These phenomena have led to the conclusion that Western business people will not succeed in negotiations with Chinese unless they have Chinese members on their negotiation team (Graham and Lam 2003; Chung 2008).

In this chapter we argue that in interactions involving a high context culture, because so much of the meaning accorded to interactions is part of the context, researchers may fall into the trap of thinking they understand behaviour by being able to report recognised patterns of communication. In high context culture in particular, an interactional phenomenological approach to research is required. Failure to do so creates the danger of the ‘Glass Wall’ effect (Chung 2008), whereby outsiders think they understand a phenomenon because they can describe it, but are unable to properly explain the phenomenon because they do not understand the totality of the background.

The literature in explaining Chinese culture and culturally influenced behaviours has so far focused on Confucianism alone, which is not enough to explain the behaviour of mainland Chinese. The distinctive feature of mainland Chinese culture vis-à-vis the rest of the world is created by the unique combination of Confucianism and Maoism.

There is a crucial difference between mainland China (PRC) and overseas Chinese groups (Chung and Smith 2007). The ‘cultural difference’ label is not sufficient to describe the political difference deriving from the fact that mainland China has had a particular, and extreme, history since 1949. There are differences – caused by the variable of Maoism and in particular the Cultural Revolution – between mainland Chinese on the one hand, and people from ‘Chinese backgrounds’ on the other.

The specific reference to the PRC, as distinct from other ethnic Chinese groups and countries such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and other overseas Chinese communities in, for example, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia and the United States, is based on the historical significance of Maoism and in particular the Cultural Revolution.

Although this point is acknowledged in passing by one of the existing studies in which a different ‘individualism’ grading was attributed to Taiwanese research participants as opposed to mainland Chinese, generally speaking (existing studies’ exceptions being use of the term Chinese to refer to anyone who is a member of a group), that is part of the broader Chinese culture (Lee, Yang, and Graham 2006b).

The importance of Maoism

A full understanding of the implications of this crucial difference is required if Australians, and Western people more generally, are to have a sufficient understanding of China in order to negotiate successfully with the Chinese. We do not say that the existing discussion of Confucianism is irrelevant; rather that the focus needs to be on the relationship between Confucianism and Maoism. Generally speaking, the exist ing literature about China stresses the importance of Confucianism but is relatively silent about the importance of Maoism.

The first importance of Maoism is in terms of the influence of the Communist Party on all aspects of life, including the relationship between political influence and career advancement. Western society is characterised by separation of powers on many levels. Although there are obvious questions as to the extent to which the ideal is matched in practice, there is in liberal Western democracies at least the need to maintain a distinction between legislature, executive and judiciary.

Further, in many liberal Western democracies there is a diffusion of political power affected by federalism (whether internal as in Australia, or external as in the European Union). Also, the democratic process in liberal Western democracies is characterised by changes in the extent to which the legislature is controlled by particular political groupings.

In China the legislature, executive and judiciary are all controlled by the Communist Party and the party is the only effective political grouping. This has been the case for all practical purposes since 1949, so there are few people in China with any living memory of anything else.

The second importance of Maoism is the impact of the Cultural Revolution on Confucian culture. This is a ‘high trust’ culture, where people’s interactions are based on the expectations generated by relationships and hierarchies, in contrast with the more ‘deal-based’ assumptions of individualist liberal society. But one of the effects of the Cultural Revolution was to challenge the assumption that personal relationships provided security. The imposition of political will transcended family and other relationships, and created a situation where no individual could treat another without suspicion that the interaction might be used to their disadvantage for political purposes.

The Chinese do not discuss the Cultural Revolution easily, although there are few families who can have escaped experience of it from one side or another. The experience of the Cultural Revolution is not part of mainstream primary and secondary education, and the official Government policy can only be interpreted as an attempt to ignore a bad memory, analogously perhaps to the Vichy French collaboration with the Nazis. The following sections of the chapter look at the relationship between key Confucian concepts and Maoism.

