The Impact Of Culture On Sino-U.S. Business Activities

The rapid development of science and technology brings about the fastdevelopment of the global economy. The speedy advancement of the information andinternet techniques are making the earth smaller, which leads to the closer relationshipamong countries. In order to reduce conflicts (such as the conflicts aroused bydifferent values, religious beliefs, and national taboos etc) due to cultural differences,it has become an inevitable tendency to highlight the study of culture.With a view to solving the business conflicts between the United States andChina, Premier Wen Jiabao recently paid a visit to America; he maintained that inorder to cut the business conflicts between two countries, the people in both countriesshould try to make more cultural communication and get more understanding witheach other. The Sino-U.S. trade relationship has kept on a rapid and steadydevelopment in recent years; up to December 2003, America has been the largestinvestor of foreign capital in China for a succession of three years and has been thesecond largest business partner to China for many years and China, too, has becomethe fourth largest business partner to the U.S.A in addition to Canada, Mexico andJapan. With the further development of the economic globalization, the Sino-U.S.trade relationship will gain more weight to China and America even to the wholeworld. Nowadays, the competition for consumers and the markets in the internationalbusiness arena doesn't only lie in the business techniques, the issues of the quality andfunctions of the products any longer, but in how to adapt your products to the taste ofthe consumers and to the target markets' expectations; in another word, that is amatter of culture. Now that the market economy has made it possible for a market tointroduce the same product with varieties of brands, in order to lead consumers tomake their choice of your product from the various substitutes one should turn to thehuge cultural background of the consumers and the target markets for help.China, a country with centuries of civilization history, has cultivated its ownstrong complex culture system in the course of its long history, which could be atypical eastern culture. While, America, on the other hand, as a comparatively newdeveloped capitalist country, hasn't got so much influential historical and traditionalaccumulation. However, its rapid advancement and its economic mightiness couldnever have been so without its highly developed material affluences. Under this large ivcultural background, naturally, the people's evaluating criterions can never beseparated apart from their material achievements. As a result, for the American peopleand the Chinese people, the consuming and purchasing expectations and behavior andthe ways of conducting business could not be identical. Therefore, there must becultural differences existing in the international business; these differences,sometimes may lead to the business conflicts directly or even announce the failure ofthe business. In a certain sense, human beings are the products of culture; they have tolive in certain culture circle and receive the edification from the culture and cultivatethe values of obvious cultural features. So it's quite natural that, to the same thingpeople from different cultures could have quite different ideas and attitudessometimes even totally opposite opinions. In the business activities, all these differentideas and attitudes could determine the kinds of products the consumers wouldpossibly choose and the ways of conducting business adopted by the business people.The present thesis begins with the impacts culture makes on the Sino-U.S.business activities and expounds the cultural origins of the different purchasingbehavior of the consumers and the different business conducting orientations of thebusinessmen by analyzing the consumers' and the business people's behavior inSino-U.S. business activities on a cultural level. It has discussed...