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haping the global economy of the next century. Thus, the economic presence of the Chinese will be more greatly felt than it already is. Europe has to be aware of this evolution in order to face potential future markets. Likewise, western business people have eyed the huge Chinese market for centuries (Gilsdorf, 1997), the current potential market size is often spoken of as the “one billion customers”, although Engholm (1994) argued that 1.2 billion is more accurate. These are among the reasons why it is urgent to develop and increase our understanding of Chinese-European communication.
Research objectives
Negotiating in China is rarely an easy matter. European business people departing for China are commonly advised that the Chinese value harmony, good relationships and politeness. Yet when they reach China and enter a negotiation, they are confronted with fierce adversarial bargaining that appears to lack the politeness and consideration they expected (Blackman, 1997) and it seems that the Chinese negotiators are shrewd and experienced in the art of psychology and the effective use of timing (Gordon, 1986).
This paper seeks to understand the main features of the Chinese negotiator and determine the Chinese cultural traits that characterise the way the Chinese behave when negotiating. In addition, it highlights the cultural problems inherent to cross-country businesses by making the foreign negotiator aware of the necessity of having a good knowledge on this point to conduct a negotiation successfully.
The paper begins with a brief overview of the literature on negotiation, in particular the nature of Chinese cross-cultural negotiation. Our combined experiences in negotiating and working with the Chinese showed that cultural problems always appear in cross-cultural negotiations. We are concerned about these difficulties that prevail in a cross-cultural environment. As summed up by Chen (1995), “cultural understanding is difficult and sometimes painful to attain, but the rewards can be also high”.
The use of primary case examples allows for the determination of problems and issues faced by the negotiator in China. Thus, this paper will establish the main Chinese cultural traits prevailing in the Chinese negotiation style. However, this paper is not able to represent the full range of Chinese cultural traits that might influence negotiation. This is because China has over 6,000 years of history, many territories, 74 dialects and 56 nationalities (Huang et al., 1994). The many possible differences in negotiation traits in each of China’s many provinces, autonomous regions, municipalities, and the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong are too wide for this paper to cover.
Overview of the literature
The available literature on negotiation is vast. This has been enriched in recent years by various contributions from social sciences including social psychology, communication and organisational behaviour, and from business and management, including Marketing and sales. This paper will not summarise all of these, but will provide an overview of the basic characteristics of negotiation. Negotiation is one of the most challenging communication tasks in business (Gilsdorf, 1997). Fowler (1986) and McCall and Warrington (1989) observed that any negotiation exhibits certain basic characteristics including:
• negotiation involves two or more parties;
• the parties must need each other’s involvement in本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。