Confucianism’s five formal relationships

It is an acknowledged feature of Confucian philosophy that every person has a specified role in the collective culture. The gradation from continuum of ‘individual to collective’ is one of the dimensions used by Hofstede (2001) in his framework of variables to conduct cross-cultural studies. Confucian philosophy conceptualises society as a collective organisation of hierarchies based on five sets of formal relationships, each with specific obligations and responsibilities, and on the basis of which all other relationships are modelled (Chan 2003). These are: 1. Man and the state; 2. Man and his wife; 3. Man and his siblings; 4. Man and his children; 5. Man and his father.

The acceptance of these hierarchical relationships creates an acceptance that there are differentials of power and status, another of Hofstede’s variables being ‘power distance’. This means that individuals define themselves in relation to each other by reference to the differences in power (in relation to Japan see Brett and Okumura (1998) and more generally see Hofstede 2001)) of Hall’s (1990) low context to high context continuum, discussed with particular application to business negotiation by Graham, Mintu and Rodgers (1994) and Mintu-Wimsatt and Gassenheimer (2000). In high context cultures such as the Chinese, people are deeply involved in embedded relationships with each other.

In Maoist (as in Leninist) political philosophy, the party is paramount. The collective nature of Chinese culture, and the antipathetic approach to public dissent, makes it less likely there will be public opposition to the paramount status of the party. The importance the Communist Party attaches to party discipline is consistent with the Confucian concepts of five specified relationships.

For example, in the authors’ interactions with the Law School at Beijing University One, we attended meetings with the Dean, the Research Director and the Party Secretary. Their real roles were only revealed to us because one of our team members was of mainland Chinese origin, an insider (Chung, 2008). When the Dean took us to dinner, the Party Secretary or his deputy was always present. It is inconceivable that a faculty in an Australian university would have its own party secretary.

The predominance of the Communist Party in Chinese organisations has yet to be acknowledged in the literature. It is a feature that cannot be derived from interviews or questionnaires, from studies of people of Chinese background rather than from the PRC, or from research which physically does not take place in China. But Western business people need to be in China and know what happens there if they are to do business there.

The collective nature of Chinese culture (Hofstede 2001) also means that negotiations are typically conducted by teams, and often they do not have the authority to conclude a deal because approval needs to come from elsewhere (Chung 2008; Beamer 1998). The approval may include that of the Communist Party. It can be difficult for Australians, who are imbued in an individualistic culture where each person in a commercial entity has specific powers and duties, to actually know who holds the power across the other side of the table. It can also be frustrating for many days of negotiation to be concluded with the statement, ‘We’ll get back to you.’

The need to maintain harmony within and between the hierarchies created by the Confucian philosophy of five sets of relationships means that all members of society are obliged to maintain the balance between these hierarchies (Chung 2008; Graham and Lam 2003). The acceptance of and need to maintain harmony means there is an aversion to open displays of conflict. The concepts of face and harmony are related to high context communication, because implicit understandings are slowly built up and the possibilities of rejection and conflict minimised (Chung 2008). The Confucian concept of face requires individuals to maintain self-respect and to respect other members of society, to maintain a harmonious society (Kirkbride, Tang, and Westwood 1991).

When ‘normal’ behaviour is ‘aggressive’

This contrasts with Western society, where open disagreement between business people is not necessarily frowned upon and may even be seen as an indicator of a healthy ‘open’ relationship. One consequence is that ‘normal’ Western behaviour may be seen as inappropriately aggressive by the Chinese (Lee, Yang, and Graham 2006a). Another is that the two cultures have entirely different approaches to the use of legal remedies (Shenkar and Ronen 1987).

The ‘bargaining in the shadow of the law’ and ‘litigotiation’ frameworks that have dominated Western socio-legal studies of negotiation for nearly 30 years, could not be used in relation to Chinese society without adaptation. Western business people, generally, focus on the ‘deal’ and content of the outcome, most typically by resolving areas of disagreement one by one and with signed contracts representing the closure of a deal and the framework that will govern the future relationship between the parties.

