Case Studies Of Sino-American Business Negotiations: An Intercultural Communication Perspective

The economy of China is continuously booming in the 21st century, and China becomes one of the most attractive places for foreign investment because of her promising future. Intercultural communication becomes highly valued during business negotiation. However, cultural conflicts and communication failures frequently occur due to the lack of understanding to other cultures. Therefore, it is necessary for negotiators to seek to understand the main features of cultures of their business counterparts, and discover the cultural traits that affect the way the counterparts behave when negotiating.Working as the project manager in a high-tech theme park development company in Wuhan, the author has had plenty of opportunities to participate in various business negotiations between American and Chinese. However, cultural conflicts and communication failures had been regularly witnessed in Sino-American business negotiation in the personal working experience of the author. This arouses the interest of the author in making an in-depth study concerning Sino-American business negotiation. It is found that the most important difference between these two countries lies in cultural differences. In this regard, the author is motivated to make a profound research regarding the differences of Sino-American business negotiation from an intercultural communication perspective. During the course of analysis, it is found the two cultures vary in many aspects. The purpose of this thesis is to make a thorough analysis to these cultural differences, try to figure out how these cultural differences influence the business negotiation styles to these two countries, and propose some useful suggestions to Chinese and American negotiators.Since the early 1980s, a special area of inquiry has been gradually developed in the literature that deals with international business negotiations between Western firms and the organizations in China. Hofstede (1984) developed the model of five cultural dimensions, and Hall (1976) advocated the concept of high-context and low-context society in their studies.Nevertheless, most of the studies focus more on westerner's perspective. The analysis to the differences of negotiating styles from both western and Chinese perspective is still necessary to help negotiators to consummate their negotiating skills. Meanwhile, there is less research available from the perspective of case studies between Chinese and American business negotiations. The case studies in this thesis are all from the personal experience of the author; hense they can truly reflect some cultural phenomena from many aspects.This thesis adopted an etic method to analyze the cultural differences in Chinese and American business negotiations. Two typical case studies of business negotiation practices are fully explained in the study. One case study is a negotiation conference held in Los Angeles, the other is a series of business negotiation conferences held in Wuhan. These two case studies contain various events, from which some cultural phenomena can be revealed.A comparative approach is adopted when analyzing the cultural value systems as well as the negotiating styles of Chinese and American negotiators from the intercultural communication perspective, supported by quantitative events in two case studies.The author firstly makes a comparative analysis on the differences between Chinese and American negotiating styles from the perspective of cultural value systems. Case studies are used to support related arguments. Five aspects, i. e. hierarchical relationship, collectivism versus individualism, attitude towards conflict, time perception and face concern are focused in the research. Secondly, the author adopts Salacuse's (1991) model to investigate how cultural differences influence the negotiation styles between Chinese and American. Eight factors are highlighted in the analysis, including the differences in negotiating goals, personal styles, communication styles, emotionalism, agreement building process, negotiating team organization and risk taking.Through the discussion in this thesis, it can be observed that the differences between Chinese and American in their communication styles are a result of the deep-rooted cultural values and worldviews upheld in these two cultures. Key cultural features in Chinese business negotiation include long-term human relationships, time orientation, the issue of face, rank hierarchy, the issue of guanxi, ambiguity, non-verbal communication, etc. On comparison, key American cultural traits that prevail in American business negotiation are: individualism, equality, freedom, directness, high time-sensitivity, reverence of law, frontier spirit, immediate benefit, etc. The Chinese negotiating style is seen to be a high-context, implicit style characterized with collectivism, hierarchy, and relationship orientation. The American negotiation style is deemed to be low-context, explicit with the characters of individualism, egalitarian and task orientation. Affected by different cultural traits, the behaviors of Chinese and American negotiators are also distinct from each other.It is also pointed out that communication failures may occur ff negotiator does not understand or respect the culture of the other party. Stereotype sometimes also mislead people's judgment when learning the other side's cultures.It is found through comparative analysis to the case studies that it is crucial for Chinese and American negotiators to understand, learn and respect the culture from the other side. It is definitely important for both parties to avoid cultural conflicts, enhance intercultural communication, and finally achieve successful business negotiations.In addition, some suggestions on improving Sino-American business negotiation skills are put forward by the author.