“I hired a student from a local university to do my translation…and it ended up hurting my reputation.”

This was the story I heard from a business contact I met with a couple of weeks ago. He works for a large chemical manufacturer with a presence in China, and they needed their website translated into Chinese. His choice was to hire a local student from China for the job. Once he presented the translation to his Chinese business partners, they weren’t impressed — the errors actually made him and his company look less professional in their eyes.

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In terms of human resources, the current debate is focused on the continued need for multinational corporations in China to increase hiring of local staff, particularly for operations management, while decreasing or completely removing expatriate staff. Reasons for this shift away from expatriate staff include the high cost of salary and benefit packages, questionable value (in terms of productivity and ability to drive the business), high failure rates and most recently, the large readily available talent pool of expatriates already based in China (“halfpats”).

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When a company sets up operations in China they appear to be faced with two distinct choices: ‘going local’, or imposing the dominant business culture of their organization.

It’s not an easy choice, and there are no clear cut answers as to which route will bring you the best results. In the absence of a definite conclusion it can become a battle of wills to see which culture will win.

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The more I learned in China about the contrast between the way folks in the East and the West make use of their names and titles, the more fascinating it seemed, maybe because I think it implies something about the deep differences between our two cultures.

In China, one first identifies oneself in relation to the larger group, then the smaller group, then within the family, and only after that, as an individual.

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By Mona Chung

Chinese market has been a highly preferred market for many organisations worldwide in the past twenty years. However, it is not an easy market to penetrate. Australian companies are among those Europeans and Americans who have been tackling the market with little positive results. One primary reason is that they do not appreciate the important role and impact of Chinese culture.

Cultural differences

Many business people argue that there are many similarities between Westerners and Chinese. After all we are all humans; we all understand if we are in business together we need to make profits. Read the rest of “The impact of cultural difference when entering the Chinese market” or post a comment