For the Chinese, the focus is on progressing the intensity of the relationship. The relationship governs the terms of the contract and also its implementation. This means that from the Chinese perspective, the terms of the document are not a final determination of the parties’ rights and responsibilities vis-à-vis each other.

This is all clearly related to ‘guanxi’, a concept so distinctively Confucian that there is no suitable English translation (Chung 2006; Graham and Lam 2003: 86; Kirkbride, Tang, and Westwood 1991). Guanxi is a relationship built on a practised form of respect and obligation that adheres to Confucian hierarchical values, where favours are given and received only when there is mutual benefit involved (however, not necessarily in any particular sequential order) and in accordance with how people conduct themselves.

Guanxi is very different from the concept of contract, or more colloquially ‘the deal’, which is the basis of Western commercial transactions. But the understandings on this level have not been sufficient to enable Western businesses to deal easily with their Chinese counterparts.

The importance of guanxi is linked to the concepts of insider and outsider. Chinese gravitate towards each other especially when there are outgroup members. They will trust their fellow Chinese first if they are faced with insiders and outsiders. Certain things may be said to other Chinese that will never be said to Western outsiders.

This phenomenon derives from the importance of face in a high-trust culture, and the implication is the value to Western negotiation teams of having a Chinese member (Graham and Lam 2003; Kirkbride, Tang, and Westwood 1991; Chung 2008). The second reason for the mistrust of foreigners is that the Chinese have been invaded by both Japan and Western powers, and have a perception of being exploited by European colonialism.

Negotiation with Chinese in practice

Our research project examined communication between Australian and mainland Chinese from a commercial perspective by a cross-cultural team, in order to develop and test strategies to overcome impediments to successful Australian-Chinese negotiation. We argue that an understanding of cross-cultural negotiation requires analysis of the reasons for the culturally specific differences between Australians and Chinese, rather than observations of the effect of those differences alone.

This is necessary not only to clarify the theoretical assumptions underlying the project but also because many Australian and Chinese business people are unaware of the existence and importance of such differences. In addition, a full understanding of the dynamics of cross-cultural negotiation requires qualitative methods such as participant observation and simulation.

It is only by analysing the content of interactions that we can develop problem-solving strategies. Quantitative methods are less well-suited for the analysis of the phenomenon because human behaviours in communication process are ephemeral and unique (Chung and Smith 2008). In addition, there are specific cultural biases which derive that flow from researchers and respondents to interviews and questionnaires having culturally based assumptions in relation to questions and answers. In particular, Chinese respondents to Likert Scale inquiries will cluster around the midrange, because the desire for harmony means the extreme options will be disregarded.

Simulation is a common qualitative method in this area because cross-cultural negotiation is not easily accessible for participant observation. Because of the preference for quantitative studies in the American academy, simulations are primarily used to generate quantitative data. The reliability of this data depends on the extent to which the application of the quantitative variables can escape the cultural assumptions of the researchers and research assistants.

As part of an exploratory pilot study, we:

These were universities where we had connections of a personal and professional nature. At Beijing University One, where one of the authors has a family connection, we had been responsible for conducting discussions about institutional collaborations and had each given guest lectures, the reason we were each appointed Visiting Professors. At Beijing University Two there was a particular collaborative relationship with an academic involving joint publication. Beijing University Three had a pre-existing relationship with our home institutions because of undergraduate student enrolments.

We specifically organised the Chinese–Chinese negotiation teams to conduct negotiation simulations of the same scenario in both English and Chinese, so that we could consider the language variable. Each negotiation team was given a set of common facts and a specific briefing in relation to their role that was not made available to the other team. The Australian–Chinese negotiation simulations were in relation to the same scenarios but were only conducted in English. The simulations (which were recorded digitally) were observed by a team of Australian Chinese researchers.

The negotiation games (which are far less sophisticated than those previously recorded (Adler and Graham 1989) were first devised ‘on the run’ at Beijing University Three to illustrate points made in a lecture on cross-cultural negotiation. Students were paired and assigned the role of buyer and seller. They were told that: they had 60 seconds to negotiate the price of 1 kilogram of rice; any pair that did not reach agreement would be eliminated; the three purchasers who paid the most would be eliminated; and the three vendors who obtained the lowest price would be eliminated.

