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Negotiation is at the heart of every transaction and it comes down to the interaction between two sides with a common good but pergent methods. And the essence of negotiation is about striking a deal which is satisfactory to both sides. As to culture, many definitions have been suggested for it. Bates propose a descriptive definition on which scholars currently agree: culture is a system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that the members of a society use to cope with their word and with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning.
And without any doubt, culture has great influence on business negotiations. So this paper aims to analyze the impacts of cultural differences on Sino-US business negotiations and to improve the negotiation results. In part one, this article analyzes the cultural differences between China and America, which include value view, verbal and nonverbal behaviors, customs and thinking models. In part two, it emphasizes the influence of cultural differences on Sino-US business negotiations. And in the last part, the author gives some suggestions about how to get successful negotiating results.
II. Cultural Differences Between China and America
2.1 Value Orientation
Value orientation is the standard that people use to assess objective things. It includes time view, equality view and objectivity. People may draw a different or even contradictory conclusion about the same thing. Value view is one of the most important differences among the many factors. It can influence the attitude, needs and behavior of people.
Every culture has its own unique value systems, which can help people distinguish between beauty and ugliness, goodness and evil. This is people’s philosophy of life, morality and behavior standards. But it can not exist without the specific culture. Every culture has its own criteria, people of one culture may regard something as good, while another culture might consider that bad, but their existence is reasonable in their own cultural systems. As is known to all that the eastern people focus on collectivism, while the western people pay more attention to inpidualism.
For example, in Chinese culture, people are encouraged to be modest and ceremony, and do not like to prevail over others, so the social atmosphere is often blocked to the prominent inpiduals. In Chinese culture, the collective orientation is the dominant position, so pursuing personal development is a serious inpidualism, which will be condemned. However, Western culture is very inpidualistic. For example, inpidual freedom is the most important style of life for American. No matter when and where you are, inpidual freedom should be holding. They usually take “I think..., I believe..., my opinion is...” as a beginning in communications because they want to express themselves to others. Even a government’s spokesman also uses these words in a meeting. While it is not a Chinese habit, we used to quoting the other’s words, especially our leaders’opinion. There is another example for this, a Chinese made a call at his American friend about eleven o’clock in the evening, he said, “Mr.Steve , it is too late, you should have a rest, and I’m sorry for bothering you so much”. His friend said with a little angry, “No, come on, I don’t think you are bothering me. Listen, if you want to go, it is because you want to go, not because of me”. In fact, both of them stood on ceremony, it was just the different style of life that led them to mistake each other. For Chinese, it is polite to think of the other’s emotion, but in the eye of American you should do yourself well first. What’s more, Americans think that competition is eternal, which is a way to prove one’s ability in the society. In competition, they also like to cooperate with the others including their competitors. In China, competition is also existent in people’s mind, but not existent in people’s deed. Although the competition is not so strong, sometime they hate to cooperate with their competitors.