The prices each pair arrived at were all displayed on the board and then there were successive rounds until a winning buyer and a winning seller were decided.

Be prepared – the future of Chinese negotiators

One of the first challenges in devising a research project based on simulation is to find suitable participants. We took advantage of our pre-existing relationship with Beijing University One to propose simulated negotiations between academics from that university and members of a delegation from our own university.

In the week before the delegation’s visit we had two preparatory interactions with our Chinese colleagues. In the first, we were invited to provide feedback to an international trade simulation, conducted in English, by a group of commerce students. We were applauded by the students and our colleagues responded to our feedback to the students in extremely complimentary terms.

This in itself might seem something positive, but events were to show that the reasons for the response included the seeds of the problem of why the pilot did not proceed as anticipated.

In the second interaction, we wanted a simulation of a Chinese-Chinese negotiation, but our requirement that this be in English meant that not all our Chinese colleagues felt able to participate. Their attitude probably derived in part from their desire not to lose face by ‘losing the simulation’ in front of their students and their colleagues. Both colleagues and students prepared for the simulations by explicitly talking about what they had to do to ‘win’, an approach that contrasts with the ‘win-win’ philosophy emphasised in their teaching materials.

Our colleagues at Beijing University One informed the Chinese observer that they were reluctant to be used as guinea pigs, and were also concerned that their performance in the simulation might be used as part of their peer evaluation. Not all of this attitude can be ascribed to the novelty of simulation because it is clear that simulation is an integral part of the curriculum.

However, the use of simulation as a research method might be less accepted in the Chinese context; and the surveillance nature and history of mainland China means that participants may be reluctant to expose themselves in this manner. It is important to observe that the Chinese participants’ reluctance was communicated only in private and only to the Chinese observer, who had insider status. A research team that did not include an insider would not have received this information.

China’s education revolution

By contrast, the students were initially only too enthusiastic to participate. One possible explanation for this is that the students have had a different educational experience from that of their lecturers. In addition to the recent Chinese Industrial Revolution, there has also been an education revolution.

Universities were actually closed down during the Cultural Revolution. But today a far greater proportion of China’s gross domestic product goes into education than is the case in Western countries, and one of the focuses of contemporary Chinese education is a hunger for international knowledge and experience. This is shown by the fact that many classes are taught in English, English is a compulsory feature of the final-year school examination, and there are specific courses on negotiation with Western business people.

Although the students were initially enthusiastic, their response to being given scenarios was to ask where they could find the precedent for their response and at the end of the first simulation they asked the Western observer what the ‘right answer’ was to the problem. They were visibly upset at the response that there was no ‘right answer’ to this or to most negotiation problems. Chinese education differs from Australian in that in China there is a far greater emphasis on rote learning and much less emphasis on active learning methods.

During the simulation between the students we observed, they were reading from prepared texts. Although this might, in part, have been because of language difficulties, it remained the case that the simulated negotiation was an exchange of positions in the bargaining sense rather than any attempt to engineer compromise based on common interest in the more committed sense of negotiation (Adler, Braham, and Graham 1992).

It was clear that the undergraduate students lacked the commercial and life experience necessary to conduct simulation of even straightforward transactions, which was one of the reasons for conducting the ‘price of rice’ game. It was often observed by the research team that statements straight from text books were read out in negotiation simulations. In some cases, the entire section of a text book was read out.

The limitation was also observed at their inability to move forward on one topic. It often resulted in a ‘ping-pong’ game instead of negotiating around issues and moving forward. This conclusion was reinforced by the final simulation, in which postgraduate commerce students participated on a far more sophisticated level of interaction.

Another distinguishing feature of Chinese education is its highly competitive and ranked nature. Many students were visibly upset by their exclusion in the negotiation game (at both universities where this game was played). One interesting exception to the competitive nature of the students was the observed behaviour in the ‘price of rice’ game at Beijing University Three. Some of the ‘losing’ participants were initially reluctant to leave the game and only did so when isolated by counting the number of tables remaining. The bargaining pairs consulted with each other to try to reach agreed prices, which kept them in the game by not excluding buyers who paid too much or sellers who got too little. There was no evidence of this at Beijing University One.

The competitive nature of the undergraduate students sits uneasily with the Confucian desire for harmony but is explainable in terms of:

An important implication of the above is that the successful conduct of simulations will require graduate students or executive trainees, so that participants have sufficient skills and life experience to negotiate in a commercial sense; and that each party to the negotiation should be of equal status. This obviously presents a challenge in terms of arranging for Australians and Chinese to be in the same place at the same time. Lee, Yang and Graham (2006b) used American MBA students on an international course in Hong Kong.

The negotiation topic was also important. It was observed that in the first attempt by the Chinese students to negotiate a complex technical commercial contract, little negotiation was conducted as they were pushed by time. Therefore when time was limited, future negotiations were designed to be simple in term of facts.

Is English a true global language?

The question of language remains a difficult one. It was absolutely striking at Beijing Universities One and Two that the simulations conducted in English were categorised by more aggressive behaviour, body language and raised voices. An Australian colleague who observed the simulations at Beijing University Two commented that the female participants were silent in the Chinese language phase and prominent in the English version.

On one level the use of English as the language for simulations can be justified in terms of it being the language that will invariably be used in single-language negotiations. But the limits of the English language as a negotiation tool for Western negotiators are one of the reasons Western negotiation teams are unlikely to be successful in China without a Chinese member of the team (Graham and Lam 2003; Chung 2008).

Hierarchy and harmony – two key cultural features

The difficulties which qualitative researchers typically endure in the location of willing participants are accentuated in a society where a single political party controls every aspect of an individual’s life. Although there are occasions when academic freedom is honoured more in the breach than in the observance, it remains the case that Western academics generally conduct their research without fear of being adversely judged by their colleagues. In Western societies, university researchers can often take advantage of the independent and non-threatening nature of their institutions to secure access to data.

In Australia there is a difference between ‘I’m from the University and I’d like to do research’, and ‘I’m from the Tax Office and I’d like to do research’. Features of Western academic life do not apply to the same extent in China because the requisite levels of trust do not exist. Similarly, Western academics seeking to research Chinese culture (even as part of cross-cultural studies) need to overcome suspicion of the outsider, which is part of contemporary Chinese culture.

In relation to negotiation as an area of cross-cultural study, the classic frameworks of Western socio-legal study are typified by Mnookin and Kornhauser (1979) ‘Bargaining in the shadow of the law’ and Galanter’s (1984) concept of ‘litigotiation’ to illustrate the strategic and simultaneous use of litigation and negotiation. But in China the legal system is far less established in a historical sense, and the absence of transparency in the Western sense means the system lacks even the generalised guidance of common law principles. The relevance of legal rights and remedies is also lessened by the importance attached to relationships as a source of obligation.

If Western observers are to properly analyse Chinese behaviour in negotiations, their frameworks will need to account for the more diffuse nature of decision-making in Chinese negotiation teams.

The combination of the collective (Hofstede 2001) and hierarchical features of Chinese culture means that many responses in negotiation relate to the internal requirements of the negotiation team (Chung 2008; Graham and Lam 2003). This can be confusing for Australian negotiators who may be looking for a ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ approach when this is not the explanation for the behaviour.

Even in a ceremony to appoint the authors of this chapter as Visiting Professors, the Dean ensured that all members of the university spoke in response to the appointments.

However, the final decision is made by the person of highest status but is presented and perceived as a team decision.

The respect for hierarchy and harmony might create a reluctance to participate in experimental research, which puts the reputation of the academic at risk unless the research is actively supported by senior academics within the institution, such as Deans and/or Presidents. Junior academics in China are more accepting of the concept that they can be directed to participate in particular research projects, than are Australians.

The mention of harmony in negotiations by Chinese negotiators is frequent, especially when it appears that conflict is about to occur.

Chinese negotiators – the key to success

The prominence of relationships as a source of obligation means that a full understanding of the dynamics of negotiation will require analysis of interactions between the same groups of people over a period of time.

The techniques used to code negotiation behaviours in previous studies are not sufficiently sophisticated to enable an understanding of the dynamics of cross-cultural negotiation. They are typically influenced and scoped by Western researchers that simply do not reflect Chinese negotiation behaviours. The techniques are generally drawn from typical low context statements that derive their meaning from the words used. High context negotiation behaviour does not fit within these behavioural patterns.

To understand the Chinese negotiation behaviours it is necessary to have Chinese members of a cross-cultural research team, so the questions and observations contain an understanding of both cultures as well as the language aspects.

In this pilot study the high context negotiators often attempted to become more involved with their counterparts by directing discussions towards topics outside the negotiation items. Their statements often started as something that will not create conflict, ‘Have another drink, have some more duck . . .’ They also used far more words, although the words used did not explicitly refer to the subject matter of the negotiation.

‘Yes’ does not always mean ‘yes’

There is a precise difference between Chinese and Australians in relation to the use of the word ‘yes’ (and as a consequence the use of the word ‘no’). In Chinese there is no generalised use of the single word ‘yes’, as in English. Two different Chinese words translate to ‘yes’ in English: one confirms a statement has been made; another confirms the statement is true.

The likelihood that the first meaning is intended is increased by the previously discussed phenomenon of Chinese people not wanting to lose face by admitting to a lack of knowledge or understanding. Problems can be caused by the fact that Australians treat the absence of explicit disagreement as agreement (Beamer 1998). There are at least five meanings expressed in the word ‘yes’ by a Chinese speaker:

Australians are used to dealing with binary ‘yes/no’ alternatives, whereas high context Chinese culture looks more at graduated ‘how much’ alternatives.

‘Yes’ was frequently used by the high context negotiators but with the appearance to the Australians of being at random. At one point a team of five participants had three saying ‘yes’ and two saying ‘no’ to the same question. When the Australian colleague specifically questioned each participant for the meaning of their particular ‘yes’ or ‘no’, the Chinese team members gave answers avoiding a direct ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Instead they were offering explanations of why they said ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Negotiation with Chinese is a complex task

One conclusion of the preliminary study is that the design of the research is itself constrained by the cultural, political and communication factors that influence the phenomenon constituting the subject matter of the research (Adler and Graham 1989). The centrality of trust to the formation of relationships, combined with the absence of trust resulting from the Cultural Revolution and the omnipresence of the Communist Party, puts ‘outsiders’ in a difficult position.

It took three visits of approximately ten days each, over a period of about 14 months, for the authors of this chapter to develop a strong relationship with Beijing University One, even though one of the authors already had ‘insider’ status through her father being a retired professor there. Even with these personal links, it remains the case that the institution is an institution and that collaboration requires the trust of individual people.

It seems clear that participants for simulations will come from the ranks of students, and that graduate students will be required to enable the necessary level of life and commercial experience to be brought to the simulation.

The questions that we seek to explore in further study concern whether it is possible, by third-party mediators or cross-cultural intermediaries (Chung 2008), rather than the more diffuse effect of cultural adaptation (Pornpitakpan 1999; Adler and Graham 1989), to enable negotiations to proceed more freely when parties can have the other’s behaviours and responses (as discussed in Adler and Graham (1989) and George, Jones, and Gonzalez (1998)) explained to each other in terms of their cultural specificity.

For example, Australian negotiators might be less likely to view their Chinese negotiation partners as evasive or dishonest if they understood the particular techniques used to express negatives (Lee, Yang, and Graham 2006a; Gilsdorf 1997); and as obsequious if they understood that flattery is a form of politeness.

Similarly, Chinese negotiators might be less likely to view their Australian negotiation partners as rude if they state their positions explicitly and without ambiguity; and stupid if they actually express the contents of the desired outcome at all.

References